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Elementary Sight Reading
You may be one of those people who are hugely impressed by the fact that some people can sit down with a new sheet of music and play it letter perfect the on first try. I've known people who have played pipes for thirty years and more who still can't do it - they have to hear a tune before they can make sense of the music.
The fact is, there's nothing magic about it. It's an acquired skill, just like reading a language, and like any acquired skill you learn it through practice. If it seems too difficult, it's probably because you're trying to skip some of the steps in learning.
If you think about how you learned to read a language, you will realize a couple of things. First, you didn''t start out by reading an entire book, or even a single page of closely packed type. You started out with the alphabet, then simple words, and then simple sentences made up of those words. Then you worked your way through a lot of simple books, not because you were fascinated by the adventures of Dick and Jane, who were actually a couple of boring little prudes you wouldn't actually want to know, but because you needed the practice at reading before you could get into the good stuff like letters column in Penthouse.
By the same token, you learn to sight read by practicing on a lot of tunes that you have no intention of learning (although you may discover some that you will want to learn). Start by picking out some simple tunes, such as 4/4's and some two-part 6/8's.
Now take what looks like the simplest one. Work through it very slowly, one bar at a time. Your object here is not to play it at speed, it's just to play the right note (and gracenotes) on the beat, and to observe all the cuts and holds. Work through the entire tune one bar at a time, then two bars, and so on until you can do the whole tune so that it actually sound like a tune. Don't worry about speed; that will come with practice.
Don't spend a lot of time trying to get that tune up to speed. You're just trying to learn what you have to do when you see a certain pattern of notes. Instead, as soon as you're satisfied that you've figured the first tune out, move on to another one, and then another. You'll find that as you do so, you'll get faster and more accurate. Then you'll be ready to move on to more difficult tunes, which will slow you down again - but not for long.
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