Sight-Reading Daily Drill — 30-Day Practice Tracker PDF
30 days of sight-reading practice, one excerpt per day with tempo, stops / restarts, pitch-and-rhythm accuracy, and the one thing to fix tomorrow. Free printable practice tracker.
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5 minutes a day for 30 days beats 60 minutes a week, every time
Sight-reading is the *one* musical skill that responds best to short, daily, separated repetitions. Five minutes today, five minutes tomorrow, never the same excerpt twice — that's the protocol professional teachers use. The reason: sight-reading is *reading-at-sight*, not *playing a piece you've seen before*. Second-pass attempts train repertoire, not sight-reading.
This 30-day tracker enforces the daily habit and captures the data that lets you see progress: stops / restarts trends down, tempo trends up, pitch ✓ / rhythm ✓ percentage tracks both axes separately. The what to fix tomorrow column is the single most-useful piece of metacognition — it forces you to name the weakness *while it's fresh*.
Excerpt source matters: graded sight-reading method books (e.g., *Improve Your Sight-Reading!*) are designed to escalate slowly; pulling random pieces from your repertoire shelf is too unpredictable. Stay one or two grade levels *below* your performance level — sight-reading is hard precisely because the music is too easy to be working on, and too unfamiliar to be effortless.
Pair with the existing Music Practice Log (`/planners/music-practice-log`) for repertoire work and the Note Identification Worksheet if pitch-recognition is the bottleneck.