Refining Your Exam Pieces

Hi everyone,

In todays post I will be talking about refining your exam pieces before you take your music exam.

When it comes to refining pieces of music for your exams to get them up to a high standard of playing, you may just need a little more time to go through just a few areas that need some minor attention in your practice sessions.

Play the Piece/s Through 

To help you identify any areas that need a little more work, play all of your pieces through fully a few times. As this will help you to figure which areas needs some more attention within your pieces.

Tone

Also when refining your exam pieces, you may also want to work on your tone and tonal colours for these pieces; to see if thats what you would like your piece to sound like. You may also want to work on giving your pieces a fuller, and richer tone; which will enable you to create more depth.

Phrasing

You might find that you may need to smooth out a few areas of phrasing, to make your piece flow a lot better. Also, you may want to work on your air support to enable to phrase a longer phrase/ section as smoothly as possible.

Articulation

You may find that your articulation isn't as clean and crisp as you want to be in certain areas of your pieces. You might want to work on an easy study to help you to crisp up your articulation, and to make it easier for you to articulate within your pieces of music.

Slow Practice

Playing the pieces through at a slower tempo to help you to identify any additional areas that need work, or just play the pieces through slowly to solidify any improvements that you have made to your pieces.

Feel free to do what ever it is that you need to do to get the best grade possible in your music exams, but also make sure that you take your time. Also, you can also analyse your practice as you go along; and this will also identify any areas that need working on earlier on in your music practice.