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Comment by tnecniv | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of a tangent, but I’ve played instruments all my life and I never really understood how to use sheet music beyond the initial learning of a piece. I always see musicians actively referencing it while playing, but I’ve never been able to read it nearly quickly enough to do so. That also holds for guitar tabs, which I can read more quickly than sheet music (for guitar or piano). For anything remotely complicated, I need to memorize the piece so I can focus on what I need to do with my hands. A chord sheet I can follow while improvising even if I haven’t seen the progression before, but my playing definitely isn’t as good because the mental load of reading, listening, and playing is too much. It’s like having one too many processes open on your computer and the OS / CPU can’t quite keep up

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The ability to read unfamiliar music while playing is called sight reading, and generally speaking it's more of an exercise than a capability relevant to actual performance.

During performance, sheet music is like a cheat sheet during exam, a reminder of something you already know. Most of the music is in your head and hand. The sheet music is just there to prevent a memory slip. Some orchestral music can be awfully repetitive, and having the page there helps you keep track of where you are. You are not supposed to devote lots of attention to the page itself, (unless you didn't practice before the performance and decides to sightread on stage, which, you know, happens).

I play a lot of piano and harpsichord at a very advanced level, and almost always use the sheet music. For me, it's a memory aid and a sort of "map" to the piece. You can also write stuff on your score to have reminders. This takes cognitive load off when you are performing. The goal of music is to play the music, so why waste brain capacity on getting to perfect memory of a piece when you can instead spend that on making the piece more expressive?

I will also say that learning to play without looking at your hands is a great skill to have, and also takes off some of the cognitive load.

Having good memory is important. It seems to me you have a really good muscle memory and that has helped you play without looking at the score.

I've played the piano since a very young age and the thing is, learning to play without looking at the keys (eg whilst reading) is actually a good skill to have. The argument goes that this way you can look at one hand without worrying about missing with the other while in a concert. I tend to agree.

Also I scribble a lot in my sheet music because part of studying a piece is discovering things written in it (everything has a purpose, every staccato, forte, piano, etc.)

I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing.

Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?

The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!

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