Many teens and adults, perhaps including you, have developed quite a bit of proficiency with a musical instrument. Perhaps they took piano lessons when they were younger, or played in the school band or orchestra. Maybe they even excelled on one of these instruments and played in a top notch band. But even though they consider themselves to be accomplished musicians, they never learned to sing on sight. They can take a complex orchestral music score and play it without breaking a sweat, but trying to sing a simple vocal score without help makes them uncomfortable. If this is you, there is good news.
Of course, you may have never thought of learning how to sight sing. Perhaps what you do never seemed important to you. But when you think about it, you realize that you are not a complete musician without the ability to sing at sight. And you may live in fear of the day someone catches you asking what a particular melody line sounds like. Will you be able to prove it?
The good news is that you are more than halfway there. Your knowledge of rhythm and music usually puts you well ahead of those who are starting their sight singing training from scratch. But you still have to bridge that gap and learn it. Fortunately, it’s not rocket science; You’ve already mastered the hard part.
As a musician, you are familiar with the concepts of a major scale and a tonic note, C, which is the root of the scale. And you may not have thought of it this way before, but you can easily understand that once you find C on the staff, the other lines and spaces represent consecutive notes of the scale (unless there are accidentals).
All that remains is to learn to listen in your mind to how the other notes sound in relation to C. This is the skill of melodic ear training and allows you to sing notes in any key with ease. You don’t have to remember which notes are sharp or flat, just sing within the scale.
Fortunately, most of the relationships between notes can be learned by referring to familiar songs. If we use the Do-Re-Mi system as a reference, the song “Three Blind Mice” is Mi, Re, Do. “Born Free” is Do, Sol, and can be used to find Sol, while Sol-Do can be illustrated by “Here Comes the Bride” or “Amazing Grace”. The first note of other songs can be used to demonstrate Ti (“O Danny Boy”), Re (“Yesterday”), or La (“I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”).
Getting used to these interval relationships and a little practice can make you the well-rounded musician you always knew you could be. You will never have to consider yourself inferior to singers in any phase of the art; you will have it all