For the past year and a half, I've been working on and off on improving an underdeveloped skill on piano. Proprioception is a ten-dollar word for playing without looking at your hands. Broken down, it's the feeling of knowing where your hands are in relationship to the keyboard and knowing the distance you need to move for the next note or chord shape.

If you read only one bit of this as a fellow pianist, take this advice: Start developing it early. It's something that was not emphasized enough when I was taking lessons and class piano, and I certainly wish it were!

Why It Matters

Sight-reading and proprioception are intertwined. They are technically different skills, though. Sight-reading is decoding what is on the page and playing it without prior rehearsal. Proprioception is not sight reading, but it makes sight-reading much easier.

Why does sight-reading matter? Maybe it doesn't to every player. But to me, sight-reading and playing more technical pieces are intertwined. The more you can play without much effort, the better off you are at being able to focus on the new challenge in a denser piece.

Additionally, improvisation requires the level of intimacy with an instrument where phrases are second-nature. Proprioception plays into it.

Lastly — It's just fun! It feels like flying, being able to play without switching your gaze between looking at your hands and the page. Playing the piano is simply more enjoyable this way.

Developing Proprioception

If you're already familiar with playing as I was, there's an unavoidable feeling of really downshifting. New neural pathways were being synthesized. It felt like playing a new instrument once I started taking my eyes off the keys. A rite of passage, a good exercise of the mind, and a hit to the ego, but worth the effort!

All that said, much of the material I worked through started very simple. That's for the best, since an entirely new skill is being learned here to great effect.

Super Sight Reading Secrets by Howard Richman came highly recommended. I dove in here first and would say that this is the "Start Here" for working on proprioception skills. Richman divides exercises between "Keyboard Orientation" (proprioception) and note-recognition skills.

The approach is very gradual and highly tactile. Some teachers would recommend focusing primarily on learning intervals, but Richman takes the long view and encourages you to gain a sense of where each 2/3 note cluster of the ebony keys is located from 0. If presented middle C on the page, the exercises encourage you to find it. Then, removing hands from the keys, doing the same with A2, F5, and so on. Very tedious, progress is slow, but this has been one of the most beneficial exercises in my learning.

There are many more great exercises, thoughtfully ordered. My one note would be that you probably don't need to wait until completing the book before you move on to reading simple music. There are a whole slew of skills that need to stack to read even elementary-grade music, and it's better to start that in tandem with these exercises.

Speaking of, a great companion is Hannah Smith's Progressive Sight Reading Exercises for Piano. This is a book of five-finger pattern 2-3 line pieces. Nice to work through since you're not worried about making leaps across the piano, instead getting a familiarity with feeling different scalar shapes under the fingers. Since there are regular key shifts, this book encourages interval recognition, first in a contained window of five fingers, which then works up to larger leaps after graduating from the book. In actuality, exact-note placement and interval measuring are two lenses that are used in tandem when reading, so it's beneficial to have both developed.

Most recently, and with great jubilation, I've been returning to earlier elementary piano methods. It's time to leave the realm of pure exercise and start applying this to music more regularly. My method series of choice has been the Faber Piano Adventure series, jumping back in at book 3A. Though any method will do, such as the Alfred method.

Progress

I started this in March of 2024, so it's been about a year and a half of gradually working on this in small bursts. Of course, the keyboard orientation exercises took the longest. It's not been until this month that I've felt comfortable enough to work with the elementary method books.

Eventually, though, there was a tipping point. One day, it went from being impossible to — well, possible! Much like a child learning a language, I'm still having to "sound out" (meaning, play really slowly) certain sections, but I can stumble my way into finding where my hands need to go.

When I was first learning piano, playing two hands separately felt like an impossible task. Until it wasn't. After some point, the skill wasn't perfected per se, but I knew that in most pieces I could climb that wall. I'm excited to be reaching a similar point with proprioception and, as a result, sight-reading!

Am I done? Nope! But I do feel that the skill can now develop more naturally as I continue to play. I've broken free from the stratosphere, and it will now be easier to cruise and let the eyes on my finger mature organically. Winston Churchill in Painting as a Pastime encourages "[planting] a garden in which you can sit when digging days are done." Digging days are just about done!

So I'll keep going — enjoying that feeling of soaring whenever my parasail catches a day of good wind!

Post Script: A few bits of very practical advice from Yeargdribble, particularly for anyone picking up Piano as a secondary instrument. Namely:

• Don't follow the "just keep going!" approach of sight reading. No need to practice with a metronome early on; you'll learn more from slowly, but successfully playing the correct notes.
• When sight-reading, avoid looking at your hands when you've read ahead a few bars. This is robbing you of the chance to develop proprioception for when you'll need it with denser music.
• Treat it like learning a language. Tackle pieces that you are 80% familiar with the patterns, or as he puts it, that you can play at half speed. Then, don't worry about perfecting every piece. Better to read more pieces quickly than to develop rote muscle memory for the particular piece you are learning.