Sight-singing, or sight-reading for singers, means looking at a line of music you've never heard and singing it. It sounds like a gift some people are born with, but it's a skill built from a few small ones: knowing where home is, seeing how far each note is from the last, and keeping the beat. A few minutes a day, with lines that are a little too easy, is how most singers get there.
This guide uses do, re, mi, the sol-fa names, called solfege in many places, because they name each note by its place in the key. Do to mi looks and sounds the same in any key, so what you learn once works everywhere.
Find do: the home note
Every line starts from home. In do re mi, home is do, the first note of the key's scale, and the key signature at the start of each line tells you where it sits.
- No sharps or flats: do is C.
- Sharps: the last sharp, the one furthest to the right, sits on ti. Do is the next line or space up.
- Flats: the last flat sits on fa. With two or more flats, there's a quicker way: do sits on the next-to-last flat.
Before you sing a note, find do on the stave and hum it, or play it. Every other note is counted from there.
Moveable do or fixed do?
In this guide do moves with the key: it's always the home note, so do to mi is the same distance in every key. That's moveable do, the usual way in English-speaking countries. In much of Europe and Latin America, singers learn fixed do, where do is always C, re is always D, and so on, whatever the key. Both work. Moveable do names each note by its place in the key, so a tune is sung on the same syllables in any key.
Read steps and skips
The stave is a ladder. Each line and each space is one note, and higher on the stave is higher in pitch.
- A step goes from a line to the next space, or a space to the next line: do to re, re to mi. Most tunes move mostly by step.
- A skip jumps one line or space: line to line, or space to space. Do, mi and so are each a skip apart, the notes of the home chord. Learn to sing them cold, and every leap gets easier.
- So below do is a common start: many tunes begin on the so a fourth below do and leap up home.
Ode to Joy is a good first read: its tune moves almost entirely by step. In sol-fa it starts mi, mi, fa, so, so, fa, mi, re, do. Read it, then check yourself against its melody part.
Before you sing, look at the shape: where does the line go up, where does it turn, where is the highest note? Then hear the first note in your head before you sing it. If you slip, don't stop: go on to the next note. In a choir, the music won't wait for you.
Count the rhythm
The shape of each note says how long it lasts.
- Crotchet (a quarter note): filled, with a stem. One beat.
- Minim (a half note): hollow, with a stem. Two beats.
- Semibreve (a whole note): hollow, no stem. Four beats.
- Quaver (an eighth note): filled, with a flag or joined to its neighbour by a beam. Half a beat, so two fit in one beat.
- A dot makes a note half as long again: a dotted minim is three beats, a whole bar of a waltz.
- A tie joins two of the same note: sing it once and hold through.
- A rest is silence that still counts. Count it, don't skip it.
Count a bar in before you start, out loud or in your head, and keep the beat going through the whole line, even through a mistake. A metronome helps at first: slow enough that you can read every note on time.
The two half steps, and minor
Most steps on the stave are whole steps. Two of them are only half as far, though they look exactly the same: mi to fa and ti to do. Sing those close together. Ti in particular leans up into do.
The same notes can make a minor key. Find do from the signature as usual, then la, a skip below it. If the line starts and ends on la, it's in minor: la is home now, and the home chord is la, do, mi. The signature doesn't change, so you read the notes exactly as before.
Read your part in a choir
A choir part rarely has the tune. Altos often hold one note while the melody moves above them; tenors and basses move in their own shapes.
- Read your line, not the tune. Keep your eyes on your own stave, even when the melody sounds more interesting.
- Look at the shape first. Long held notes, then where it climbs or falls.
- Lost your place? Find the first note of the next bar and come back in there.
- Know your clef. In a choral score with a stave for each part, the tenor is usually written in the treble clef, an octave higher than it sounds; in a hymn book the tenor shares the bass-clef stave with the bass.
The first time, read your part on its own. Then read it while the other parts sing around you: that's the real test, and the one that makes rehearsals easier.
Hand signs
Many choirs and classrooms add a hand sign to each syllable, so you can feel each note's place as well as see it. The signs come from John Curwen's method, as Kodály teachers adapted them. Your hand rises as the notes go up.
- Do: a closed fist.
- Re: a flat hand, slanting upward.
- Mi: a flat hand, palm down, level.
- Fa: a fist with the thumb pointing down.
- So: a flat hand, palm facing you, level.
- La: a relaxed hand, hanging down from the wrist.
- Ti: a fist with the first finger pointing up and away.
A daily habit
- Five to ten minutes a day beats an hour once a week.
- Read something new every day, a little easier than you can manage. Reading is about the new; the old you already know by ear.
- Find do, look at the shape, count in, then sing straight through. Same order, every time.
- Medium volume, in the middle of your voice. Sight-reading is for the eyes and ears, not for range.
Where do re mi came from
Around the year 1030, the monk Guido of Arezzo taught singers to read with the first syllables of a hymn whose lines each started a note higher: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Ut later became do, and a seventh syllable, si, was added; English teachers later changed it to ti. In the 1800s Sarah Glover and John Curwen turned the syllables into a method for teaching whole classes to read, and in the 1900s Zoltán Kodály built Hungarian school music on it. Singers have been learning to read this way for nearly a thousand years.
Practise it in Stackapella
The free Sight-singing course teaches it a step at a time, with the names under the notes first, then faint, then gone, and the app hearing whether each note lands:
- Do on the stave: lines, spaces and home.
- Do, mi, so: skips through the home chord.
- Long and short: reading rhythm in time.
- Sharps and flats at the start: finding do from the key signature.
- A part of its own: a choir part that isn't the tune.
Free tools help too: the intervals pages show and play every step and skip, interval ear training trains you to hear them, and the metronome keeps the beat while you read.