Four years of sight reading practice

Summary

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. Some back story I’ve been playing the guitar since an accoustic guitar was delivered to our scout hall by accident in the early 1990s. There was a piano at home, but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t play it. When my folks moved to a smaller house in 2021, the piano came to live in my study/music studio. I figured it would be a shame if I didn’t learn how to play it. 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. Hardware and software I am constantly aware of fighting GAS by trying to use the things I already own. So I have been using the same M-Audio Axiom 49 key MIDI keyboard for years. I have a WIDI Master connected to its MIDI ports, so that I can connect to it via bluetooth on my iPad. This works flawlessly. The app I am using has gone through a few renames. It is as of 2025-05-11 it is called “NoteVision“. I can’t claim to have done a particularly exhaustive evalauation of music learning apps. This one just seemed to click for me due to the rapid feedback. 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. The setup screen Once you click the play button, you get a full-screen staff and randomly selected notes, the bar moves as you play. The play screen The summary screen The routine I have written a little interface in Pythonista that I can start directly from my home screen. It selects a key for me to input into the iPad app, as well as tra...