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ABRSM Scale Practice Charts for Piano Grades 1 to 4

ABRSM Piano Scale practice charts are available for Grades 1 to 4. Please email your teacher for your copy. Aim to practice as many scales per day as you can. We find a ‘pot luck’ system really good so that you’re not always practising in the order of the book. Write out all the names of your scales, arpeggios, chromatic and contrary-motion (including permutations of Hands Together and Hands Separately) on a piece of A4 paper. Cut this up and put into a pot or cup and keep it near the piano. Pull the pieces of paper out one at a time so that you are practising in a random order. You can also ask your friends or family to test you in any order on your scales. Aim to play the scale correctly the first time without hesitating, fumbling, stumbling or using wrong fingers. Play as slowly as you need to until you can play reliably, smoothly and steadily. Once you are feeling confident with the scales, think about shaping the sound to start around ‘mf’ (moderately loud) and reach a ‘f’ (loud) dynamic level at the top. Return to ‘mf’ when descending.

Here is a sample scale practice chart. The versions we supply for our students do not have the watermarks. Copies of these charts are available for a donation of 1 lesson’s fee to our Justgiving charity page. We can customise these with your own teaching practice details. We can also produce practice charts for other instruments.Grade 3 ABRSM Piano Scale Practice chart

 

 

 

Daily practice guide to prepare for your ABRSM exam

In the final few days before your exam, here is some information for parents and students to make sure you are properly prepared for the exam. This is partly written as a guide for parents but it has information of relevance to adult students too.

1. Preparing for performance
You should perform all three pieces in a row to your family and friends. Make an occasion of it so that you feel under pressure as this will mimic the exam scenario. You can also record the performance of your three pieces and try to get them as good as you can in one take as you only get one chance to play them in the exam. Whatever happens – just keep going! Try not to restart – keep moving forward.

Also ask your school if you can play in assembly or in your music class. This is excellent preparation. We also provide termly performance opportunities including Scale Competitions, Masterclasses and the Dulwich Piano Festival. See our Events page to sign up for upcoming performance opportunities.

2. Listen to your pieces on Youtube
All your pieces are available to listen to on Youtube – just type in the name and composer and you will see lots of videos for your songs. Do you know where the louds and softs are, how fast or slow to play, whether you need to speed up or slow down anywhere? Do you know the character of your piece? Is it lively, melancholy? Listening to various recordings online can help assist learning of a piece. Your teacher will also play your piece to you regularly. Do your homework and make sure you have read the footnotes, looked up the composer (are they dead or alive, where are they from, what else did they write) and know the meaning behind the title of the piece.

Yohondo has a great YouTube channel with step-by-step help on some of the graded pieces: https://www.youtube.com/user/YohondoYT

3. Aural practice
This must be part of your daily practice for exams as this will help greatly with the aural section. There are several online resources or apps you can use to practice this every day.
Hofnote
Free Aural Tests
ABRSM App for iPhone/iPod/iPad

4. Sight-Reading
Sight-Reading is worth 14% of the marks – as much as the entire scale book! Keep working through the Specimen Sight Reading tests for your grade. If you have an iPad, then the excellent ABRSM sight-reading app is available for your grade.
ABRSM SightRead4Piano by Wessar

5. Scales
Ask your parents or friends to test you on the scales in a random order. Or you can make a ‘scale pot’ where you write out the name of every scale, broken chord, arpeggio etc and put these into a pot. Take one out of the pot and practice it until the pot is empty! As always, this must be done every day. We give all our students practice charts for their scales. These should be filled in daily – aim for ticks in all the boxes! Print a fresh chart each week. Students that work hard at their scales usually see a great improvement within just a few days. Practice your scales in random order so that you’re not always starting at the beginning of the book.

 

Grade 3 ABRSM Piano Scale Practice chart
Grade 3 ABRSM Piano Scale Practice chart

6. Daily Practice
In the run-up to the exam, daily practice is vitally important. To cover all the requirements for Grade 1, at least 30 minutes is needed and the time for practice increases by about 15 minutes daily for each grade. However, quality practice is of importance, so there is no point spending half an hour just practising your pieces but neglecting the other requirements. Make sure you practice your weaker areas first.

7. Parental supervision
It is important that parents supervise practice to ensure all the requirements above are covered thoroughly. Check the scale practice charts to see whether there are enough ticks in all boxes. Print these sheets out to fill in every day and bring to the lesson to show your teacher.

8. Mock Exams.
I have been doing mock exams each lesson. Please have a read through the mock exam to see what level your child is currently playing at and what grade they can expect on the day. The mock exam form will also highlight any weak areas that need particular attention. Please print some Mock ABRSM Exam Forms and bring to your next lesson.

9. Criteria used by the examiner in awarding a pass, merit or distinction.
Details of the exam marking scheme and what the examiner is looking for can be found here.

Safiya, Grade 3 ABRSM Piano, Distinction
Safiya, age 7 – Grade 3 ABRSM Piano, Distinction. Click here to view more exam results.

A guide to setting up page turning device AirTurn BT-105 on the iPad

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qETjp_MgDaA]

I love gadgets. My newest purchase is an AirTurn for the iPad. This is a foot-operated pedal that allows you to turn your own pages – something I could have done with last night when I played at the Richmond Festival. I drafted in a fellow performer (thank you, Diana!) to turn my pages and she did the job very well, having never seen the piece before, but I would have felt much less anxious if I was in control of it myself! It also means that I don’t have to drag loads of books over to my piano lessons on the other side of London, I just take my iPad now. As an early music enthusiast, I love playing Ye Olde Pieces from the 16th Century using my iPad and foot pedal!

Setting up AirTurn on the iPad:

1) Charge the AirTurn for 2 hours via the USB/mini-USB cable plugged straight into your computer.

2) After it is charged, then pair the device with your iPad. On the iPad, go to Settings > Bluetooth. Turn on Bluetooth if not already on and it should pair automatically. I did not need to enter a code but the usual 0000 will suffice if it requests a pairing code. One point to note is that the iPad keyboard input does not work when Bluetooth is turned on but I think this is because I am sat next to my computer which also has a wireless keyboard.

3) Download a PDF reader app. I use Music Reader which costs 69p. I tried a free app, CloudReader which does not seem to respond to the AirTurn for some reason but it has a much faster page turn response rate than Music Reader which is quite sluggish so you need to press the pedal a fraction in advance of needing the page turn! Annoying that you have to pay for a PDF reader – grrrr! I am sure there are other free ones out there that I haven’t found that work with Air Turn.

4) Load your sheet music onto the PDF reader. The easiest way is to email the PDF to yourself, then open the attachment from the mail message, then use the arrow at the top right to select “Open in Music Reader” and it loads it straight into your library.

You can use iTunes, the built-in web browser in Music Reader or USB cable to transfer your PDFs from computer to iPad.

That’s it – job done! The left pedal is page up and the right pedal is page down. The pedal is silent so it won’t interfere with your performance at all – unlike the piano at the Festival I played in last night with the incredibly squeaky right pedal! It also has a built-in gizmo that stops you from turning two pages at once.

Here’s a performance of a 3-page long harpsichord piece, Couperin’s Les Ondes using Air Turn for the iPad. Could there be any better demonstration of ‘Old’ meets ‘New’ than a harpsichord and the Air Turn?!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lavl9EAofg]

You can just about see my left foot on the AirTurn pedal in this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJEv2brgC4o]

The BT-105 with 2 ATFS-2 Pedals and Pedal Board is available from the following supplier based in Lancashire, UK:

Sight Read – £114.00 inc. VAT and P&P. Please note that SightRead will give any SE22 Piano School students an educational discount. Please contact me for details.

Here’s a video all about AirTurn. British pianist Sam Haywood demos the gadget at TEDxAsheville. Instructions for setting it up are below the video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oUN7MCQWQEY]


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