Procedural sight-reading practice
Sight-reading is the skill of playing music you have never seen. Practice books run out — you learn the pieces and stop truly reading. Sight Reading Pro generates an endless supply of musically-real exercises, graded to your level and written for your instrument, so every read is a real one.
Free · no sign-up · print to PDF
Why we built it
Most students practise sight-reading from a fixed book of examples. After a few passes the notes are familiar, the fingers remember, and the exercise quietly turns into a memory test — the one thing sight-reading is not. The well runs dry exactly when it starts to matter.
We wanted a source of reading material that never repeats and never runs out, but that still sounds like music — with phrases, cadences, and a sensible shape — rather than a scatter of notes a computer happened to emit. So we grounded the generator in how music is actually built and how reading skill is actually graded, and let it write a new, correct, level-appropriate piece every time you ask.
Sight Reading Pro is made in Normal, Illinois, by JJ, a saxophone player, together with JJ’s daughter. It is shaped by what teachers and players tell us, so write to jj@sightreadingpro.com with anything that would make it more useful for you or your students.
The methodology
Every exercise is built as a period or sentence — a basic idea that returns, a question-and-answer shape, a half cadence in the middle and a full close at the end. It reads like music because it is structured like music (after Schoenberg and Caplin), never a random walk across the staff.
Keys, meters, rhythms, tempo, and expression widen level by level along a ladder modelled on graded sight-reading standards (ABRSM-style). Level 1 stays in one sharp or flat and simple time; by level 6 you are reading every key, syncopation, triplets, and asymmetric meters.
Thirteen instruments — full woodwind, brass, and string sections plus voice, from flute and oboe to French horn, viola, and bassoon. Exercises stay inside each instrument’s comfortable written range for your level — never an unplayable note — with correct clefs (including alto), and transposing instruments notated properly and played back at concert pitch.
Dynamics, crescendos, slurs, and articulations are introduced on the same graded schedule and placed to stay legible — accents and staccatos on the notehead side, clear of the slurs. You practise reading the marks, not just the pitches.
Play any exercise back with sampled acoustic instruments, or set a plain metronome click and read it yourself. Adjust the tempo, use a count-in, and check your reading against the playback.
The generator is deterministic — the same settings and seed always give the same piece — but every new exercise is fresh. You can’t run out of material or quietly memorize the book, which is the whole failure mode of static sight-reading collections.
The graded ladder
| Level | Keys | Meters | Rhythm | Reading tempo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ≤ 1 sharp/flat | 4/4 · 3/4 · 2/4 | whole → eighth notes | Andante ♩=80 |
| 2 | ≤ 2 accidentals | + 2/2 | + dotted rhythms | Andante ♩=88 |
| 3 | ≤ 3 accidentals | + 3/8 · 6/4 | + sixteenths, rests | Moderato ♩=96 |
| 4 | ≤ 4 accidentals | + 6/8 | + syncopation | Moderato ♩=104 |
| 5 | ≤ 5 accidentals | + 9/8 · 12/8 · 5/4 | + triplets, octave leaps | Allegretto ♩=116 |
| 6 | all keys | + 5/8 · 7/8 | full mixed rhythms | Allegro ♩=126 |
Each level is cumulative — everything from the levels below, plus what the row adds. Dynamics grow from p–f up to pp–ff; articulations from staccato and accent to tenuto.
How you use it
Choose an instrument and a difficulty from 1 to 6. Leave key and meter on “random” for a genuine cold read, or pin them to drill something specific.
A new eight-bar piece is rendered instantly as clean notation, in your instrument’s clef, key signature, and range.
Play against a steady click, or hear the melody on a sampled instrument. Set the tempo, add a count-in, and follow the moving cursor.
Print or save any exercise as a PDF for lessons and studio handouts, then hit “New exercise” for another one you have never seen.
Pricing
$0
Three exercises with no sign-up, then five a day with a free account. Every instrument, key, and level. No card.
$36 / year
Unlimited exercises. Cancel any time; your access runs to the end of the paid year. All plans →
Free Pro
Your own Pro is free. For your students, a Classroom license is $99 a year for 40 seats, or a Studio license $60 for 12. How it works →
Pick an instrument and a level, and start reading.
Start practicing