Reddit reviews Mikrokosmos Volume 1 (Pink): Piano Solo

I had been practicing for about a bit less than a year before I decided to take up sightreading seriously. Similarly, when I was younger, my teacher didn't really ever teach me to sight read, so I mostly used the sheet to figure out how to move my fingers then never looked back.

That being said, I want to say that noticeable results were actually pretty quick. Within a week or two I was actually following and reading notes much better. At this point, I had bought a small sightreading book with about 50 or so small 5 bar pieces. I don't recommend this one, it's not very good in my opinion. I started on Bartok's Mikrokosmos next. This is where I saw the most improvement in a short time. This was the most helpful because his music tends to be pretty dissonant and doesn't sound how you'd expect. When you can't really predict the next note easily, it really forces you to read the sheet. I HIGHLY recommend this book. It works really well on a lot of levels. It's good for beginners and gets progressively more difficult as you go. It does spike in difficulty somewhat fast, so so use some of the other resources I linked below.

Though when I say improvements I don't mean I could sight read a Liszt concerto. I just mean that I had begun a mentality shift away from muscle movements and looking at the keys to actively looking at the sheet.

Here's another thread with a bunch of useful materials. A lot of these can be found online for free as well. I used the Gurlitt pieces as well, which were helpful. I can't vouch for it all, because I haven't played all the pieces, but if you worked your way through all those pieces in a week or two, you would see massive differences.

After using a lot of those pieces I got into the Bach Chorales because I had somewhat of a foundation for reading sheet at this point. I wouldn't really recommend it as a starter book. Go to Mikrokosmos for that.

Some materials I am using now is a big book of Chopin works. I take it pretty slowly and make a bunch of mistakes, but it's pretty helpful for recognizing chords which is a skill in it's own.

Some tips for practice:

• Try to consume as much music as possible. Online, hard sheet, anything. Just make sure you aren't retaining any of the music and if you do play it again, you shouldn't be able to remember the specifics of the piece.
  
  
• Sight reading is mentally exhausting, which is good to keep in mind. There's a lot of days where I really don't want to do it because it is one of the most mentally strenuous activities I do. You have to push yourself a bit.
  
  
• Take it slowly. You don't need to play up to the recommended tempo if you cant play at that speed. Play at a speed where you make the least mistakes. That's where you retain the most. Use a metronome as well. Don't play at different speeds, keep a consistent tempo.
  
  
• Sight reading is not much more different from the actual reading of words. Your brain does some pretty interesting things when reading. It clumps a jumble of letters into a word (notes in a chord), and reads ahead of what you are actively processing. It's very hard to read ahead with sheet, so don't worry about it too much. It comes with time and practice. Just keep both of these in mind.

My suggestions are going to be very simple. I highly recommend you don't try to skip anything thinking it's too easy for where you are. This is how you end up with lots of gaps. I speak from deeply personal experience and some of the best improvements in my playing have come from realizing that unless it's easy enough that I can sightread it perfectly and effortlessly the first time, it's worth working. Every small thing even in children's beginner books helps build that scaffolding that remove ability gaps and helps you be a better and more consistent player.

>1) get some classic stuff that we learn at the begining and

Not entirely clear about what you want in terms of if you just want the basics or you specifically mean you want some classical style stuff. Either way, here are some recommendations.

Alfred All-In-One - This is just a generally good book to work through with a lot of fairly basic stuff mostly sticking to a very small harmonic palette used in a ton of music. You can carry on to level 2 and 3 when you're done.

Masterwork Classics - If you're looking for actual simple literature, this is a great place to start. Very easy pieces and a great progressive series of books.

Burgmuller Op. 100 - Probably a it more challenging, but great progressive stuff as well and very classical.

Czerny Op. 139 - More progressive goodness.

Czerny Op. 821 - Not progressive, but lots of very short, bite-sized exercises that isolate specific things that show up in classical music, but in a fun musical way rather than just dull exercises.

>2) get better at sight-reading. I have lots of gaps in my piano skills.

Progressive Sightreading - These are ridiculously easy, but this is really where you should start. They are easy enough to let you be successful quickly and focus on keeping your eyes on the page because they are all within a 5 finger pattern reach covering all keys.

Paul Harris books - These are progressive sets of books that slowly introduce specific concepts. My favorite part about them is the articulations and stylistic directions that go beyond just having you hit the right notes, but have you actually thinking about how you want a piece to sound.

Mikrokosmos - These start a bit easy, but get hard very quickly. They also tend to not stick to predictable western harmony, which helps with getting your reading out of its comfort zone. Additionally, there tends to be a good deal more left hand motion and even melodies which really helps your left hand not just be the accompaniment hand.

Bach Chorales - I'm honestly not a huge fan, but some people swear by these. I would actually instead recommend finding a hymnal instead. These chorales are not only more difficult than most hymns, but will be extremely frustrating if you don't have a comfortable 10th.

In general, you should be learning lots of small pieces constantly. A huge part of sightreading is actually being technically capable. If you can't execute it technically, you can't read it. So find lots of pieces in a variety of styles that you can learn in no more than a week, or better, several of in a week. Lots of short focused pieces will chip away at very small weakness in your playing very quickly and efficiently. This will make your reading much better. Better technique and reading will lead to you being able to learn increasingly difficult music much faster. You'll likely find that something that once might've taken you a month to learn could be learned in a week. Something that could be learned in a week might be learned in a day or even sightread.

Try to remember when learning new, simple pieces, to try to keep your eyes on the page. Not matter how slow or out of tempo you need to go, really learn to trust your ability to feel the distances and shapes of chords you need to play. You might need to look early on for stuff that is more difficult for you, but try to get to a point where you don't need to look. When you can trust yourself in that regard, your reading ability will increase a ton.

Mikrokosmos: 153 Progressive Piano Pieces : New Definitive Edition https://www.amazon.fr/dp/1423493044/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_IxKUCb045MNEP

Here is the link

I know it's a contentious group of pieces, but I've had incredible luck with Hanon. If you can read music and play hands together, I highly recommend it.

I took lessons for 13 years, but since I've been in college I've been self teaching. I've always really loved piano and I have decent technique, but I never really learned things in a way that wasn't sloppy. I decided I wanted to change that, and I sat down and learned all 3 parts of Hanon exactly as instructed in the book. It's not a perfect method, but I play through it every day now and honestly my technique is miles beyond what it used to be. I wish I had learned as a beginner so badly it hurts.

So my suggestion to you is this: buy this book (http://www.amazon.com/Hanon-Virtuoso-Exercises-Complete-Schirmers/dp/0793525446/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414561983&sr=1-1&keywords=hanon), play through it every day (no matter how boring it may get) exactly as instructed. It takes a little under an hour to play the whole book at tempo, and I imagine you'll be preoccupied learning all of the etudes for quite a while.

I'm a firm believer that we can all craft ourselves into excellent pianists, and all I think you need to do that is repertoire and a will to practice and make a sound that you like. Once you have the technique from the Hanon down, you can get started on any number of pieces. Another very good method is Bela Bartok's Mikrokosmos, which my mean, Hungarian teacher made me slave away at for years. It comes in 6 volumes, the first of which is (http://www.amazon.com/Mikrokosmos-Pink-English-French-Hungarian/dp/1423493044/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414562208&sr=1-1&keywords=mikrokosmos).

If you were to learn a significant amount of the material from either of those methods, you would be a significantly better pianist. If classical piano isn't necessarily the route you want to go, you'll still be well served by either/or.

The most important thing is to play whenever the urge strikes you, in my experience. It becomes a bit of an addiction, but there's such a huge world of piano music out there that you'll never grow bored with it, and you'll certainly never run out of things to do. Best of luck.

Strangely I've never really listened to his compositions, though I've used his piano solo book excessively. Thanks for posting this!