Sight Reading practice

The Sight Reading tool shows you a real four-bar excerpt on the staff — a melody line on a single stave, a bass line, or full chords on the grand stave — and you play it back on the keyboard. When you check your attempt, every notehead turns green (you played it) or pink (you missed it), so you can see exactly where your reading broke down.

You can play with the mouse, your computer keyboard, or a MIDI keyboard — see Playing the keyboard and Playing with a MIDI keyboard.

Reading an excerpt, step by step

1. An excerpt appears on the staff, with its key signature, time signature, and difficulty badge.
2. Read it and play the notes on the keyboard. Order within a chord doesn't matter — a rolled chord still counts — but every note of a chord must be played for that chord to score, and the exact octave matters.
3. Click Check (or just pause — after about 30 seconds of inactivity your attempt is marked automatically). Noteheads colour green or pink, and the result line tells you how many notes you got and whether you played any extras.
4. If your bars were noticeably uneven, you'll see a gentle timing advisory. Pitch accuracy is what's marked; timing is only ever advice.
5. Use Reset to wipe your attempt and try the same excerpt again, Hear it to listen to the excerpt played at its own tempo, or move on to the next one.

A repeated note has to be played once per notehead — playing a note a single time won't light two of them.

Difficulty tiers

Every excerpt belongs to one of three tiers, judged by how hard its notation is to read:

• Easy — single melodic or bass lines in friendly keys, staying near the stave.
• Moderate — lines that range wider, use more ledger lines, or carry more accidentals.
• Advanced — mostly full chords across the grand stave, both hands at once.

This mirrors how readers progress: from following one line to reading stacked chords on two staves.

Scheduled practice (signed in)

Sign in and the tool schedules your reading for you with spaced repetition — the same expanding-interval idea described in Testing yourself. Excerpts you find hard come back soon; ones you read fluently stretch out over days and weeks.

• Open the Study set panel to choose which tiers you're working on and how many new excerpts per day to introduce.
• In Scheduled mode, the queue serves whatever is due. After checking an attempt, rate yourself — Again, Hard, Good, or Easy — and the schedule adjusts. The rating is yours to judge: the marking shows you the evidence, but you decide how it felt.
• Skip rotates the current excerpt to the back of the queue without grading it.
• When nothing is due you're caught up: the tool tells you when your next review lands, and you can switch to Free play to keep reading.

Free play

In Free play (and any time you're not signed in) the tool deals random excerpts, filtered by the difficulty you pick — Any, Easy, Moderate, or Advanced. Nothing is graded and nothing is saved; it's pure practice.

Where the music comes from

The excerpts are derived from a large open collection of chord progressions released under the MIT licence. Each excerpt is a genuine four-bar passage — credited in the app, with its source recorded — presented as a melody line, a bass line, or grand-stave chords.