Built by one person, in London.
SightReader is made by Bret Cameron — a software engineer who took piano back up as an adult and couldn’t find a tool that took sight reading seriously. There’s no team here, no investors and no growth department. There’s the app, and an inbox I answer myself.
Why sight reading
I could learn a piece if I sat with it long enough. What I couldn’t do was open a book at a page I’d never seen and play it. That’s a separate skill from playing repertoire, and almost nothing teaches it directly — you’re told to read more, which is true and useless.
It’s also the part of piano practice software can genuinely help with. It needs a large supply of music you haven’t seen, at close to the right difficulty, marked honestly, every day. That’s a job for a computer. Tone, phrasing, what to do with your wrist — that’s a job for a teacher.
Why the cursor doesn’t stop
Most practice apps wait for you to play the right note before they move on. That trains you to stop, which is the exact habit sight reading has to break. In an exam, in an accompaniment, in a rehearsal, the music carries on without you.
So ours carries on too. Notes go green or red as you play them and the piece keeps moving. It’s uncomfortable for about a week, and it’s the whole point.
Why the grades follow ABRSM
“Get better at sight reading” isn’t something you can measure. “Read a Grade 4 test at ninety per cent” is. ABRSM publishes exactly what each grade’s sight-reading test asks for — keys, time signatures, hand position, length, articulation — and those parameters make a ready-made difficulty curve, whether or not you ever sit an exam.
We’re not affiliated with ABRSM or endorsed by them, and our grade pieces aren’t exam material: real tests use unseen, single-use music on the day. Ours are newly written to the same published parameters.
What we will and won’t build
On the list
- More music, sorted more precisely by difficulty.
- Better feedback on what actually went wrong — which keys, clefs and intervals are costing you.
- Timing and rhythm scoring. It isn’t there today, and it’s the biggest gap we know about.
- Tools that make a teacher’s week easier. The class tools are early and we know it.
Not on the list
- Music theory lessons. There are better tools for that, and we’d be a worse one.
- Ear training. Same answer.
- Video courses. We’re a practice tool, not a curriculum.
- Anything that pretends to replace a teacher. An app can hand you new music every day and mark it. It can’t hear that your wrist is tense.
If you want to see whether this thing is actually being worked on, the changelog is the honest answer.
Read the changelogWhere your data lives
European and UK infrastructure
Our database is hosted in the EU, files in AWS London, analytics on PostHog’s EU cloud with IP addresses masked, and error reporting in Frankfurt.
A named operator, not a shell
SightReader is run by Bret Cameron, sole trader, London, United Kingdom. The registered address is in the terms of service.
Practice data stays private
Sessions, accuracy and progress belong to the account that made them. We don’t sell or share individual data, and you can export or delete everything on request.
Getting in touch
Email [email protected] and it reaches me rather than a queue. I aim to reply within three working days, UK time, usually sooner. If it’s urgent — payment, account access, lost progress — put “urgent” in the subject line and I’ll jump on it.