To read or not to read...

I remember taking piano lessons as a kid and learning the 'problematic' task of reading music.

I went as far as grade 5 when I was about 12 before becoming a bit disillusioned with the whole system of extracting music from the dots and lines on a page.

At the beginning of each year or term I would buy the book for the grade I was going to sit before my teacher and I 'got to work' on it.

This involved sitting at the piano and very slowly and painstakingly decoding the dots and symbols on the page over weeks and months until something more musical started to emerge in my playing.

I was always excited at the prospect of picking-out and learning a new piece. But I needed every ounce of that enthusiasm to get past the weeks of mistake-filled playing that would follow.

And in the end it was that same laborious playing that made-up so much of my practice that made me decide as a teenager I had better, more enjoyable, things to do with my time.

Fortunately this approach that is the MAINSTAY of the majority of instrument lessons is avoidable.

Imagine it was the same for reading language: if every time you went to read a new book you had the reading age of a young child. How much of a BARRIER would that be to your enjoyment of life and indeed your development as a person? Imagine taking an article and reading it over and over again to the point where you've memorised it. Wouldn't it be nice to be able read 10 or 20 articles FLUENTLY in that same space of time?

For the majority of musicians sight reading is something they labour-through a few times a year when they learn a new piece or when they're preparing for a graded exam. They never learn real FLUENCY and so are denied all the benefits that go along with that:

• Increased playing ability from playing so much MORE and VARIED music - each new piece becomes a lesson in itself.

• Improved understanding of music in general just by playing more of it. Which means better memorisation, theory, technique etc. etc.

But the big one for me has to be simply exposure to a LOT more music and all the pleasures that come with that (like reading a variety of different books for entertainment). The whole process becomes ENJOYABLE rather than a chore.

Over the past few months I've created and refined a self-paced online course with the aim of turning the tables on sight reading. It's the guidance and instruction I wish I'd had when I was learning all those years ago.

It teaches the key skills of fluent sight reading in a learning journey that I've designed to be as enjoyable and engaging as possible. I've road-tested it on a few volunteer students and made adjustments where necessary. The pieces on there are grade 1 level but it's really for anyone who wants to learn the specific techniques that unlock fluent sight reading.

This course offers a structured journey which includes over 45 minutes of high quality video content as well as carefully selected material to embed all the skills taught within.

I want the course to be available to as many as possible so I've dropped the price from £45 to £15 until the end of February. (The research seems to say if the course is 100% free the completion rate will suffer.)

As always, sight reading will always feature in my lessons but with this course I've tried to cover the subject far more extensively than I could in could in even a month of lessons, condensing everything I've learned over the past 35 years of my playing and teaching.

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