Is there a musical equivalent of dyslexia?

I did classical training for some 13 years. It takes longer than two years to learn to sight-read music. I think the best thing I did to learn to sight-read was to just plod on and try to hack it without stopping to count the keys or the steps, and then fix it if I hit a wrong note. As long as you still stop to count, you won't get better at sight reading because you aren't practicing it. Give it a whirl with some easier sheet music!

Dyslexia! The Musical

I teach my students to identify intervals and patterns right off the bat instead of just memorizing notes (note ID will “click” after continuing to play, I promise!). I use the analogy that learning to sight read is like learning to read - it would take forever if we had to keep stopping to sound out each letter, but learning to recognize groups of letters as a word enables us to read quickly. While playing sheet music, I have my students stop and identify notes every so often so we have a starting point/a named note to relate the other notes to, and then I have them continue to play from that point while focusing on intervals and patterns. There are many tricks for identifying intervals/patterns, feel free to dm if interested and I can send you some of my teaching materials!

If you don't mind me asking: Do you have trouble reading letters as well? I had a couple of students with forms of dyslexia, and they had the same troubles with reading sheet music.

It should get faster, especially when you're new, in time it becomes very fast, like reading a book. However that does not preclude learning disabilities. If you've only been at this a short while, you will likely get better at it, like over a year or two. But, yes even regular dyslexia can impair music notation reading.

Remember that dyslexia isn't an impairment of reading, but an impairment of seeing the order of small things in a small space. The problems of dyslexia become visible when people try to read. That applies to staff notated music too

Sounds like... dyslexia? As in, not some special musical version of dyslexia, just plain ol' dyslexia.

If it makes you feel better, I still do that with alto clef. I'm getting a little better at it, but not that much. You can just forget about tenor clef. On the other hand, I've actually gotten OK at some of the C clefs in the four-line staves used in neum notation for Gregorian chant.

The key here, though, is practice. Keep trying to match notes on the staff. You might want to try some sort of flashcards or music reading quiz app to get faster at it. Even if you do have dyslexia, that means that it's harder for you to read, but it's still not impossible, and you can do better; you'll just have to work harder than most people to get there.

For what it's worth, playing by ear isn't a bad thing to do while reading the music. Just make sure you're actually looking at the music correctly. You can even read the music while listening, though you can't go as slow as you need to with that method (usually). You can even read music while not doing either, away from the instrument, just hearing the notes in your head. This is not very easy to do but it's very useful when you're say, reading books about music!

Good luck!

A little clarification needed:

• How often do you practice?
• Is it all reading or just sight reading?
• While you’re playing, you look at the music? Or your hands?

I don't know what "after two years of piano lessons" means, so please take my offering with a grain of salt if it does not apply.

To me, "piano lessons" means more than showing up each week to the half-hour appointment and doing what the teacher says. It means more than practicing a half hour a day. If this is how you are approaching studying the piano -- and it might be all that you can because the real world doesn't give us a lot of free time after about age 7 -- you're not going to be happy with the results.

If you can't look at a key on the piano and instantly say its note name, or look at a note on the staff and instantly say its note name (I can't do this last one, personally*), it's because you haven't memorized the prerequisite information necessary for reading music for the piano. That's it. Period. How do you solve it? How do you learn and memorize anything? Doing it over and over and over. Make yourself some flash cards if that's what it takes. You have to know what it's telling you to play and where that is on the piano before you can start to build the neural pathways that connect the two automatically.

*Currently. I could when I used it. I play mostly guitar, and I play mostly by ear and with theory.

Thank you all for you suggestions and comments! This is the first time I've asked on this group and am blown away by the solid, careful responses with no criticism or snarkiness. It'll take me some time to read all the responses in detail and also to look into some of the suggestions but I'm extremely grateful. For what it's worth, I'm 61 so a "late learner" and read text easily, as well as functionally in French, German, Greek, and some Latin, so I guess I expected "music" to be the same - but clearly not! You folks have reminded me that sometimes you have to work hard and sweat more than you think you learn some new skills and this is one of those! I enjoy playing by ear but felt I needed to learn to read music and thanks to your comments I won't give up just yet :)

I have learning disabilities and dyslexia.. I can only speak on my behalf that reading notes took so many years and one of the reasons was that I played from charts instead of sheets. Some people learn quickly but what matters is to practice reading notes daily. Key thing is exposure.

I am still quite slow reader and can sight-read only easier notation and many times I mark the notes in the sheet. Sometimes I even color the sections.

Reading sheet music is like reading words. The more you do it, the more fluent you get at it.

How old were you when you started piano lessons? I wonder if you got rushed through sheet music too early and didn't get to learn them thoroughly. Or it will just take you more time to learn it.

Are there lines/spaces that you know off the top of your head? Like if you learn where middle C is (I hope you know that one, it looks like the planet Saturn) and you know where C is in the treble clef (3rd space from the bottom) off the top of your head, that will help. I think that you should memorize the lines and spaces one at a time off the top of your head. Like go through a piece and pick out all the C treble clef notes, until you can't forget it.

Sometimes it just takes brute force memorization, at one point I had staff note cue cards, my teacher's attempt to get me to memorize them. Like it's not going to go in by osmosis.

Somehow, you have to get away from EGBDF and GBDFA.

I overheard my piano teacher teaching a small kid the notes on the staff. She had a whole spiel and I wish I remembered it. "Baby B is the line right in the middle because you put the baby in the middle of the bed so he won't fall off" so she had a little memory trick for every line and space, for small kids to remember.

It can be difficult if you have a good ear, because you depend on your ear, and counting intervals, and use those as a crutch instead of learning to read really well. I took lessons since I was a kid, but I would listen to what the teacher played, and imitate it, and it held me back from learning reading really thoroughly. Also I still depend on intervals, which is okay but still gets in the way of memorizing all the lines and spaces. As of right now, it takes me a moment to to remember any given line or space, the treble clef, I know better than the bass clef, and the ones closest to middle C, and spaces I seem to know better than lines. So you may never get it really perfect, but the more effort you put in, the better you will get.

You shouldn't be trying to sight-read the pieces you're learning to play. You learn sight-reading by starting with incredibly simple beginner exercises and working up from there. Your sight-reading will always be years behind your ability to play a piece you have learned.

Sight-reading is a combination of sight memory, muscle memory, and look-ahead reading. The first thing you learn is the notes under your fingers when your thumb is on middle C. That gives you a foundation for similar patterns when your thumb is elsewhere. Then likewise for the left hand.

The point is that you don't really learn "That's a G". Of course you need to know it's a G, but for sight-reading you're actually looking at the distance on the stave between your thumb and the finger you'll use to play the note.

You then learn common finger patterns as patterns on the stave. Eventually you'll be able to recognise thirds, fifths, triads, broken triads, common melodic patterns, and so on. Then you learn the modifications for different scales - not as a grammar or by rote, but by practicing simple exercises at every level.

if you learn a different style like jazz you'll have to go back and learn some new patterns, because the chord shapes are (mostly) different.

This sounds a lot harder and more complicated than it is, because the goal is to make it unconscious, so you do it without thinking about it - just like driving, or riding a bike, or dancing, or sport, or any other physical skill.

So if your teacher hasn't been teaching you how to sight-read with separate exercises, you need a new teacher. It's clearly holding you back, and it's something that needs separate work - which will help your learned playing too.

on youtube, look up “how to read notes fast - the landmark system.” all it is is memorizing G (treble clef), F (bass clef) and middle C. you find the other notes based off these landmarks

Do you have similar difficulties when reading, say, words or numbers? If so, it might indeed be straight-up dyslexia and it could benefit you to get some screening for it. There are many strategies you can use to work around a learning disability and even use it to your advantage.

However, what you describe seems less like dyslexia and more like (forgive me) a need to practice more. You can play by ear, so you almost certainly don't have Amusia. In the same way, most children have a pretty big spoken vocabulary before they learn their alphabet-- if you've ever seen a preschooler learning the ABCs, you know what you're dealing with. It's just a normal part of learning.

Step one: Stop relying on "EGBDF" and such mnemonics to identify notes. Forget you ever heard EGBDF. That's like counting on your fingers to add-- it seems helpful but really it's holding you back. The staff itself is the memory aid; it's showing you exactly where the notes are in relation to each other. e.g. The top space on the bass clef is always a G. You don't need to remember All Cows Eat uh Flowers, no Grass that was it! You just need to remember what a G looks like.

Step two: Each and every day when you practice, devote a few minutes to practicing nothing but sightreading. Grab a book of Bach Chorales (or anything really, but those are a good choice because the rhythms are always straightforward so you can focus on the staff). Sightread just the soprano line of the first one. Sightread the alto line of the next one. Tenor line of the next one. And so on. No do-overs, no fiddling around till you get it right, just a straight-up cold read, one-and-done. All you're practicing is sightreading.

This will be challenging, because leaning is hard. It will get easier, because learning gets easier with practice. After you've done this for a few weeks I'm pretty confident you'll be impressed with the results!

A big breakthrough came to me when I started writing things. When we learn to read we also learn to write. Many beginning college texts start with writing out all scales and chords. Consider these exercises.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia

Something that may help is to not try and read the notes but instead try and read intervals. So you start at lets say an E. And instead of reading a G, you go up two notes. So you only really need to learn distances between notes. Obviously working with like flashcards helps a lot as well. But translating sheet music to a note and then translating that note to your hands is way slower than just translating motion.

I tend to not even think about notes when I am playing anymore and instead think of shape of the keyboard and translate that. So I see the first line on treble clef and my brain goes to note to the right of the two black keys.

Hope that helps

I started piano when i was 6, and i wasnt able to just easily and enjoyably sight read a piece of music until i was around 20. The gains have been exponential since. Analysing the actual music as you go is tough when beginning, but its a game changer. Im not consciously looking at the notes, im just absorbing patterns i have set up in my brain, F major with augmented 5th, E min 7th, C# diminished with B in the bass, etc. you dont even necassarily need to be analysing stuff with exact accuracy for it to kick in.

I suffered the same but am making real progress now thanks to flashcards and following the advice in this article:

https://medium.com/@danbarber_12163/teaching-the-notes-of-the-music-staff-eb8240d0a2bd

https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/keyboard-reverse

Start with a few notes, or even just start with C, and gradually introduce more, like BCD, then ACE, then ABCDE, the ABCDEFG, finally add all the accidentals. It really helps to get familiar with where C is, then where the others are relative to it.

On that particular site, hit the little cog/gear in the top right to bring up the settings. Enable the Note Filter. Start by choosing just C. The default Treble Range will mean you are presented with only 3 notes, middle C, and 1 and 2 octaves above middle C. You're only going to be recognising where these C notes are to start with, so you won't need to do this part for very long. After that add B and D to your filter. You're going to start recognising where these notes are relative to each C. It's going to become obvious pretty quickly and intuitively that B is always below the C and D is always above. It seems really obvious, but if you do this for a while you'll get quicker and connecting these notes to the keyboard. Now it's just a matter of continuing to build up the notes in the filter. There is a name for this method but I can't recall it.

Keep at it, it works. There's similar stuff for rhythm training.

I am a piano teacher with 15 years experience. I’ve found that dyscalculia causes many issues when reading music, as well as understanding and conceptualizing rhythm.

With that being said, if you’re learning by using Every Good Boy Does Fine or whatever system that counts from bottom of the staff to top, stop that. Instead, pick 3 landmark notes, and try to memorize just those 3 notes. The landmark notes I use for Bass clef are lowest line G, second-space from bottom C, and fourth-line from bottom F (which is where the Bass clef, or F clef, gets its name.)

Get to the point where you can know those on sight, then pick 3 more. Don’t try to learn the entire Grand Staff all at once.