Well, my Music exam is in less than 2 weeks I've always been weakest at listening exams. I don't know why; the features seem to be so obvious when I look at the markscheme but I can't hear it - or else know how to describe it in the way they want. I wonder if examiners really do mark strictly, and only allow answers in the mark scheme...... Anyhoo, I have a few areas of concern.

Music technology & instrumental techniques - what do these words mean? What do they sound like?
- Panning
- Scratching
- Flange
- delay effect
- mixing

- difference between sliding & pitch bending
- strumming

Renaissance music... What do these sound like?
- Crumhorn
- Sackbut
- Shawm
- Cornett

Also, utterly stupid question, but what is a 'bass'?



Thank you in advance for your help! I can't seem to find any short descriptions of these easily. (And my teacher is useless). Any general advice on listening exams would be a great help. Or if you could just give me moral support

Okay, I may go off and do further research on some of these but here are the ones I know about definitely:

Scratching is what DJs do when they put their fingers on the records and move them backwards and forwards when they're playing so the piece stops, rewinds, starts, stops, rewinds, starts etc and it sounds a bit like a scratching noise (really hard to describe!)

The Sackbut is an ancestor of the modern trombone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackbutt

The Cornett is NOT a cornet - don't get the two confused! Here is some information on the cornett http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornett

The Shawm - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawm

The Crumhorn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumhorn

(I'm a big fan of wikipedia!)

Flanging - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanging

Strumming is what guitarists do when they aren't playing a tune, they're playing all the strings of the instrument in a chord (imagine singing round a campfire with a guitarist doing the accompaniment - they would be strumming).

The difference between sliding and pitch bending: sliding would be sliding from one pitch to another. Pitch bending is where you just taking the pitch of one note and bend it just out of tune (normally take it flat) and back again.


Bass could be lots of different things. Obviously, any instrument that is playing the lowest part of anything in harmony is playing the bass line.

Bass could be a bass singer or it could be referring to the double bass or bass guitar.

Good luck with the listening exam!

Anakkron, if you are doing OCR which I think you are, I don't actually think you need to know the Dj-ing stuff do you? Unless they have changed the syllabus from last year...

I had a sheet with all the renaissance instruments on..all I remember is that crumhorns make a nasty low farty noise...

I don't think I ever knew what a crumhorm sounded like, and you didn't need to much DJ type stuff like delay effect. The CGP book should tell you everything you need to know.

I've always thought that about crumhorns! (Love 'em!)

Thank you Daisy Duck, that was a lot of help!



Thanks, I won't forget what a crumhorn sounds like now....



Hmm, my teacher might just be making that up, then! I'm glad to know it. She keeps on mentioning it when we go through disco/bhangra/minimalism (where ICT is involved) and all it does is confusing us!

How confident were you two when you did the listening exam? The very best I can do is about 73/100, on a really good day, and I am never confident with them.

To be honest, I think I only ever did 1 listening paper which was marked. I think I got 73 or 83%, and because we have a not too good teacher, I was so panicky. The night before I rang up a friend from another school and she was taking me through the different periods.

Write down everything you hear, even if it is something simple. Even at AS, they want really simple things, which is what I can't do

PS - The Music section of GCSE Bitesize has some really good listening things

Same, I find listening really difficult and my results vary quite considerably. I got 21/28 on part of last year's paper yesterday (which was actually quite low. I have higher coursework scores and more musical experience than a lot of the people who got 25+ and my teacher was NOT pleased), 73% (an A* and top of the Year 11s) on the mock and 9/16 on some random test we did a couple of days before the mock. Any advice/help would be gratefully received as I really want an A* - I got full marks for composition, my performance was an A/A* and apparently my Integrated Assignment was good.

I don't know much about listening on other boards...

General things:
- Listen to Classic FM/Radio 3 as much as you can, try and identify the period it comes from
- If you do well in other areas, you can afford to drop marks on the Listening paper
- Write down everything you can hear, even if it is stupidly simple

When I did it (11 years ago though!) we just wrote and wrote and wrote. From what I remember, how you express stuff isn't as important as that you actually do express it - ie just because you don't write it exactly right doesn't mean you don't get the marks.

I wish I could help more but it was a long time ago....