Take After Take – Syree’s Grade 2 Guitar Exam

For Syree, the hardest part of his graded music exam was not the playing. It was the recording.

He took Trinity Rock & Pop Grade 2 on electric guitar by the recorded route - the one where you play your songs at a time and place of your choosing and submit the video, rather than sitting in a room with an examiner. That sounds like the easier option until you read the rules. Candidates may make several complete recordings before choosing one to submit, but the submitted performance must be one continuous, unedited take. Whatever happened in the take he sent is what the examiner heard.

Syree with his guitar.

One continuous take

“Playing live feels more natural to me because I can focus on the music and let the performance flow,” he says. “Recording, however, made me much more conscious of every small mistake, timing issue, and change in expression.”

His method was disciplined and it worked. He took one section at a time, listened back to each attempt, marked what he wanted to improve and went again - and, harder than any of that, kept his confidence steady from one take to the next. The result was a Merit.

The three songs

The certificate was not the whole point. He wanted the structure the grade imposes - the discipline, the technical work, the obligation to step outside what he already played well. Trinity Rock & Pop asks for three songs at each grade, one of them a designated technical focus piece. His were Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69”, Oasis’s “Morning Glory” and, as the technical focus, The Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket” - three decades of guitar-driven pop and three quite different right hands, from a stadium strum to the clean, clipped placement that “Brass in Pocket” runs on.

Where it started

He did not start with a guitar. He started with singing in junior school, and the singing came long before the guitar. Music was simply something that made him feel alive before he understood any of it. The guitar arrived later and changed the terms. Music stopped being something he listened to and became something he could make.

Beyond the syllabus

Syree is 19. He learns guitar at Trill Route and is also interested in music production - which makes the recording story less of a detour than it first looks. The things he was working through are the things producers do all day.

Away from the exam, this is him at Band Camp with Black Noize, playing Spiritbox’s “Circle With Me” - a long way from a syllabus piece, and a fair picture of what he actually likes to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chVuPubczmg

What he took from it

“Sometimes performing well is not just about playing the notes correctly, but about being able to capture the emotion, control, and intention behind them.”

When the result came through, he was happy - but his first thought was not really about feeling proud. It was, “Okay, what’s the next step?” He is not in a hurry to be finished. Asked what he enjoys most about playing, he described the feeling that there is always another technique to learn and another sound to discover, and that he will never truly finish learning, because there will always be more music in him waiting to be found.

Congratulations, Syree. The next step is already on his mind.

Guitar lessons at Trill Route in Indiranagar, Bangalore run one-on-one and in duos, for complete beginners through to graded-exam students - you can see how they work on our guitar lessons page.