Practise sight-reading, one note at a time.

Why generated exercises, not pieces

Sight-reading only happens the first time through: replay the same page and you are practising memory, not reading. Books of graded excerpts go stale for exactly this reason — by the third pass you know how the line goes. The drill removes that ceiling by dealing a fresh exercise every time, so every repetition is a first read.

Freshly generated does not mean random. Each exercise is dealt from two fixed constraints: the level decides what notation is allowed to appear, and your own reading history decides which of those notes appear most. Difficulty and weakness stay separate — a level-3 exercise is always a level-3 exercise; it just leans on whichever of those five notes is rusty.

The twelve levels, with real exercises

Each level adds exactly one new thing — one more pitch, the other clef, a shorter note value, a second simultaneous note — so when you stall, there is only one plausible cause. The engravings below are not illustrations: each is an exercise the engine actually dealt at that level, engraved by the same renderer the drill uses.

Level 1: Middle C

One note, right hand. Find middle C and play it in time.

Level 2: C to E, right hand

Three neighbouring notes. Read the step up and the step down.

Level 3: Five-finger position, right hand

The whole right hand without moving it. Quarter notes join in.

Level 4: Bass clef C

A new clef. Same idea as level 1, read with the left hand.

Level 5: C to E, left hand

Steps in the bass clef.

Level 6: Five-finger position, left hand

The whole left hand in place.

Level 7: Hands alternating

Both staves on the page. One hand per measure — read ahead.

Level 8: Quarters and eighths

Faster values. Keep the pulse steady as the notes subdivide.

Level 9: A wider view

A full octave in each hand. The hand now has to move.

Level 10: Two notes at once

Read a shape, not a note: intervals within one hand.

Level 11: Black keys

Two accidentals: F sharp and C sharp. Check the sign before you commit to a key.

Level 12: Hands together

Both staves at once, now with G sharp too — the real thing.

How your reading is graded

With a MIDI keyboard connected, every note you play is compared with the notation at the cursor. The drill grades what it can hear, and nothing it can’t: wrong pitches count against a note, hesitation counts a little, and tone, fingering, and dynamics are not judged at all.

• A note read cleanly in under about a second is effortless — it will come back much later.
• A clean read that took longer is simply good — it comes back sooner.
• One wrong attempt before the right pitch makes the note hard — its memory is treated as fragile.
• Two or more wrong attempts is a lapse — the note’s history collapses and it starts again from the top of the queue.

No keyboard connected? The exercise is still dealt and readable — you can step through it at your own pace. Grading, and therefore adaptation, needs the instrument.

The engine underneath: a forgetting curve per note

Most drills track a score. This one tracks a memory — separately for every note on every staff, because being able to read G on the treble staff says nothing about reading G on the bass staff. Each of those reading skills carries its own stability: an estimate of how long the memory holds before it fades. Clean reads stretch it; a lapse collapses it.

When the next exercise is dealt, notes are drawn by how likely you are to have forgotten them — a note is never “done”, it is only ever more or less overdue. A note you missed thirty seconds ago can reappear in the very next exercise; one you have read cleanly for weeks nearly disappears. Flashcard apps schedule by the day; reading is drilled by the second, so the same curve runs on a continuous clock instead.

Two more rules keep the drill honest. New notes are introduced only a couple at a time, and only while the notes already introduced are holding up — a page of unfamiliar notation is noise, not practice. And a level is only offered as complete when nearly all of its notes are secure — read cleanly several times in a row and stable over minutes, not luck — so levelling up means the staff got easier to read, not that you had a good streak.

Five habits that make sight-reading practice work

1. Keep going. The single defining habit of good readers: a wrong note is gone, the next one isn’t. Stopping to fix a mistake practises stopping.
2. Read ahead of your hands. Your eyes should be a beat or two in front of what you are playing. The alternating-hands levels are built to force this — while one hand plays, the other is reading its next measure.
3. Slow enough to be right. A steady slow pulse with clean reads teaches more than a fast one with corrections; speed follows accuracy, never the other way round.
4. Read shapes, not letters. Fluent readers see a third or a five-note run, not five separate note names — the two-notes-at-once levels start this deliberately.
5. Little and often. Ten minutes daily beats an hour on Sunday: the forgetting curve is exactly why. The drill remembers your state between sessions, so each day starts where the last one left off.

New to the notation itself? The reading-the-staff reference covers the staff and ledger lines, clefs explains the two clefs the drill uses, and key signatures prepares the accidentals that arrive at level 11 — each shown inside a real score.

What you need

Nothing to install and no account — your progress is saved in your browser. Live grading needs a digital piano connected by USB and a browser with Web MIDI support: current desktop Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera qualify; Safari does not. The setup guide walks through connecting an instrument.

When you would rather read repertoire than exercises, the score library has over a thousand public-domain pieces free to open — and Wait mode there is the same idea at full-score scale: notation that listens and moves when you play it.