Many thanks and God Bless,
Dave

For sightreading, the best advice I ever got was back in college. I was told “To get better at sightreading music, just sightread more music!” And I believe that’s true.

I also believe when you learn to read music you will become more sophisticated in your ear training, and be able to play more complex music by ear.

Don’t be fooled in thinking that producing audio and scoring for notation are similar. They are very different animals. In musical theater you will be working in performance with notation, and the game is to make the notation sound free and take it off the page.

For pit experience you can volunteer for local theater productions in your area once you can read a bit of music. The pit almost always needs a keyboardist, or two or three! I would often include a student in my community theater pits. Sometimes I would give them a simple glockenspiel part as an introduction to the pit.

My name is James, and I’m 16! just started college.

I have a real love for theatre, one of the things i’d love to do when i’m older is play keyboards in the pit. Piano is my instrument, but one of my main problems is I’m terrible at reading music – I play very well by ear, and i’ve got my own little backing track company through all the things i’ve done by ear, my latest achievement was producing the full show backing tracks of ‘the wizard of oz’ (london cast recording) for a professional company, and i’ve produced many backing tracks for different companies and individuals, I use a mac with logic pro to do all the sequencing and many different instrument plug-ins that sound real! (samples etc) and I love doing justice to this musical theatre music.

I really want to get into the pit crowd when i’m Older, but I can’t read music well – where as I can play the music just as good, i just can’t read the notes. so if anyone has any tips on how to get better at reading music, or how you even get into the pit crowd once you’ve mastered the reading music stuff! Is it just a matter of who you know or what? I’d really love to know, its just something I HAVE to do when I’m older.

If someone could point me in the right direction etc, please talk to me *email edited*

Thanks a lot for everyones time.

Cheers,
James