i was practising with the grade 5 aural tests yesterday and now feel that i will fail miserably! with test A where you have a sing back a 4 bar phrase i nearly cried! my teacher played the first 2 bars and i could just about remember that so how will i cope with 4 bars? sight singing is a bit easier but i sometimes cant hear the right intervals in my head ill sing a semitone above or below or something like that. any suggestions on how to improve (as well as lots of practice?)
thanks very much!
jess

I always find the tests for remembering melodies to be quite inconsistent: some are in 2/4 and really fast; others are in 4/4 and are really slow. Many of the ones in 4/4 are twice as long and have twice as many notes (the ones in 2/4 don't seem to have more faster notes to compensate!). Fortunatley it seems generally to be the case that the actual) aural tests in the exams are easier than the ones in the books (that's just from what people have said here, not any confirmed statement...) so the ones in the exam may only seem two bars long! The thing that I find makes them easier is to play them faster (or to get whoever is playing them to do so faster) then you can slow it down if necessary, it just feels like less to remember if the piece is faster and there's less time to forget the beginning!

As for sightsinging I asked a question about sightsinging in another thread and the concensus seems to be that one has to be born able to do it and no-one knows how to teach it! However after having attempted some of the grade 6 ones last night it doesn't seem so bad: the intervals seem more awkward (by that I mean not forming so much of a logical pattern) in the grade 5 ones, but they're in free time so you can just literally sing a chromatic scale (or just the major/minor scale) in your head if you get stuck as you've got plenty of time. The higher grades ones seem quite natural to sing intuitivley though, so don't worry if you have to use this method in the lower grades, perhaps it's because they're real 'tunes' not just arbitrary notes!

Finally, good luck and don't let it worry you too much, answer confidently (even if you're not confident in your answer) as you do get marks for being confident in your answers; and remember you'll still get enough marks for doing most of it right so it sounds like you can do well enough already.

QUOTE (nutter @ Jun 17 2004, 03:16 PM)

i was practising with the grade 5 aural tests yesterday and now feel that i will fail miserably! with test A where you have a sing back a 4 bar phrase i nearly cried! my teacher played the first 2 bars and i could just about remember that so how will i cope with 4 bars?

I was practicing the grade 5 aural tests a while ago too, and I can't ever remember the notes in the singing part. I'm just going to keep practicing and hope it will get easier once I get used to it.

QUOTE (AnotherPianist @ Jun 17 2004, 03:49 PM)

As for sightsinging I asked a question about sightsinging in another thread and the concensus seems to be that one has to be born able to do it and no-one knows how to teach it!

[/QUOTE]

Another Pianist - this is NOT so!!!

I spent YEARS wondering how some people could just sight-sing and, yes, seemed to have been born able to do it - AND I COULDN'T!

Those people who CAN 'just do it' often can't understand why many of us struggle with it.

I did learn the piano - for 11 years - but *SLOW LEARNER* never connected the notes I was playing (mechanically, obviously) with the intervals I heard. So in my case, osmosis was clearly not going to work....

I was led to believe that this was just something I couldn't do - bad luck!

But what if I had had difficulty reading WORDS? Would a teacher have indicated that this was just my bad luck? NO! They would have worked hard to find a strategy that worked for me. Sadly no-one did this for me with sight-singing.

I can only speak from experience - and it has been SOLFA that has worked for me, and in a spectacular fashion.

I cannot imagine any other way that works so well.

Unfortunately, many teachers are not versed in solfa themselves, and so do not know how best to teach it (especially those who have no trouble sight-singing themselves). So try to find a teacher who CAN teach you this way. If you can find a Kodaly class then that would be ideal.

If I can learn to sight-sing, ANYONE can!

Good luck....

I absolutely HATE the singing back the phrase part, and I'm doing grade 8 so it's the bass line I need to listen to. Does anyone have any idea how to not get distracted by the melody line, not to mention remember it after it is heard??? HELP!!!

Cyrilla, I'm so glad you replied. I was about to post something very similar.

YES sightsinging can be learned. I teach it all the time!

I find the problem when it comes to singing in these higher grades that the foundation work has been completely ignored by the teacher in the first place. I guess most piano teachers think, well it's PIANO, not singing, but it's MUSIC and the most natural instrument we have is our voice. From lesson one, singing should be encouraged. I even get my 66 year old man to hum the melody as he's playing the piano.

Trying to 'cram' aural skills for an exam just doesn't work. There are no 'easy/quick' fixes, you must start with laying a good foundation before you can be expected to build more complicated skills.

Try solfa. As well as singing the pitch, making the hand signal, add watching the notes you're singing and you're using all three methods of learning. Sight singing begins with singing in steps i.e. C to D to E. Don't try intervals until you can sing a whole line of music in steps. When you have confidence, then practise the third. Of course you have to first hear the model, (someone singing it, or playing it - preferably singing) then imitate it. And like any other skill, it has to be practised.

Once those pitches and hand signals are established it's virtually impossible to sing the wrong note with the wrong hand signal. Singing in intervals then becomes a cinch! Eg, a fourth is not la - la - you sing Doh Fah - with the words, the hand signal youre brain becomes 'tuned' in. But don't try it once and say, well THAT didn't work. It needs to be practised every day - just like scales and sight reading (piano) to become good at these skills.

DComposer, one thing to start practising now (that should have been introduced to you at your first lesson), is listening to the bass line in a piece of music you already know. So grab one of your easier pieces, play it, and then try and hum the bass line as you play.

Another way to practise isolating lines, is to listen to Baroque orchestra music. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos are ideal (Listen to No.4 - it's my favourite). Pick an instrument, say the violin, and try and follow the violin's part through the whole concerto. Of course, the best way to teach yourself to isolate lines, is to have the score in front of you and follow that particular line with your eyes and the voice in your head humming. There are whole scores you can download. Do a web search. The next step is to replace the score with eyes closed, and nothing but you and the music. Sometimes it even helps to do this at night time with the lights off. Get yourself a CD player beside your bed, and every night try to isolate lines in orchestra music, (cello line, the clarinet etc).
Do the same with recorded piano music.
1. Choose a piece you're very familiar with.
2.Have the score in front of you.
3. Play the recording.
4. Follow with your eyes and your inner voice the bass clef.

Repeat with music you're not familiar with.
Try it without the score.

To get ready for your exam, practise this listening skill every night.

QUOTE

Another Pianist - this is NOT so!!!

Yes, sorry about that, I was just feeling a little disconcerted yesterday that most of the replies were 'just do it' even though presumably people did have to teach it some how!

QUOTE

Trying to 'cram' aural skills for an exam just doesn't work

I'm not trying to do this, I won't have an exam for while yet: it's just that I do need to learn it at some point; believe me, I'm a great disaprover of cramming like this!

I can sing any interval from a given note without a problem (which probably immediately makes you say, why can't you sight sing then!) so I think that I have the first stage. I think what probably causes the problem is when worrying about the key, I spend so much time worrying about remembering the tonic that I can't concentrate on what I'm trying to do. I don't usually do it by just singing a chain of intervals from each note, that does seem to make me loose the sense of the key in my mind; which means having to work out from the music precisely and very quickly what each interval is.

The only advice (before now) that I'd ever been given about how to do it is by singing a scale in my head and missing out notes; which does make the grade 4 and 5 ones quite simple (they're in free time so one can just leave a gap) all one has to do is look at which notes to allow to sound out and which not to; okay for free time but it does, however, leave blatant gaps in rhythm where the missing notes are and isn't really scalable to when one has to actually sing a rhythm too (which will be the eventual aim). The problem with having used this method now is that it works, so it's hard to do it any other way resisting cheating if one gets stuck!

I seem to be able to do the reverse naturally, if I hear a piece of music I can hear in my head which note of the scale it is and imagine the pattern on paper or play along (I'm only talking about single melody lines not a whole orchestral transcription!) so maybe I somehow need to extract how I do that and reverse it! Incidentally if I'm doing this in my head I 'pretend' it's in C Major and name the notes as they would be in C Major in my head, is this effectively doing sol-fa but with different names?

A thought about how the 'just doing it naturally' may arise. I find certain things e.g. arpeggio patterns, scale patterns, leading note rising to tonic at the end etc. are really intuitive, they're instantly heard in my head as soon as I look at them; similar to reading where we don't use the phonetic sounds of each letter to work out what words say, we just recognise the word, it's very rare that one comes across a word that one doesn't recognise from having read before, and if one does one has to go back to the original phonetic method of working out what it says. Perhaps those that can sight sing well just have a wider 'musical vocabulary' so to speak so that they recognise more patterns instantly; perhaps sight-singing something of a more atonal nature would be more difficult (and may even allow them to unlock how they do it if they find it difficult).

QUOTE

Unfortunately, many teachers are not versed in solfa themselves, and so do not know how best to teach it (especially those who have no trouble sight-singing themselves). So try to find a teacher who CAN teach you this way. If you can find a Kodaly class then that would be ideal.

Is sol-fa something that one can only do with a teacher? Or is just attaching the appropriate name to each degree of the scale and then having a go? When you talk about it it seems like a vast area that covers nearly everything!

I don't think that I'm too bad at it, I just don't always feel confident that I am going to do it correctly, I feel like I need to have a 'safe' method to do it; I don't like to trust my intuition unless it's 100% correct 100% of the time! Or maybe I'm just worrying about it too much generally and that 'just do it' is very good advice after all .

Thanks to both of you for your help.

yay its not only me who cant do it!! im just about coping with the sight singing but i can never remember the melody they play!

QUOTE (AnotherPianist @ Jun 18 2004, 01:06 PM)

Is sol-fa something that one can only do with a teacher? Or is just attaching the appropriate name to each degree of the scale and then having a go?

I'm not a Kodaly teacher, but it just so happens that some of my ideas in teaching are apparently similar. I teach these hand signals along with the words because it adds kinesthetic learning to the mix. As you ascend he scale, lift the level of the sign. Low doh should start at chest height, high doh at about chin height.

Have a look at the hand signals here.

Curwin hand signals

i have never done any aural tests; sight singing and listening...

and im taking the grade 5 exam next year

but i only can start lessons after summer because i wont be home...
and its 3 weeks till my holiday...

i hope i can cope...

i think i will fail terribly....


sometimes when i just try to play some notes from a random song i hear on telly, i always get 1 or 2 notes above or below the correct one

dont worry im hopeless at aurals to but my teacher makes me do loads of them!! im sure your teacher will help you!

QUOTE (missfabflute @ Jun 20 2004, 05:57 PM)

but i only can start lessons after summer because i wont be home...

The wonderful thing about aural work is you take your ears with you wherever you go!!!

Have specific goals in mind and practise while you're on holidays.

QUOTE (AnotherPianist @ Jun 17 2004, 03:49 PM)

I always find the tests for remembering melodies to be quite inconsistent: some are in 2/4 and really fast; others are in 4/4 and are really slow.

I agree! And in and exam I will almost certainly get a slow 4/4 on with no tune!

But don't worry about not being able to remember them, I can't I have a terrible musical memory but by doing well on the other bits you can still pass this section. When doing test A, I just try to get the rhythm OK, start on the right note and have the shape roughly correct (you know up for a bit then down for a bit etc.). I never really let what the notes actually are bother me because I know that I won't be able to remember!