Sorry I don't want to be nosy or anything but, how long does one take to reach grade 8, if they practise like crazy and has 'the' determination and love for their instrument?

*starry-eyed*

It depends on the individual!

Yes, definitely depends on the individual. It depends on a lot of factors too: schoolwork/effectiveness of practice/ teacher/ability etc. There is no set time, and it is better to get to Grade 8 a really good player, in a longer time, then quickly get up to Grade 8, and to not be as good

I hope you achieve your dreams

Also depends on the starting point....

It also depends if you have played an instrument before do you know the notes of the scales, can read music etc.

Good luck!!

And it depends on the instrument.

The fastest I've seen on the flute is 2 years 8 months from first picking up the flute to Grade 8 distinction. This was a sixth-former who borrowed a flute from me in the November of her Lower 6th year and took Grade 8 in the summer of her gap year. She was about to take Grade 8 piano when she started flute, and did a lot of singing.

if your mad and insane and have played other instruments (like me lol) then quite quickly. im attempting grade 8 in a year

Depends... I took 5 years for grade 8 distinction (piano)

QUOTE (clarinetlover @ Apr 24 2005, 09:15 PM)

if your mad and insane and have played other instruments (like me lol) then quite quickly. im attempting grade 8 in a year

Gulp! Well, we all knew you were mad and insane, Nat, but... Good luck anyway!!

There's no time limit, really. Anything from a year to a lifetime, I'd say. If you already play several instruments, I would imagine it's probably quicker if not necessarily easier. Plus it depends on which instrument you're learning, how dedicated you are, how good a teacher you've got and how talented you are. In other words, how long's a piece of string?!

As long as you have a good musical ear, it's all down to the quality of the teaching and the amount of hours you put in. Whether you put in those hours over a matter of years or a matter of months, it really doesn't make much difference. They say it takes 10,000 hours so do the maths!

Or I'll do it...

365 days in a year, therefore with 1 hour a day it'll take you 30 years. With three hours a day it'll take you 10 years. Six hours a day it'll take five years. Twelve hours a day it'll take you two and a half.

I met a totally virtuosic violinist recently (Adam Summerhayes), and asked him how much he'd practised. he told me he went through a period of going crazy with practice - 12 hours a day for a couple of years. Aha! That's where he got his 10,000 hours in...

He was also taught by Ifra Niemann, a superb teacher.

OK, lets halve this for a Grade 8 level, so -

1 hour a day - 15 years
2 hours a day - 7/8 years
3 hours a day - 5 years
4 hours a day - 4 years
5 hours a day - 3 years

You get the picture.

This article is interesting:

No one would dispute that practice is an important component of achieving exceptional levels of performance in music, chess, sports and so on. After all, even the chess prodigy Bobby Fisher spent many years immersed in chess strategy and tactics before becoming world champion. But it is commonly assumed that both talent and practice are needed to achieve renown, where talent refers to some innate predisposition to make rapid advances in a particular field.

Yet evidence for the contribution of talent over and above practice has proved extremely elusive. In another recent study, Ericsson and his colleagues studied young pianists and violinists in their early 20s at the Music Academy of West Berlin, Germany. They asked the music professors to nominate the best young musicians, those who they thought had the potential for careers as international soloists, as well as others whose potential they regarded as not quite so great, and a third group who were most likely to become music teachers. Hence, in terms of achievement, the first group comprises the most exceptional musicians, the second group the next most outstanding, and the last group the least exceptional.

If "talent" is the primary factor, we might assume that these three groups differ in their innate giftedness for music and that this explains their different levels of achievement. If a person is innately gifted, then he or she can very rapidly attain an outstanding level of performance once the basic skills and knowledge required have been mastered. Yet Ericsson and his colleagues obtained a surprising finding: the best musicians had simply practiced more across their lives than the next best ones, who in turn had practiced more than the ones likely to become music teachers. Each of the musicians was asked to estimate approximately how many hours a week they had practiced each year since the outset of their musical training, and these estimates yielded cumulative totals of about 10,000 hours for the best musicians, followed by 8,000 for the next best ones and 5,000 for the least accomplished. The musicians also kept diaries for a week, recording their exact amounts of practice, and these yielded comparable differences, suggesting that the retrospective estimates were roughly accurate.

The full article is at http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/david.shanks/..._expertise.html

Apparently it take 600 or so hours to reach grade 4 level.

Interesting, huh?

Violinia

In as much as the hours thing is correct (it's a fascinating study), in my own practice life some of those hours were not in practice on my own, but in sight-reading when playing chamber music etc... All the other activities which can add in to a keen musician's life.

it depends really....i'm an example here.... i don't like playing the piano very much..... not even when i did my grade 8 about 3 years ago....( i was forced to do my grade 8...... my teacher and my mother pushed me quite a bit)....i wasn't interested on the subject..... however....my views changed and as i began my study in england....i changed my view....i began to love the subject and started new instruments.... and achieve quite good grades at higher level.....

It really is difficult to say! If you love your instrument, have a competent teacher, practice and generally show enthusiasm, you might get there very quickly.

I just took grade 6 flute after playing for three and 1/2 years but I'll probably attempt grade 8 this autumn or next spring. Depends on how busy I am with other things (like school work), how much practice time I have availabe, what I decide to do at uni etc. so you see how many different things progress depends on!

The number of hours theory is interesting; I also think that there is something important about sleep too though. I can practice a section of a piece for quite a while repeatedly in a given day until I can play it; or I can practise it less and not quite until I can play it as well as I would like to and the next day I can play it as well as I could have done if I'd carried on practising it to be better. This is because our brains use sleep time to sort out the learning we have done during the day and learn the things properly. I think therefore that there is only a certain amount one can cram into the day before the hours of practice to progress ratio becomes lower (i.e. four hours of practice a day is probably not quite twice as good as two hours of practice as the brain doesn't have twice the sleeping time to assimilate twice the knowledge, furthermore if it's just double of the same thing in the same passage it's something that might have been learnt during sleep anyway with only half of the practice!).

I would definitely agree that the more practice one does the better one will become but perhaps not twice the practice twice the progress beyond a certain threshold (I don't know what this is: it could be 2 hours a day, it could be 8 hours a day) because the brain can only take in so much at once.

I'm not sure that I'm entirely convinced by the argument that talent doesn't exist though: it could just be that those who are more talented make more progress and so enjoy music more because they can see results hence they practice more; or looking at it another way it could be that talent simply is a natural predisposition to want to do more practise, i.e. a natural love of music.

I depends so much on other things. I got to grade 8 in about 12 years, and I didn't do grades 2 and 6.
David

QUOTE

Anything from a year to a lifetime,

Mmmmm....

Well, if I count from when I had my first ever piano lesson to when I might (was that a squadron of pigs overhead?) be taking my grade 8.... 35 years.........

QUOTE

I would definitely agree that the more practice one does the better one will become but perhaps not twice the practice twice the progress beyond a certain threshold (I don't know what this is: it could be 2 hours a day, it could be 8 hours a day) because the brain can only take in so much at once.

The experts seem to disagree on this one. Suzuki pointed out that one of his pupils who practised 3 hours a day reached the Bach double in a year.

Andy Sheppard the great sax player went through a period of practising 12 hours a day.

Adam Summerhayes ditto. Mozart did hours daily at the behest of his dad.

You can also do silent practice where you go over the music in your head, visualising the fingering - this can be as effective as actual practice! This is because your fingers are perfectly capable of doing the actions, but they need to remember the order of them.

Mind you if you did too much of this you'd become dead to the world - always mentally in some musical world or other, and your friends would soon write you off as a nutter.

Violinia

Well, I thought there'd be no point in starting a new topic, but here's another similar question:
How long did it take you to become an FRSM?

Or, another question, how many of you are FRSMs? And in what? And what did you have to do?

Wobby