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Four years of sight reading practice

I’ve been doing relatively frequent sight reading practice using an iPad app for four years. Here’s how I’ve automated some of the steps and what I’ve learned from the experience.

I understood the basics of sheet music, but the decoding process was always very laborious, not helped by the fact that I had learned guitar mostly from tablature, which felt like a very different skill. NoteVision’s Grand Staff practice has options to set the range of notes (which I’ve set to match the limited range on my MIDI keyboard), a key signature selection, a “Chords” mode that switches between just single notes to showing common chords (basically triads, 1st and 2nd inversions), and a “Sharps and Flats” toggle that adds accidentals. It selects a key for me to input into the iPad app, as well as tracking the other two options in the sight reading screen (whether there are full chords and accidentals in the generated notes).

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