Guitar Exam Tips - 01/06/2010

This month takes a look at what you need to do to pass your guitar exams with flying colours.

 Having had a lot of experience with students doing exams, heres some good tips that may serve you well.

My top 10 tips:

1. Learn your pieces inside out, because most exam marks are given to you performing your pieces well. Also, first and foremost you should want to be a good player anyway so everything above goes without saying.

2. Don't miss out on easy marks because you left out the dynamics, easily done and has meant the difference between a Merit and Distinction in the past.

3. If there are improvisation parts to your piece, practice with a backing track, understand what notes to target and where, it will give your solo more structure and meaning.

4. When sight reading use your 90 seconds well, clap through the piece and get as aquainted with it as you can. Look for the hand positioning of the piece straight away.

5. Ear training, make sure you practice trying to transcribe and sing melodies, in turn working them out on your guitar, its invaluable.

6. Technical exercises should be practiced all the time with a metronome, metronomes can be found online and open in your browser, so NO EXCUSE!

7. General questions at the end will test you on note names and values. I use a word association  technique to help teach my students, its simple quick and easy, why not have a lesson with me and your note knowledge will be all the richer for it :-)

8. Get a good night sleep the night before and try not to panic. Your always going to worry a little before the first one its only natural. On a pleasing note performing does get easier with time.

9. Get a good tutor to go through all the parts of the exam with you well in advance. You will be much more confident then and the tutor will point out all the pitfalls in your playing so you can correct them in good time.

10. Lastly remember the examiner wants you to do well! He does not want you to fail.