Ethan:  My guess is that your teachers/conductors missed a very important "readiness" period when you were young.  If your ear is good you're halfway there.  Now the goal is to relate what you can hear to the symbolic language that's on the page.

 

First question:  can you pick out a part on a keyboard (or on any other instrument)?  If not, you have no way of knowing whether you're correct or not, so you'll have to find someone else who is willing to work with you.  And if you can find someone who has a background in Kodaly teaching that would be absolutely the best possible situation, because you need to be taken through the ear-training process that you seem to have missed when you were younger.

 

So, get yourself a hymnbook, and set aside a time period every day when you can work with it.  Take 5 hymns each day and attempt to sightread the melody (the soprano line, but of course in your own range).  Before singing, LOOK at the page and absorb what's there.  Note where the notes move up, where they move down, and where they stay put for a while.  Now, find a starting pitch and SING it.

 

Note:  Only the first time counts as sightreading.  Repeating it to get it right is rehearsal, not sightreading, but of course you SHOULD repeat it until you get it right.

 

There's enough music in that single hymnbook to keep you busy for quite a while, and as you improve (and you WILL improve!!) you can take on more hymns every day, but always look, then read, then listen and rehearse.

 

At some point start over again and do the same thing with your bass lines.  Different clef, different note names, but exactly the same process.  And if you live long enough  you can expand to the alto parts and eventually the tenor parts.

 

But having a teacher to work with will definitely be the BEST way to proceed, so see what you can find.

All the best,

John

 

I have been teaching sight singing for many years, and I often see among my students good singers that are weak readers.  I think that many singers learn to sing at an early age by ear and the brain doesn't learn how to make the connection between sound and visual perception.   You need to create that connection.

Practice makes proficience.  The more you do it, the better you get at it.  Any sight singing book will help you if you practice every day, at least 15-20 minutes.  Using solfege syllabus for pitch and conducting for the rhythm are helful.

Good luck!

 

Manena

Ethan,

 

I can't argue with any of the previous replies, but I'd like to add my two cents. 

 

What you need at this point is a strategy.  If you've been singing all this time, what you've already done is to build up a sizable musical vocabulary.  Now, it's just a matter of, as Manena put it, the connection between sound and visual perception.  The others have given great advice on what to practice to build this connection, but I think it's also important to examine how  to practice.

 

1. Read patterns, not notes. Music isn't written one note at a time any more than literature is written one letter at a time.  Use the vocabulary you've built up over years of experience to enable you to read music one phrase at a time rather than one note at a time.

 

2. Keep your eyes ahead of your voice.  An effective reader is much like an effective driver.  It's too late to see what's happening.  You must see what's about to happen.

 

3. Relax.  You are nervous enough about this issue to create this thread.  If you are nervous while you read, you can't possibly be successful.  Fear shuts down the frontal lobe of the brain, where the cerebral process necessary for decoding takes place.  The notes can't hurt you.  Relax.

 

4. Don't be afraid to guess.  Nobody can look at every note every time.  Sometimes, based upon context, you guess.  If you are reading patterns rather than notes, your guess will be logical, and usually correct.  Sightsinging is multiple choice.  That is, the next note can only be so many possibilities.  The only way to guarantee a wrong answer on multiple choice is to leave the answer blank.  Guess.  Now.

 

I hope these ideas are of some use to you.  Best of luck!