How to practice sight singing on your own
Twenty minutes, three times a week, done properly, beats two hours on a Sunday. Here is what “properly” means.
The rule that matters most
Sing it once. Sight singing is by definition a first-sight skill, so an exercise you have already sung is no longer training it — it is training memory. Read a line once, score it, learn what went wrong, and then move to a new one. Repeating the same exercise until it is perfect feels productive and builds almost nothing.
This is why a library of several hundred graded exercises matters more than a clever feature. You need material you have never seen, at the right level, every single session.
The thirty seconds before you sing
Most of the marks are won here, and most people skip it entirely.
- Key. Read the key signature and find do. Sing the tonic triad to yourself before anything else.
- Shape. Look at the whole line and find its highest and lowest point. Know where you are going before you set off.
- The hard bit. There is always one — a leap, a chromatic note, an awkward rhythm. Find it and hear it now, not when you arrive at it.
- The pulse. Feel a bar of it physically before you start.
A twenty-minute session
| Minutes | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3 | Sing the scale and the tonic triad in the day's key | Puts the key in your ear before you need it |
| 3–6 | Rhythm only, on one repeated note | Separates the two channels so neither hides the other |
| 6–16 | Four or five new exercises, each sung once and scored | The actual training |
| 16–20 | Re-read the worst one, slowly, and fix the specific thing | Turns a mistake into a correction |
Five mistakes that keep people stuck
1. Practicing too fast
The useful tempo is the one where you can think one bar ahead of your voice. If you are reacting to notes as they arrive, you are too fast, and going faster will not fix it.
2. Checking every note at a piano
Understandable, and fatal. The instant you check, you stop building the inner ear and start building a lookup habit. Sing first, verify afterwards.
3. Stopping when you go wrong
Stopping trains stopping. In an exam, in a rehearsal, in a service, you have to keep going and find your way back. Sing through the mistake and recover — recovering is the skill.
4. Ignoring rhythm because pitch feels harder
Rhythm is where most marks are actually lost, and it is far quicker to fix. Score them separately or you will never see which one is failing you.
5. Only ever singing in C
Reading in one key builds a shape memory that collapses the moment the signature changes. Move around. Every step round the circle of fifths is one accidental's difference.
Dealing with going flat
Almost every singer drifts flat over a long line, and almost none of them notice — the drift is gradual and your ear recalibrates to it. Three fixes, in order of effectiveness:
- Sing against a drone. A held tonic makes drift immediately audible, because you hear yourself go out of tune with something real.
- Re-touch the tonic. Every few bars, silently check where do is.
- Support the descending lines. Most people sag going down, not up.
Prima Vista measures this directly — it reports the drift across a page in cents, and which direction it went.