Read Ahead Piano Sight Reading 4+

On The Right Track

The developers of this app are on the right track. They have realised that a key skill in playing the piano is to quickly absorb the notes that are coming and in doing so to provide oneself with time to translate what was read into played notes.
The app provides carefully incremental sight reading tasks and teaches the player to read ahead by making bars of music disappear. And it’s all done very well, very professionally.

The next big feature to provide (no small feat) would be to “listen” to what the player was doing either via the iPad microphone or via MIDI and to rate the player instead of the player rating themselves. The app could also start at a lower level, making just a single note appear and disappear and requiring the player to quickly find it on the keyboard. This could be followed by having to play a single note with the correct rhythm etc.

Some functions don’t work

Hard to judge from a couple of weeks use (starting from prelim), but the pace of the lowest levels seems too fast. Would have liked more exercises. These levels are 5-finger jobs: if you haven’t spent a lot of time with 5-finger exercises (for young kids, mostly) or you’re used to reading note-names/values rather than the intervals within the 5-finger span you’ll have to try to start over.

The introduction of two staves w/ two ‘voices’ playing independently is sort of early and sudden in Level 1. Feel like I could have used more practice reading ahead before having to check intervals on two staves even at the ‘easy’ tempo.

I knocked off one star because, on my iPad Pro, none of the ‘Tapping’ exercises works reliably. There’s a blunt knocking sound but the tap hardly ever registers no matter how often I try. Contacted the developers but no response/acknowledgement.

Developer Response ,

Hi Peter,
Thanks for sharing your experience and suggestions for the easier levels. Oddly, I have not received any email or contact from you, but if you'd like to try again I'd be happy to respond.
Regarding the tapping exercises, the blunt knocking sound results when you tap the wrong spot on the score. If you hit the right spot a rectangle should appear along with a nice harmonic sound. If you can be specific about which tapping exercises you are having trouble with I could be more helpful.