If you have a CD of the exam pieces you are learning, do you listen to it before you start learning the pieces in order to see how they go, or do you learn the pieces without listening to the CD?

I do take time to listen to all the exam pieces before I decide which ones to go for initially (usually the first choice ones would be carried forward to the final exam but on at least one occasion for me this has not been the case). I find that listening to the CD every now and then after that gives me a good idea of how the pieces should be played in terms of style.

I've only bought the exam CDs with the exam book from grade 7 onwards and they've been a great help.

Car Expert

Recorderists don't get CDs of exam pieces. But a search on Spotify or iTunes can often find a recording to listen to (often on flute instead!) I tend to hunt out recordings after the lesson in which I start on a piece. It's not to tell me how it goes, more like CE says to get the style and listen to how it 'should' sound in the hands of someone who really knows what they are doing.
Assuming they do of course I found two recordings of one of the pieces I am currently playing, and on one of them you can find some mistakes (e.g. they have played something later in the piece as an exact repeat of how it first appears; but if you look at the music, that is not what it says)
Actually, in the case of that same piece, though, it is useful to listen to because the piece in question is FULL of dynamics, many of which are challenging-to-impossible on the recorder (a pp high D anyone?) So it is good to hear how the professionals either don't manage / ignore the prescribed dynamics, or try to sneak round it with alternative fingerings, etc.

I let DS listen to his first for three reasons:

1) So NitWit mother knows if he is playing it correctly.

2) So NW Junior can get an idea of the piece as he often finds a new piece daunting.

3) To give him the opportunity to pick pieces he likes as invariably he will practice them more and do well. If I had my way I would convince him to pick the shortest pieces.

Unfortunately the bassoon CD does not have all the pieces on it though and the only graded piece I've ever seen on y-ou-tube was Teddy Bears Picnic!

The only problem is that how nice they sound, or how much one likes them, may not correlate with how easy they are to master, or how comfortable one eventually feels performing them! Oddly, it seems to me that the pieces set for a grade vary in difficulty, rather than all seeming the same standard. Or maybe its just that differences in our anatomy, posture (or whatever it is) makes different pieces seem easier for different people. Either way, there are two pieces on the CD for my next grade that I'd love to play, but I'm not sure I could manage them as well as the ones I've been working on so far.

I'm not suggesting of course that we should always choose the easiest pieces, but it has to be a factor!

I think part of learning to play music is learning to play from the dots. For that reason I always have a go at playing a piece first before I listen to it. I may then decide to get hold of a recording of a piece I'm particularly interested in for "hints and tips". I have never bought an exam CD.

We generally buy the CD of the exam pieces. They don't usually get played until after a choice has been made, they are useful for giving a flavour of the piece. Looking at the dots first helps with sight reading, listening might give some indication of style or interpretation though it wouldn't be faithfully copied.

The accompaniments are used much more than the CD with the instrument on.

This is more or less how we use them too, though we do usually buy them before the final choice of exam pieces has been made. I bought the grade 7 CD straight after daughter took grade 6, not with a view to pushing her straight on to the next exam but because I realised it included a piano-only version of a piece that she had already discovered (having heard a fellow learner play it) and started to play off her own bat.

We've done that too Though it's normally been because daughter has a book with other pieces in (Sax and Oboe still come seperately).

I use the AB CDs primarily for the piano accompaniments, but do listen to the recordings once I know which pieces I am going to play. Generally I'll have attempted the pieces prior to hearing them, though the exam pieces quite often are well known bits of music anyway, so it's not like you're hearing them for the first time - particularly the later grades/diplomas (For Cello, at least, I'm not familiar with the other instrument syllabuses)

I didn't discover such a thing existed till I was choosing my Grade 8 programme. I bought it for the piano accompaniment CD, but although it didn't contain all the pieces on the list I also used it to try and shrink down the list of pieces that I loved (ok, that was quite hard!).

The pieces on the disc are really beautifully played. I loved listening to them and I didn't see it in any way as "cheating". I had to make a conscious effort not to listen to them too much though, because I wanted my interpretation of my pieces to be my interpretation, not Philip Dukes' interpretation (beautiful as they are).

I would like to learn a piece from scratch, free from pre-conceptions of how it should sound that come from having heard it performed.

Unfortunately there is very little in my 7 or 8 9 or 10 shelf-feet of piano scores that I have not heard before on a CD or at some concert.

You'll have to commission somebody to write something for you, Mad Tom!

Hmm, I think the exam recordings need treating with caution. They tend to be on the quick side. I've also had accompanists that hate them to bits. After all, its a little awkward having people say: "Hmm, I've got used to hearing that cue-ing chord played really loud and crashingly on the recording, and am missing it when you plink it out. Can you give it some welly please?"

(Please note that I never EVER said anything to my accompanist, a significantly better musician than myself, quite like that! )

All that said, if you're going to play something in your G8 thats more of a duet than a piece plus accompaniment, then I think you really do need to be more familiar with the second part than you'd get from just a couple of run throughs before the exam. And lets be honest, that's all some candidates will otherwise get.

I've not found that always to be so on the piano ones. Sometimes I've listened only to decide that it isn't how i would play a piece.


I get in trouble for saying that!
I've been told that I have to trust my own opinion and not think that I can't tell my accompanist what I want.

Yes, I agree. The other issue is that more often than not they are recorded on top notch instruments. That is particularly obvious on recordings for strings. When a pupil compares themselves to someone playing on an instrument that cost a fortune, they could well feel thoroughly miserable that they can't get anywhere near the tone they can hear on the CD, even though their own tone may well be excellent taking into account the instrument they have.

Daughter was furious over one of the G8 Sax pieces where she swears the person playing didn't play PP but the recording was turned down in someway

The Oboe Cd isn't particularly brilliant which has been talked about before.

Tamsin I agree with you about the CD as support but definately not in place of practice with an accompanist.

Although the accompaniments can be on the quick side, at least it gives an idea of exactly how the two parts blend together to produce the whole. Some of the clarinet repertoire has quite tricky accompaniment, e.g. Arnold Sonatina, Schumann Fantasiestucke, Finzi Fughetta, so it's very useful to listen and familiarise yourself with it before meeting a real live accompanist.

I'm sure the string ones use vibrato at the lower grades too, which is a bit demoralising.

I did buy the grade 5 trumpet one for my son so he could choose 2 or 3 from each list to learn before he made the final decision about what to play. He is rather fussy, and I draw the line at buying every book on the list for him to play only to decide he doesn't like them (no AB book of pieces for trumpet) He has listened to a couple he is learning once or twice, at points where he wasn't sure about the articulation, just to get an idea of what it might sound like, but he likes his own interpretation. We don't use the accomp as I can just about bash through those so he can get an idea of how the two parts fit together at the speed he plays at. I can imagine it would be useful to have it nobody else can play them - it must be tough to only have one play-through before the exam.

I've become quite a big fan of the exam CDs. I've bought the oboe ones even though it's quite unlikely that I'll ever do an ABRSM exam.

Going back to morton's original question, I think both approaches (listening then playing, diving into playing without listening) each have different things going to them. I have generally had a quick listen and paid more attention when (a) I particularly like the interpretation and (b) my own capacity and creativity is distinctly lacking and I think I could benefit from a bit of imitation. With some of the CDs I have - I boldly admit - used the piano accompaniment tracks more than the oboe performance tracks. Sometimes instead of a metronome (more fun and useful for intonation too).

Hmm, my concern with the accompaniment tracks is that sometimes they really do encourage you to crank up the speed long before the fingers can really keep up. Risky thing to try, in my opinion!

As for listening to the pieces before learning them, I never did that. In the case of some of the later grade Baroque pieces, I frankly think the interpretations given on the CD are a bit lacking. That said, I guess they don't want to encourage student after student to play the ornamentation and dynamics they heard on the CD, rather than coming up with their own. After all, particularly in the case of Baroque music (and perhaps jazz pieces too, though I'm less familiar with the genre) the interpretation is half of the performance, and the sheet music just a framework to start with. (Or that's how I see it! )

The CDs didn't exist when I did the lower grades. I would hope though, that students listening to them would feel inspired by the higher standard (they are recorded by professions, after all!) rather than demoralised that they can't reach those loftly heights! I guess it might be hard for young children to relate, but still...

Thought: Would a CD of more authentic recordings be more or less useful? Namely, one containing recordings by G1, G2 etc level musicians, rather than pros?

I would think, and hope, that candidates using the CDs would recognise that they are recorded by professionals, and that those professionals' level of playing is a world away from any of the grade exams. I found it something to aspire to, not be demoralised by. Perhaps it depends whether you are a glass half-full or half-empty person.

The other thing I found it useful for is where I hit a really tricky passage when learning my pieces. I liked that I could go to the recordings and find out that he uses a harmonic here or goes right up the D string there. By Grade 8 some of the pieces are pretty obscure, and even if you do manage to find a piece on Youtube you can't always see or hear this kind of detail. Also, the quality of the playing available on Youtube is by its very nature variable. In the case of one or two pieces, the AB disc was literally the only recording I could find.

I am easily demoralised by lots of things but I like hearing something I can aspire to. I am now going back to some of the earlier grades to see if I can play them a bit more like the recording now I have advanced a bit.

The accompaniments can be a bit fast, for which it could be useful to have a CD player or software that allows the speed to be reduced without altering the pitch. I can't be bothered so once I have isolated the passages with which I have problems I spend some time working on those to get the speed up before going back to the accompaniment.

Speedshifter does that, see thread and link to the (free) download here:
http://www.abrsm.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=44599
I've tried it and it's quite effective for the piano pieces and easy to operate. It works with any CD or MP3 so it doesn't matter if the recording is from the exam CD/download or not.

I think you are right about the irnamentation of Baroque pieces. The improvised solos on the Jazz Cd's are similarly bland. These are elements of the exam where the student is being tested on their musical knowledge.