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I'd love to be practicing right now,unfortunately i also love warm weather so i'm sunning myself on the beach in the lovely 26degree spanish sun . Hope not to have to practice with the fingerless gloves when i return on saturday.
Glad to hear you're on the mend Dave but don't sight read better than me,it was great having someone worse lol

I'm glad I came across this thread. In a few weeks time I'll have a decent piano again and I'll be re-learning after many years. Sight reading was always my problem. I passed grades 1-3 (as a child 40+ years ago) easily; scraped through 4 by the skin of my teeth getting bascially 0 on sight reading and my teacher at the time told me not to bother going any further unless I learned to read. Instead, I gave up lessons altogether and went on to play keyboards in a jazz rock band...

40 years later I still have a pathological fear of sight reading. I simply can't do it. Being able to improvise actually makes it worse; I can't stop myself making it up as I go along!

Just do a little every day - even just one bar. And don't forget that it's only a weeny bit of the exam, so gussy up the pieces, scales and aural and you'll be fine!

How does the marking actually break down? Is it basically the same throughout the grades?

classic-keyboard wrote:I'm glad I came across this thread. In a few weeks time I'll have a decent piano again and I'll be re-learning after many years. Sight reading was always my problem. I passed grades 1-3 (as a child 40+ years ago) easily; scraped through 4 by the skin of my teeth getting bascially 0 on sight reading and my teacher at the time told me not to bother going any further unless I learned to read. Instead, I gave up lessons altogether and went on to play keyboards in a jazz rock band...

40 years later I still have a pathological fear of sight reading. I simply can't do it. Being able to improvise actually makes it worse; I can't stop myself making it up as I go along!

Have a look at the Trinity College syllabus as an alternative to ABRSM. Sight reading is an option not compulsory and you could choose improvisation instead!

God, improvisation - now that would terrify me!

Gill the Piano wrote:God, improvisation - now that would terrify me!

You can only avoid sight-reading until grade 5 and after that - wallop! I have one working slowly towards grade 6 TG and I wonder if she'll ever take it. She can sight-read after a fashion, as I didn't let her get away with not reading while she was not being examined in it, but g6 level is still a long way above her.

I don't know about other boards, but with ABRSM you can't get zero for sight-reading as long as you actually do it, however rubbish. There's this very comprehensive guide called These Music Exams which gives the criteria for all the marks in each section, and for sight-reading (pass mark 14) there is a description of a typical performance which gets I think 10-13, and then another which gets 7-9, which describes little recognition of the notes, total disregard of key, no pulse, etc - and then there's zero for "no work offered". Similarly with the scales, you get 7 for doing it at all, 6 for aural, completely incorrrect all through, and 10 out of 30 for attempting to play a piece. So that's 50 out of 150 for actually doing anything at all in every section.

Gizzy in Cambridge