Sight reading is one of the most important skills to develop as a musician, but constantly finding new music to practice can be a challenge. Printed sight reading books can be costly, and once you complete all the exercises in the book, you have nothing left to sight read. Similarly, writing your own music for sight reading takes a lot of time and effort. 

That’s where Sight Reading Studio comes in.

Sight Reading Studio was created to provide musicians with an unlimited supply of music to use for sight reading practice. Whether you’re creating music for your own practice, or to teach developing musicians, Sight Reading Studio makes it quick and easy to generate music for sight reading.

Here’s how to generate a template or exercise for sight reading:

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the preset levels mean?

Each preset increases in difficulty. Difficulty is determined by a variety of factors, such as the inclusion of complex time signatures, rhythmic patterns, and more. These presets are intended to provide a good starting point from which you can further customize your sight reading template. After choosing a preset, the template’s settings can be adjusted in any way you choose to create exercises that are at just the right difficulty level for you or your musicians.

I created my template, now what?

After a template is created, you can do several different things with it:

• Practice your music in the Practice app, where you’ll receive real-time feedback as you play along with music generated from your template.
• Save your music as either a template or exercise (more on that below) for further adjustment later, or to prepare for sending.
• Assign your music (if you have a MakeMusic Cloud subscription) for your students to practice.
• Share your music with others via a public link so they can view and practice the music.
• Download your template parameters, a PDF of the exercise, or a MusicXML file of the exercise.

What’s the difference between a template and an exercise?

It’s important to note that when using Sight Reading Studio, you’re typically creating a template. This template serves as an outline on what your exercise will look like based on the settings you select. The actual piece you see on screen will be constantly changing, and when your piece is sent out (to a student, for instance) they will see something entirely different. This ensures that you never run out of new pieces to practice. Click “Generate a new score” to generate new pieces of music based on your template.

But what about when you see the perfect piece that you absolutely want to practice, or have a student practice? Not to worry – when you save your piece, you can save as an exercise rather than a template. When you save as an exercise, the piece will stay exactly the same as you see it on screen. 

Once saved, you can open the music in Compose to make further modifications, or share it with a student so they can open it in the Practice app, where they’ll receive real-time feedback and assessment as they play along with your piece.

How can I make changes to my template after it’s created?

If you have finished setting up your initial template, but later decide you want to add an additional instrument, or perhaps a new rhythmic pattern, you can make further adjustments using the menu at the top of the page:

Selecting any of these options will take you back into the template editor where you can change your settings. You are also able to add additional adjustments to your music, such as adding a variety of expressions.