New Year's Resolutions 2016 - YES WE CAN!

2016 is upon us, and I don't know about you, but I didn't see a single flying DeLorean all of last year.

Movies suck.

Anyway. I've written here before about New Year's Resolutions, and we all know that they usually amount to no more than three days of gymn membership before finding yourself blind drunk and face first in a kebab (just me? OK then..).

But it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, the whole New Year's Resolution idea could be approached a different way. Up to now, I've always approached the subject with my students by finding out what they would most want to be able to do on the guitar by the end of the year that they can't do yet. Once I know what direction a student wants to take, it's a much simpler task to break that journey down into a series of progressive steps to help them reach their destination.

However, now I'm thinking of a different approach, one to help remotivate students who feel that they've “plateaud out” and can't improve any more. An awful lot of the time we keep ourselves blinkered in our approaches to many things, ignorant of what Donal Rumsfeld notoriously described as the “unknown unknowns”. Think of all the genres of music you've heard or seen and thought, “not for me”, or more perniciously “I could never do THAT”.. You could be a classic rock player aspiring to the shred approach , or a blues player nervously hovering on the edges of jazz. You could be a “thumb and strum” acoustic player fascinated by the seemingly arcane intricacies of classical or percussive styles – all these styles can seem hugely intimidating and on the face of it, utterly impenetrable.

But they're not.

I'm a firm believer that there is no greater satisfaction to be had in life than identifying something you thought you would never be able to do, a challenge that you never thought you could meet – and doing it. Whether it's learning a language, writing a novel, running a marathon, learning to fly – or on a more modest guitar-based level, tackling a technique or style that you never thought you could – make 2016 the year you give it a shot. It may well prove easier than you think.

#TUNEICEF 2015 - a review

So as 2015 romps to a conclusion amidst a great disturbance in the Force, it's time to take a look back over this year's #TUNEICEF project.

The album itself is available here: https://tuneicef.bandcamp.com/releases and I have to say, it's our biggest and best yet! 21 tracks ranging from Aled Horler's orchestral metal insanity to Mollie Lee and Charlotte Bond's achingly gorgeous acoustic track, by way of Dave The Rock Band's ridiculously catchy pop/ rock offering and Billy Edwards more-Darkness-than-The-Darkness squealer, to name but a few! There are some terrific tunes on there so well done to everyone who's helped make this year's album a reality – particular thanks go to Matt Chubb, without whom it's safe to say neither the album nor the gig would have been possible.

So after months of frenzied writing, recording, mixing, Facebooking and hashtagging, we've got ourselves an album to be proud of! Next stop – the launch party. Thanks to The Beacon for hosting this one, and thanks once again to Matt for providing his PA, as well as Jon Bell for providing the use of his exquisitely lovely Les Paul and Marshall half stack to complement my humble little Laney combo!

So after a frenetic and confused set up, it was Billy Edwards who kicked off proceedings with “Hold On” - and it's a measure of how frenetic set up was that whilst introducing him my mind went blank and I completely forgot his name! Oh well, only been teaching him about four years... but he did a sterling job getting us all into the groove and laying down a scorcher of a solo – this young man goes from strength to strength, having helped out with 2014's Winterwonderland2014 project - https://leicestershiremusiccollective.bandcamp.com/releases – and 2013's Songs For Syria.

Dave The Rock Band were up next, with “Christmas #1” and our alter ego The Formidable Ale Society track “Sunshine”, before mellowing into an acoustic section with Beth Hartshorne, whose hypnotic folk-rock stylings impressed everyone (despite yours truly having forgotten his capo, when her first song was in Fm...) - a genuinely captivating performance from a very talented artist.

Jacob Waltens joined us next, taking a break from his Rockschool Grade 5 to provide a lovely version of “Little Wing” and drop jaws on “Sweet Child O' Mine” before Dave The Rock Band took the stage again, augmented by our guest keyboard player and Honorary Dave, Leigh Blount.

The stage was then set for The Bench That Rocked, containing my student Tom Ion and former students Billy Chamberlain and Luke Billingham – we first met these guys again in summer 2014, they impressed then and they are simply superb now. Check out their alter ego, Dawn Of Anubis, where they release their own material, you won't regret it. The boys did a sterling job, belting through their own material and a good few crowd pleasing classics (including another impressive version of Sweet Child O'Mine)! Lead guitarist Tom is preparing for his Rockschool Grade 5 and when he goes for it, frankly I'm not sure the examiners are going to know what's hit them!

Then it was over to Dave The Rock Band to close proceedings and by this point the audience were well and truly revved up! We hammered our way through our set list of ROCK classics – including yet another Sweet Child O' Mine featuring a guest vocalist from the audience , and let me tell you – as a guitar teacher, when you've just had two of your students get up and absolutely shred that song.. it's actually pretty nerve wracking! Still, we gave it our all, and I had the privilege of putting Jon's Les Paul/ Marshall rig through it's paces before we convinced the man himself to get up and strut his stuff, and Jon soared through a superb “Parisienne Walkways” before Dave close the evening with the double whammy of everyone favourite guilty 1980's pleasures - “The One And Only” and “Every Rose Has It's Thorn”. Apologies to all those who wanted more but we were dead on our feet by that point!

So to everyone who helped make this project possible, I offer my heartfelt thanks, wish you all a very Merry Christmas – and we'll see you in six months to kick off next years!

#TUNEICEF 2015

It's that time of year again! After 2013's Songs For Syria project and last year's Winter Wonderland album, we've been firing up Cubase and hitting social media to promote this year's TUNEICEF 2015 charity album.

So, if you're not familiar with the idea, let me give you the gist of it:

The basic idea is that each student writes a song, we record it here at the studio with bass and keyboard parts added by my bass and keyboard students, with drums and vocals added by guest artists where necessary. Along the way, students learn how to use all the theory and technique they've accumulated in a practical context – layering up guitar parts, composing solos, learning about arrangements, harmony and so forth – and then end up with an actual tangible accomplishment they can point to. It's also a good indicator of progress – listening to students tracks from the last two years and comparing them to this year's, it's great to hear how much they've improved.

Last year we expanded the idea to include local (and not so local) guest artists giving us a huge range of styles – probably the only album in history to feature a track with guest vocals from former Iron Maiden and Wolfsbane frontman Blaze Bayley alongside a track sung by a seven year old girl! Lots of great music, lots of talent on display – lots of work gone into it but lots of fun got out of it.

The album launched online courtesy of Bandcamp, with a night of live music with performances from students, guest artists and finished up with Dave The Rock Band's set of crowd pleasers, raising well over £100 for UNICEF – not a bad evening!

Special thanks must go to (among others):

My Dave The Rock Band comrade-in-arms, Matt Chubb for many, many great vocals, along with a huge amount of promotion and organisation work.

Elisabeth Barker-Carley from Dreaming In Colour Productions for organising the launch party

Tony Wadsworth and BBC Radio Leicester for having us on his show and helping plug the project, Steve Ward for some excellent drums, DaveThe Rock Band, Charlotte Bond for some great lyrics and vocal performances, The Bench That Rocked, Jonezy, Matt Humphries and each and every one of my students for creating something really special!

So what have we learned for this year?

Shorter name! “Winter Wonderland Charity Album” is all well and good, but on Twitter you're limited to 140 characters – that's half of them gone in the name!

Timeframe – this year, we've left plenty of time, tracks are already coming together with guest vocal and drum performances. I'm encouraging students where possible to experiment with other interests – there are several tracks where the same student has written the song, tracked up the guitars, the bass, and the keyboard parts.

Social media – This year we have a website, a Facebook page, a Twitteraccount and a hashtag #TUNEICEF... hopefully, between all these outlets and what elements of the conventional media we can harness (as well as the clout of UNICEF themselves) we can really generate some interest.

So, here's the deal – we don't need to crowdfund or get a Kickstarter or anything like that. We don't have overheads. 100% of the proceeds go to UNICEF – a charity that knows what it's doing, and sadly there are no shortage of crises around the world where this money can make a difference.

We don't need donations

We need you.

We need you to share the Facebook page, retweet the Tweets, tell people about this cool little project you've stumbled across online, and then when launch day comes (December 18^th) bnrowse your way to our Bandcamp page and shell out £5 for what will be an album crammed with great tunes and unlike anything else you're likely to come across. One thing I've learned is how much raw musical talent these kids possess, and quite apart from the fundraising angle, I want to give them a chance to be heard.

Aren't you just a bit curious to hear this? #TUNEICEF

Why Music Lessons Matter

We live in dark times. The age of austerity is upon us, the eurozone is circling the drain and even the Chinese have discovered their economy can't keep growing forever. In the midst of all this economic doom and gloom, any cash strapped parent could be forgiven for looking at the idea of music lessons for their child as something of an unnecessary frivolity. Far better to spend their time and money on academic or vocational pursuits. Music lessons... well, they're just a bit of fun, aren't they?

So speaks conventional wisdom.

However, as with so many things, conventional wisdom is very, very, wide of the mark. There are a huge number of cognitive and developmental benefits associated with learning an instrument – and I'd make the case that the guitar, with its portability, relative cheapness, attractive image and history of improvisation rather than rigid adherence to classical strictures is about the best place it's possible to start.

First off, let's look at the academic benefits. Intelligence is a hard thing to define – let's not forget that Einstein was a completely average pupil at school – but at it's heart lies the capacity to understand a subject from first principles, and then extrapolate different outcomes from those principles. An understanding of software coding built from the ground up enables a software developer to come up with programs to cover any eventuality he or she can think of – someone trying to achieve the same result forcing together chunks of rote learned code isn't going to succeed. Music is a fantastic primer for these thought patterns, as there are only twelve notes so the building blocks are very simple. From the chromatic scale we get the major scale, from the major scale we build chord progressions which we can recognise and identify using the Nashville Number System and so on.

That ability to understand and extrapolate, those thought patterns which are so essential to problem solving, once mastered in one easy, enjoyable recreational field, can be very simply applied to others.  Extensive research done in this area has proved that children who learn to play a musical instrument do better in academics. Shaw, Rauscher, Levine, Wright, Dennis and Newcomb, in their research paper titled Music Training Causes Long-Term Enhancement Of Preschool Children's Spatial-Temporal Reasoning, speak about, “a research team exploring the link between music and intelligence reported that music training is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills, the skills necessary for learning math and science."

Hand in hand with these benefits go the additional ones of improving short term memory – a big part of a musician is learning to recognise, internalise and recreate patterns. This is an essential part of learning and understanding any discipline, from languages to physics. Maestro Eduardo Marturet, reiterates this point when he says, "Further research has shown that participation in music at an early age can help improve a child's learning ability and memory by stimulating different patterns of brain development." Music education is also linked to higher IQ levels and the physical development of certain parts of the brain.

Discipline, patience and focus are essential qualities for success in any field and these are all qualities which will be exercised and developed by learning a musical instrument. The discipline to apply yourself to a regular practice routine, the patience to keep working on a particular song or section or solo until it comes good, the focus needed to look at a part and work out where the problems are and how to solve them.. these qualities have a huge carryover into the real world. If you've got the discipline, patience and focus to keep plugging away at crafting the perfect solo for your band's new song, you're more than likely to have the discipline, patience and focus to root out the bad line of code or trace the engine problem or even just keep the burger under the grill for exactly the right amount of time to bring out the flavour. It's all about the attitude.

Let's also not forget that learning in itself is a skill. Learning an instrument is a multilayered process that involves looking at what you want to do, looking at what you're currently doing, evaluating the two and working out what problems are there and how they can be solved (I've encountered people who can't – or won't – do this, as I'm sure we all have). Applying this self-critical approach to everyday activities brings interesting results, especially for kids on the edge of adolescence when their perceptions of themselves and the world around them start to change rapidly. Learning how to learn, how to truly understand something, is a complete game changer for younger students.

This brings me onto another interesting psychological issue, particularly applicable to younger students who are in their early teens and starting to define themselves. If you have a skill, or even the beginnings of a skill, you have a tool with which to define yourself in a world which can seem uncertain and confusing. Without something to define yourself positively, it's natural that a child will tend to fall back on acting out and bad behaviour because they can only define themselves negatively – I'm not one of those nerds, I'm not one of those goths etc etc. Give him or her a skill, something that they can do, and their confidence rises, solving a whole lot of issues along the way. I've seen this happen myself – kids who've had behavioural issues calming down because they have something that is theirs they can focus their energy on. No longer is little Johnny only identifying himself as the class clown in the back row who gets detention each week, he's little Johnny who's an awesome guitar player. And as he keeps playing, keeps practicing, he gets more awesome. And he stops getting detentions because he's got better things to do.

It happens. Not 100% of the time, and not overnight, but it happens.

Finally, let's not forget the fact that music is a highly social activity – bands, school orchestras, singing groups etc. If your child is starting a new school or struggling find friends at their current one, being able to play an instrument instantly gives him or her a skill in common with which they can bond with other ids. Being in a band or orchestra also gives them the experience of being part of a group, all working towards the same goal, which is invaluable training for all manner of occupations.

Every kid has a hobby. Why not encourage one that has academic, social and behavioural benefits? That guitar, or keyboard, or even (God forbid) drum kit might seem expensive and noisy, but it may well be the smartest investment you ever make in your child's future.

Why Are Teachers Worth It?

 September, and a new school year brings a new raft of students picking up the guitar for the first time. Now, at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly old git – you young 'uns, don't know yer born, in my day electric guitars were powered by steam – let me just say this:

You've never had it so good.

The fact is, even a cheap Chinese Strat knock-off from Argos is at least going to a) work, b) stay roughly in tune for 15-30 minutes, c) not have an action so high it cuts your fingers to ribbons just trying to get a note out of the damn thing. If you've been smart and got your guitar from the local music shop, chances are you've got something even better. Precision computer controlled manufacturing techniques may lack the magic of a handcrafted Gibson, but they do at least ensure consistency and good quality control. The days of warped fretboards, actions so high you could park a bus under the strings and tuning less stable than a North Korean dictator are mercifully a thing (largely) of the past.

It's the same with amps – even the humblest practice amp carries an overdrive, probably a reverb unit and enough EQ that a halfway decent set of tones can be coaxed from it. Once again, if you've been smart and got your package from a music shop, they'll probably have sold you something made by Marshall, Line 6, Fender or Vox – these amps have incredible fucntionality, often including modelling software to emulate tones recorded on classic rock songs as well as modulation and delay effects and mp3 player inputs to allow you to jam along to your favourite tracks to your heart's content.

By comparison, my first amp (a “Piggy” - no, seriously, that was the brand name) had no distortion, no reverb, and sounded like an empty shoebox. The first decent sounding amp I got was a secondhand Sessionette 75, which sounded glorious when it could actually be coaxed into working. And jamming to mp3s? We used cassettes. Think about that. Oh, the nineties...

Anyway, the point of all this wistful nostalgia – when it comes to learning guitar, you the student have more options than ever. Books, magazines, CDs (yes, ok, we had them to), YouTube, UltimateGuitar.com, Guitar Pro.. there are no end of tabs to be downloaded off the internet. And much of it is free. So why, then, would you shell out your hard earned money for that most antiquated of devies – a teacher?

The answer is simple. A teacher – a good one, anyway – takes you through things from first principles, so that each step builds logically on what has gone before. Some questions that a student has cannot be answered immediately without ensuring that student has the bedrock of knowledge to understand the answer. An example – a student asked me if Sweet Child O' Mine was in G or D. Technically, it's in D Mixolydian – but telling him that would have done nothing except demonstrate that I know a big word. Before I can give him the answer to his question, there are many steps that need to be taken for that answer to make sense. He needs to understand what a mode is, what specifically `the Mixolydian mode is and that it is in fact the same as G major but seen from a different point. Without these “in between” steps, the answer makes no sense – it just demonstrates me teacher, me clever, you student, you foolish, which is absolutely not the point of a lesson in any way. If the student leaves frustrated and more in the dark than when he or she arrived, the teacher has failed.

The problem that the DIY student faces is that most articles he or she will encounter – be they in magazines, books, online etc – tend to assume a basic level of knowledge which is not always there, and trying to decipher and make sense of this information without a framework to understand it in is incredibly difficult and frustrating. It's akin to trying to learn a language just from a phrasebook. It's no wonder I have many students who come to me having learned solely from internet tabs, who have then plateaud out and are unable to make progress because they didn't understand what they were doing in the first place. That's when I have to break it all down and rebuild their understanding and technique so they can keep progressing and reach their goals.

I know these problems and I understand them all too well because I was exactly that student, teaching myself from the odd book and early issue of Total Guitar magazine – and arriving it music college with a patchwork, disconnected understanding of what I was doing. It took my guitar teacher (the mighty Brian Thomson, Leicester's Yoda of the guitar) pulling everything apart and going from the ground up for me to have my Eureka! Moments and realise ohhh, riiiiiiighhhtt.... that's how it all fits together.

And the great thing is, it's way more simple than you think it's going to be. Forget the silly jargon, the ridiculous overblown Greek and Italian words we've appropriated to make ourselves look clever, and let your teacher take you through from first principles, because when you understand the framework the darkness evaporates and it's all just so damn obvious.

So, teacher vs DIY – yes, a teacher is more expensive than a magazine. But a teacher – a good one - ensures understanding. And with that understanding, the student has the tools to go and achieve anything they want. The basic tenets of my program – and the Zero Point series of books – are ensuring that my students (regardless of style interest) have the chops and understanding to hear a song, identify the chord pattern and play it in any key, all over the fretboard, and improvise an appropriate solo or lead part. With this understanding, pretty much anything becomes attainable. A student doesn't come to me to learn a song. They come to me to learn how to learn any song for themselves.

What I Learned From Learning Flight Of The Bumblebee

When Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote his virtuosic, dizzying chromatic violin piece as an interlude to close the third act of his opera The Tale Of The Tsar Saltan in 1900, it's unlikely he anticpated the shred guitar movement or how iconic his piece would become as a benchmark of guitar technique.

The piece itself is a frenzied, frantic non-stop cascade of sixteenth notes (semiquavers), mostly only a semitone apart, and on the guitar at least the actual fingerings are not too tricky – the challenge lies in the stamina, the reflexes and the relentless, dizzying speed. Now, I've never considered myself to be a particularly fast guitarist, so working through this piece was a chance to try and polish a weaker side of my playing and it taught me a great deal about how we actually learn.

There's a long-held myth that humans only use 10% of the brain power, and that were we to be able to access the other 90% we'd develop psychic powers, telekinesis blah blah blah. Rubbish. We may only use 10% consciously – the “front line services”, if you want to use current buzzwords – but that “unused” 90%? That's taking care of all the incredible variety of processes that we simply take for granted. Imagine all the things that have to happen for you to blink:

Take the decision to blink

Consciously move your eyelids together by the correct amount to close them – not too little, not too much.

Take the decision to re-open your eyes.

Deliberately move your eyelids upwards, gauging how far to move them.

Now think about how many times a minute you blink. If you had to think, consciously, about each time you had to perform a simple “maintenance function” like a blink, you would simply have no capacity for coherent, rational thought. The fact that your body takes care of blinking, breathing, balancing (an act which uses 300 muscles alone) etc without you consciously being aware of any of it – that's the 90% at work.

Psychologists and neurologists divide our behaviours into two modes – the rational mode (that's our 10%) which weighs the various factors that might affect the outcome of a particular decision. This is the part you use when buying a car or (hopefully) voting. It's much more thorough, analytical approach – probably one we evolved in prehistoric times out on the savannah, trying to work out which way the antelope might run or whether that particular rock might have a sabre-tooth tiger behind it- but it takes a great deal longer. When you're learning to drive, this is the “thinking time” your instructor tells you about.

The second mode is the “intuitive” or instinctive mode – this is where all the learnt processes get stored, all the things that you “just do”. This is the snap decision – fight-or-flight, instant decision making when there simply isn't time to absorb all the facts and reflect on them. When the sabre-tooth tiger lunges, you “just run” or you just stab it with your spear, you don't debate.

So, what does all this evolutionary psychology have to do with guitar playing? Well, as I mentioned before, “Flight Of The Bumblebee” is all about speed. Sheer, relentless, blistering speed. So what we have to do is harness the intuitive aspect of the brain, because with this piece if you're thinking about what you're playing, you're not playing fast enough.

So – how to approach learning a dense, complex piece like this. Playing it top to tail whilst glued to the tablature is NOT going to work – that's involving the rational bit of the mind way too much. The best way I've found is to break it down into small chunks, roughly 4-8 bars long depending on the complexity of the pattern, and literally play this into your fingers until it's memorised. You need to be VERY careful here not to train mistakes into your fingers, as once the chunk is grouped, decoded and stored in the intuitive portion of your mind you're going to have a hell of a job digging it out and correcting it.

Once you've got your first chunk down and can play it successfully from memory (not necessarily fast – that will come), then try the next. Then add the two together, reinforcing what you've already know as you go. As the mental agility improves through not having to consciously think through what you're playing, the physical dexterity will follow, especially with metronome use to gradually speed your playing up (see my post Feel The Burn – A Need For Speed for more on this).

I first played this up to speed about a week ago, and it was an almost alarming experience in a way, because as I got to the end of it I suddenly realised I had absolutely no recollection of playing most of it. I'd been acting purely on instinct and intuition, performing the musical (and far less dangerous) equivalent of running full tilt along a tightrope. It's almost a form of hypnosis, putting you completely in the intuitive zone.

Learning this piece then, not only improved my speed and accuracy (and gave me a pretty cool party piece) – but it also taught me a great deal about how we learn and how we think, and how a musician can train him or herself to use the different “settings” of the brain to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers. If you're struggling with a piece of music that seems utterly impossible, then try this approach. Remember, if it has been played, YOU can play it too – just given time and preparation.

Oh, and just so you know I'm not bluffing - check out the accompanying video:

How To Pass Your Rockschool Exam - Grades 6-8

 Summertime, and the livin' is easy..

..but at Grade 6 and higher, the exams surely aren't.

And so to our second look at how to pass your Rockschool grade exam, this time focusing on grades 6, 7 and 8. At this level, things have got serious. Grades 3-5 count as GCSE level passes, but grades 6-8 are QCA (Quality Certification Alliance) accredited and can count towards your UCAS points total (assuming you're looking at something music-based – don't bet on it counting towards getting a place on a Civil Engineering course), so the pieces are challenging. Expect awkward time signatures, extended chords, technically demanding riffs and soloing... but if you've come this far, odds are you'll be able to handle it.

First step – make sure you've read my previous article on Rockschool exams because ALL OF IT still applies here - http://jmguitartuition.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/how-to-pass-your-rockschool-exam-grades.html

Preparation? - check. Take nothing for granted when planning your journey. If necessary ring the venue themselves to enquire about parking facilities, equipment and so on. Take nothing for granted regarding the venue either, especially if it's a new one – I have a vivid recollection of turning up to do a day's examining in an exam room where the venue had provided all the musical equipment imaginable but no desk or chair. With the best of intentions, these places are usually run by musicians, and musicians are not always brilliant at thinking organisational and logistical problems through.

Technicals? - check. In fact, as you progress further along the grade structure, the technical exercises become a very important primer for the abilities you need. As discussed in my earlier article, don't just learn these parrot fashion. You won't get the lasting benefits that way. Sequence them, play them in thirds, fourths, fifths – make sure you practice them using the two bar on/ two bar off method. At grade 8 you're also dealing with some fairly... adventurous... tonalities. Of particular interest is the “altered” scale, also known as the Superlocrian mode ( R b2 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7 – Locrian, but even more so!) - during a recent lesson, I livened things up for a slightly frustrated student by getting him to harmonise it and write a song based off a I-V-vi-IV chord progression in the Superlocrian. It's important to remember these things are not dry academic exercises for the fingers but genuine musical resources.

Pieces? - check. These are obviously more difficult than anything encountered so far in the grade structure, but the progression is logical and incremental. At this level, more and more emphasis is placed on “stylistic awareness”, that is the authentic feel that a player has for the style he or she is playing in. Obviously if you're playing a funk piece you wouldn't want to be laying down heavy handed power chords, and conversely a metal solo is no place for your sensitive and sophisticated jazz/blues lines. A good trick here is to look at the songs the pieces are based on – for example, the old Grade 8 2006-2012 syllabus contained a classic rock track called Bonzo, which owed a healthy debt to Led Zeppelin's “Rock & Roll”. So if you want to play Bonzo really well and authentically, learn Rock & Roll too. The new syllabus gives a list of recommended listening to get the feel of the exam pieces – it's definitely worth your while checking them out.

The major difference with the exam format at this level is that the sight reading and improvisation/ interpretation part of the exam has been replaced by the Quick Study Piece. This is in some ways actually easier, as you get 15 minutes to study and learn a piece that really is none too demanding. The same approach is applicable here as is with the sight-reading: prioritise rhythm, then pitch (you'll have the tablature there), and then dynamics. You may be left with the backing track to practice to – it's well worth sticking the backing on and tracing the tablature along with it to get the feel for how the whole thing hangs together. Often, any unusual rhythmic phrasing will be cued with the drums and bass. Oh, and one sneaky trick - f you're feeling nervous about reading and want to stack the deck further in your favour, when you're offered the choice of style for your QSP, avoid rhythmically complex ones like funk and go for something more straightforward like rock or punk.

It's important to realise that at Grade 8 the player is supposed to be a complete package, with all the bases covered. It shouldn't be a problem to get the right tone from your amp or guitar. You shouldn't be struggling to remember scales or arpeggios. You shouldn't be playing the pieces with our nose buried in the tab book. The examiners are looking for a polished and confident performance, befitting an experienced and confident player. No examiner wants to fail a student, but equally Grade 8 is the top end of the scale and is supposed to be difficult. No examiner is going to devalue the exam by diluting the standards. Completing it represents a huge accomplishment, but it does require a lot of preparation. Don't expect to dive in and busk it, because you will fail, and deservedly so.

If you're feeling nervous and unsure whether you're ready, the odds are you probably aren't so delay the application to the next exam period and get some extra experience in playing the syllabus and also around it using the recommended listening as a guide. When the pieces feel and sound mature and confident, when you're playing the music not just the notes - that's the time to go for it. Do the homework – I particularly recommend the Companion Guides as “past papers” to help you prepare – and you will end up with an achievement you can be genuinely proud of.