Preparation

A day off work to do some final practice and generally relax before the 3.06pm exam started. Methodically worked through all the scales and chords a number of times, subjected myself to an entire book of sight-reading exercises, and a final few play throughs of the three pieces just to keep them fresh in my head.

As suggested on the ABRSM website I arrived at the exam centre in good time and was quite surprised that I wasn’t too nervous. A rather eccentric old chap was in the waiting room already; he was there to accompany a young singer who was late. He happily told me a few horror stories of some of his students’ exams which was nice of him and then he was gone, leaving me to sit and wait alone.

The exam

This may sound odd, but the stool at the piano in the exam room was really small. I mean so small that I felt as if I’d fall off if I moved just a little way left or right. I’ve always practised on a bench so this ended up being my biggest issue of the day for some reason!

The piano was a lovely upright, and the examiner kindly let me play a few scales to get used to it before starting the exam. Did this warm up help me much… at all! We started on C# on the right hand (easy) and followed with F# on the left which is where it all started going wrong! I don’t know what happened by my left hand decided to do it’s own thing and just started hitting random keys. Thankfully the examiner asked me if I’d like to try that one again and so I did, this time rather more successfully!

The rest of the scales and chords went by with no issues. Next up were the 3 pieces that I’ve practised in excess of what must be 5000 times these last 2 months. So of course I stuffed up the last 4 bars of the Menuet – arrgh! It was at the bit where my hands kind of go into automatic mode but this time they just went very wrong. Oh well, nothing I could do about that now. The other two pieces went much better with only an odd random note added to the Tarantella at some point.

Next up; sight-reading – I’ve been looking forward to this one! The piece was simple and elegant on the sheet, and I managed to play it through just fine in the practise time. However when it came to play it through properly I managed to hit the wrong # keys twice, but while keeping rhythm and ‘feeling’ which I’ve heard is more important!

Finally the aural part of the exam seemed to go by very quickly and I don’t think I’ve done awful on that part. As expected my singing was pretty amazing… in a bad way but there’s nothing I can do about that.

Leaving the exam room was great; a realisation that a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. As I walked back to the car I saw that my piano teacher wasn’t able to keep away and had come to find out how it went which was really nice. I was still in a bit of a state of shock at that point so don’t know if I made any sense when I talked through the exam.

So that’s it for now! 2 weeks or so of waiting for the result. I’m guessing I should pass but not expecting much more than that. If I fail… well might as well crack on with Grade 2 anyway!

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The concept is simple: the site presents a text input box and asks the user: “What do you love?” Type in a subject, hit the button, and you’re away: boxes appear containing results from almost every Google service open to the public.

From a single interface, users are able to see pictures via Image Search, track popularity via Trends, view videos via YouTube, view 3D models created in SketchUp, and even make phone calls via Google Voice. In total, there are twenty different products showcased on the site – including the inevitable advert for Google Chrome, the company’s web browser – with more promised soon.

So far, Google hasn’t explained what the site is or why it exists. While an impressive way of showing the breadth of the company’s product offering, many of the boxes – such as the e-mail box – are little more than static adverts. Whether it will evolve into something more useful in the future remains to be seen. Read more here on thinq.co.uk

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More of Paul Ripke’s photography can be found on his site www.paulripke.de

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Awful aural

We practised the usual items; a few broken chords, play through and record the exam pieces so we could anaylise and improve them, and we worked through some aural exam pieces.

Usually my aural work is fine; I’m no master of it yet but I can tell the difference between 2/4 and 3/4 and I can happily describe changes in dynamics, rhythm, and sound. However whether it was because I was tired or it was just one of this days I simply could not articulate these changes in any sensible manner! Overall it was a rather frustrating experience.

Next lesson is going to be a mock exam to see just how well it all goes. So this week I’m looking at everything again (including sight reading which is still quite bad but improving) to see how I get on come Tuesday.

Two new pieces!

To make sure I’m not getting bored with the exam pieces my teacher has given me two quite different pieces to look at this week; Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, 2nd Movement and Beethoven’s Für Elise.

Für Elise is one of those pieces that everyone knows and for that reason alone I’ve avoided looking at before now. I’m probably just the same as everyone else who has played on a piano before; I could already play a small part of the theme, and even that I played badly. However it’s helped me work through the theme reasonably quickly and with (mostly) appropriate dynamics and pedalling. I’m currently working through the second development and concentrating on the trying to find comfortable fingering for the runs in there which is proving tricky.

What has not yet been discussed is the question of tempo. Some pieces really only work at one particular speed. Others work (differently) at a variety of speeds, and I think this is one such example… However, if it is not played musically it will be likely to sound boring…ABRSM forums

Getting the piece to a speed that I’d recognise from recorded versions will take time, especially if I want to add more emotion to it. Looking briefly through forums I found one link to Valentina Lisitsa playing it as Encore #4.

Her performance is beautiful; the expression she gives what is clearly a simple piece for her is amazing and it’s now my target for how I’d like to be able to play this piece… one day.

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There’s many reasons (excuses?) for not being able to practice as much as I really should be, especially with the ABRSM exam looming, but the biggest right now is working practice into a daily schedule that includes looking after three kids under 5, owning and running a company and generally being too knackered to do anything.

I’m finding that being an adult learner is harder than when I was 10-13 years old as I’m expecting much more from myself now. I know when I go wrong, I know what a piece of music ‘should’ sound like, and I know that I should be practising every day. So when it gets to Tuesday and I’ve only managed a couple of hours during the week there is a little guilt, and a little panic at what my teacher will think!

Knowing how busy I am at the moment means that my practising is concentrating purely on the exam – scales, broken chords, sight-reading and the 3 pieces. I have 3 other non-exam pieces I should be learning at the same time which I’m neglecting rather badly but I’m sure they’ll wait another week or two.

The trick so far has been trying to do clever practise in short timescales rather than sitting for hours getting nowhere, and I think it’s working. Add to that I do some rather desperate ‘practise a scale as I walk past the piano to the kitchen to get the kids a drink’ quite a lot which is inconsistent to say the least but seems to be paying dividends with forcing me to remember scales and broken chords quickly.

The pieces are coming along well. We’ve narrowed down the selection to the final three and I’m still working on bits here and there in each.

Hopefully the lesson tonight won’t be too bad and once again my patient teacher will understand why I’ve not sat at the piano for too long!

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Now I know I’m one of the lucky few fathers who actually gets to be home in time for bedtime most nights; it’s one of the things that has kept my company based locally in Egham rather than moving into central London.

Discovering Glympse

However I’ve just discovered Glympse, a fantastic app for the iPhone, Android and Windows phones that’s going to go some way to solving this problem. Glympse lets you share your current location and journey information with a group of people via SMS, email or on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. They’ll receive a message with a link to the route and your current position in their browser and from there they are able to instantly see where you are, how fast you’re travelling and even traffic condition.

You can limit who views this information and how long they have access to it to help calm any privacy fears users may have. This is great as it means that my wife Rebecca will now see if I’ve got a chance to be home before the kids fall apart from lack of sleep or whether I’ve got no chance so she can put them to bed.

The design of the app is a little ‘meh’. It looks like it’s been developed by a technical team and had a designer look at a few elements but not the whole story; it’s certainly not as polished as FourSquare or Gowalla apps. Usually this would bother me but the pros far outweigh these few cons.

All that’s left to see is how long I use this app for and whether or not it becomes something of a habit to use or another one of those apps that slowly gets forgotten…

You can download the app and try it for yourself on the Glympse website.

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Even more interesting, however, is the question how those devices relate to each other. What does it mean for the digital products and services we are designing, when PCs, smartphones, TVs and other electronic devices are connected? What implications does it have on the interfaces, if people are interacting in an ecosystem of screens?

Also worth viewing (while you’re at it!): Going Mobile and Rethinking the Mobile Web, both excellent presentations by Yiibu on working and thinking around different screens.

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Developed by BBH London and starring Allan McNish who is the Audi Le Mans Team Leader, it was broadcast during the Champion League Final in 3D on Sky’s new 3D service as well as cinemas, and in regular 2D everywhere else.

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Now this is clever for a couple of reasons; firstly, appealing to the egos of socially-minded and connected people encourages those people to link a number of social network accounts to improve their rating. These people will also share the link with friends and followers on those networks, especially if they score high.

Secondly it automatically builds a creative’s wet-dream – the ‘infographic’! Just imagine how excited you will be to see your network reach plotted across a number of different graphs and charts.

So what does The Sunday Times get out of this arrangement? Well, apart from cleverly promoting their 2011 Rich list, by connecting your accounts to this site The Times are able to identify and link you to a number of other socially-connected people. You also give permission for the Times to post to your walls and read your social network information which should allow them to further promote their 2011 Rich List.

Personally I don’t think there’s anything to see here having only reached Number 1,211 on the list; but if you want to see your placement then visit The Social List.

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