Grade 5 - Grade 8

[xxcookziexx]

How could I make my grade 5 go up to grade 8 in a year and a half? How long would I need to practise each day and what sort of things would I need to practise? Etc etc and any other advice?

[turayza]

Oh wow. You don't make your music ability go up D: You just develop it...it really depends on how you're playing now. What do you do when you practice? How do you learn pieces?

[landru]

I'll just talk about my own experience - I've gone from grade 5 pieces to grade 7 pieces (no grade 8 yet...) in a few years as an adult learner with a teacher (with 20 years of incredibly useless self-teaching before that).

Looking at what differentiates my grade 5 pieces with the more difficult ones, I'll try point out the differences I had in learning them and what I needed to do master them.

With grade 5 pieces, your hands/fingers are not usually asked to do elaborate choreographies. Grade 5 can usually be done with a "straight" hand position without a lot of attention paid to how the forearm/wrist/upperarm have to move to support the music. Beginning in grade 7 pieces, I've had to pay a lot of attention to having supple, flowing wrists and arms - I simply cannot barrel through the pieces with the relatively "stiff" hand that I used for easier pieces.

With grade 5 pieces, the harmony and musical structures are very straightforward to identify and therefore to implement. With harder pieces you need to identify and bring out voices whether they are in the left or right hand (or even crossing between them). This takes some study and listening that is not as required with easier pieces.

With grade 5 pieces, practicing can sometimes just be as easy as starting the piece hands together, working out problems as they come up at slow speed as you go through the whole piece. I've found that with the harder pieces, there are places in the piece that are significantly more difficult than the other parts of the piece and that these places absolutely need to be practiced more by themselves. By just playing the piece from beginning to end would never really smooth over those places because it would just take forever!

I feel like I've just touched the peak of the iceberg though! So in summary, you need to develop more fluent finger/hand/arm motions (and know when to do a certain motion), you need to study the music and understand the music to a deeper degree, and you need to develop a focussed practice routine to solve particular problems in a piece.

How to do all these things? That's what this forum and teachers are for. For the fluid motions - progressive exercises (Czerny) or just repertoire. For the musical understanding? Listen to recordings of the pieces as you follow along with the score - that really helped me understand exactly was going on in the score. For the practice problems - read Chang's book on practicing (search the forum for a copy).

Good luck - I believe your goal is possible if you go about it right!

[richard black]

How could I make my grade 5 go up to grade 8 in a year and a half?

You won't. You might get through a Grade 8 exam in a year and a half, though, if you practice nothing else. Bit of a waste of time, in general terms....

[turayza]

Things you can do when practicing to teach your mind how to track the more complex...stuff...includes:
1. Lots and lots of hands separately. And where there are multiple voices, practicing each voice on its own.
2. Slow practice. Even after a piece is technically learned, playing it veryveryvery slowly gives you the opportunity to listen to the little parts and control the interactions of the voices better.
3. Don't try to learn a whole piece in one go. Lots of harder pieces tend to be longer, so trying to read the piece over and over again will not let you learn it. Take a couple phrases at a time, and make those bits wonderful--then the next day, do the next set of phrases.

I'm sure you'll get to 8 soon enough. (: Don't push yourself into insanity by trying pieces you aren't comfortable with playing.

[xpjamiexd]

I don't think plaing is something to rush, when i began playing two years ago I introduced myself to classical music but generally I was only exposed myself to romantic music e.g. Chopin, Rachmaninoff etc. so I started playing at a higher level (one of the first pieces I learned was the Prelude Op. 28 No. 15 by Chopin) but this took me much longer than it would've taken someone who worked their way gradually up. So now whilst practicing a Chopin Etude I'm also playing the simplest Bach to develop my basic technique because I missed out so many fundemental things. But grade 8 as has been said is something that requires alot of musicality aswell as technical assests. I think if you reall want to do it ou will be able but don't rush it. (:

[braintist]

I managed to do it >.>
Build up on your repertoire and your technique will improve, try playing harder pieces, I would recommend playing the first 3 etudes in opus 10 of Chopin to build up technique. Though I only played 1 XD.

[rmbarbosa]

Please, read the "Fundamentals of piano practice" - Chuan C. Chang, that you may download free. "The most important message of this book is that piano skills can be learned in a short time if the correct learning procedures are applied"- says Chang. I`ve experimented and I loved.