I can sometimes kind of read ahead 1 bar, but it takes an intense amount of effort, reading two bars ahead is beyond me.

I am very quick at reading the notes that I am currently playing, pretty much at temp, though unusual note durations (strathspeys, slurs over the beat) give me trouble, as do some accidentals, especially in unfamiliar music.

Good luck on reading ahead, if you figure it out...

I'm not sure why anyone would want to sight-read two bars ahead, unless they're playing in a string ensemble that constantly performs unseen sheet music. In that context, there’s a massive amount of information to decode all at once: key and time signatures, modulations, bow directions, and dynamics. Not to mention the harmonic knowledge required—since you might need to skip notes on occasion, knowing the harmony ensures you can instantly recognise and target the essential tones.

I think that's exactly why reading two bars ahead is necessary for complex pieces: you need the buffer time to gather all that information. But with simple fiddle tunes, there's really not much to decipher. There are no bow directions to follow (you just make up your own), no dynamics, hardly any shifting, and simple structures with plenty of repeated phrases. It's really just the dots and the rhythm.

Personally, I'm not sure how many notes ahead I'm reading, but it must be at least a few since I can recognise the tune as I go. For me, it all depends on note groupings—usually about four notes per group. If these four-note scale fragments are recognisable, I can play them without looking at each individual note, which puts me about two beats ahead. And if there are many recognisable groups bunched together or If the notes form clear chord tones, I could be much further ahead. I think it just varies depending on the phrase.

I’m pretty sure I just read what I’m playing. If anything gets complicated I just work through it to learn it and memorize it. In a performance situation I just use the manuscript as a rolling reference.

Sometimes the sheet is in full focus with the conductor in my peripheral vision and sometimes the conductor is in focus and the sheet rendered to the peripheral. Maybe I can glance ahead when it is all learnt. 

For the past two weeks I've been using sight reading to get my fingers into "The Last Shot Got Him".. Now that I have the fingers working I'm listening to a recording to get the 'feel/phrasing' of the tune. There is at time/place for sight reading but I can't imagine anyone actually Sounding good on this tune while only having sheet music..I'm keeping one eye on the sheet while listening and eventually two things will happen. One, I'll no longer need the sheet music and two, I'll start getting creative with the great tune....

It doesn’t hurt to practice scanning ahead in music. This is a useful technique in ensemble playing, especially when you have important cues written in to watch out and prepare for. This is especially true in pit orchestra music, where the music is often cued carefully to stage directions or spoken parts, and you have to be ready to make quick shifts. The conductor will help with a lot of the cues, but there are still things you have to watch out for individually.

As far as reading normally, I don’t think it’s necessary to be looking ahead. If you’re on your own time, you can instead read the part without playing first to familiarize yourself with it. Then when you’re actually playing, you’ll be more prepared for certain parts.

As you’ve worked on a piece more and become more familiar with it, it’s easier to scan ahead a bit. Be careful though, as it’s easy to put too much attention on the scanning and then lose your place or accidentally start playing what you’re scanning instead.

To sum it up, it’s not a bad skill to practice, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much unless you’re playing in a setting where that skill is going to be employed. You don’t really have to scan ahead for sight reading—if your reading skills are strong, you can just play as you read without looking ahead. In a piece of music there are often so many expressive marks in a measure that if you’re looking elsewhere you’re likely to miss some of them and therefore eliminate the nuance of the music.

It has a little to do with what was discussed recently about music existing in time, not a single static image. If I were to read one note at a time, in real time, from sheet music the result would be stilted at best. There needs to be some probing ahead to allow the music to flow naturally. When I say I can read the bar I am playing I'm saying I can parse it all as a unit, part of a longer phrase, 4 beats or so at a time. Maybe saying I wanted to be able to read 2 bars ahead is wishing for something too complex but I don't see why. I also don't see a problem of confusing the future notes and accidentally playing them ahead of time. I simply think having a habit of seeing ahead is helpful. In my particular case there are tunes that I know pretty well but repeatedly get a bar or 2 wrong every time for some reason. I'll have the music in front of me and out of habit be reading casually as I play. Suddenly the offending bar arrives and I blow it again. Usually I have ways of playing through that kind of situation, but I wish to get the bar the way it's written. That's when having read a bar or more ahead would be useful.

Also, my learning method is mostly from sheet music, and for many tunes it will take many play-throughs of a tune by reading it to have it nearly or completely memorized. Learning to automatically read a couple bars ahead would speed up my memorization, I believe. I am trying to intentionally do that on tunes I know moderately well but am still reading because that's obviously easier than reading a new tune cold. Ultimately I think it will help in every reading situation.

To clarify, I think sight reading is a combination of a global understanding of the area in view, and a specific understanding of individual notes or blocks of notes in cases where that's needed. My attempts to improve my own reading skill seems to bear that out. It's the effort to get that to operate more automatically I am dealing with.

When you get to the bars that are a problem isolate them and repeat correctly and slowly.
Memorise the tunes quickly and use audiation when replaying.
Always anticipate a few notes ahead.

Sight reading is exactly what the term suggests: reading at sight. That means not having to prepare for what you’re reading. If you’re pre-reading everything then it’s not strictly sight reading when you actually play the notes. If you rely on the habit of reading everything before you play it, your ability to actually read in the moment can’t improve. After all, that’s the issue here: being stuck in a rut.

If you really want to stretch your ability, do it by playing random things completely cold, no reading ahead, and no scanning as you’re playing. Just one measure at a time.

Reading ahead is a skill to consider only after having developed regular reading ability sufficiently.

You might compare it to learning to ride a bike. In the very beginning, all the attention has to be on what’s in the immediate vicinity, so that a good sense of balance and the feel of the bike can be understood. If you’re just looking 100 yards ahead all the time, you’ll drop the bike or you’ll miss anything in the road that will catch your front wheel and send you down to the ground. As riding skill starts to develop, then you introduce the concept of scanning ahead in different zones for safety before riding with other people on the road or trail.

I recall the editor of an extremely erudite magazine once saying that he would always read articles upside down when proofing them before publication specifically so that he would be zoomed in on the individual words and sentences. Reading normally, it was more likely that he would miss errors. His ability to catch them drastically improved when he forced himself to avoid scanning ahead or reading too quickly and getting ahead of himself. The mind tricks the eye by drawing conclusions easily. Not to go too far down a different rabbit hole, but I would argue that the use of sight words in teaching reading is directly responsible for the overall decline in literacy among children over the years. Learning to read by figuring words out as you read in the moment was proven to work by both history and science, but that information was deliberately ignored in favor of a trendy program that ultimately failed. 

I don't know if I mentioned this back in the distant Fiddle Hangout past, but once you are able to at least partially get your hands, eyes & ears in sync you find that the notes on the page match up almost spookily well to what you want to hear. It's as if manuscript was invented by fiddlers.

Absolutely! Once your hands, eyes, and ears start working together, reading music becomes much more intuitive. It really does feel like the notation was made for fiddlers.

quote:

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Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

I don't know if I mentioned this back in the distant Fiddle Hangout past, but once you are able to at least partially get your hands, eyes & ears in sync you find that the notes on the page match up almost spookily well to what you want to hear. It's as if manuscript was invented by fiddlers.

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Better keep that our little secret. Don't mention it to piano players.