3 Great Ways to Start a New Piece - and 1 Terrible One - PHH 141

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. Well, I might as well get this out of the way. This is going to be one of those podcasts that sounds like it's telling you you're doing it all wrong. And you've been doing it wrong for years now. I say it's going to sound like that, but I want to be clear that's not the point of our topic today. Because the real point is finding a path to growth, a path forward. And often finding a path forward means doing something different. So I want you to approach this topic with that progress mindset, because the ideas I'm about to share with you about how I think you could or should approach a new piece might sound a little uncomfortable. And that's exactly the point.

You may know that the only one on one teaching I do is with my Gold Circle students. These students are special not because of their playing level, they run the gamut there, but because of their commitment to their heart playing. They take their heart playing very seriously. And that's why I feel privileged to be able to work with them and help speed them along their paths. And I'm mentioning this because one of my Gold Circle students, Beverly, shared with me something her French teacher told her when she was studying French in high school. In essence, it was this. The teacher gave the beginning class a rule that she qualified as only a rule for now. As the students became more experienced, she said she would rescind that rule and give them a better one. But that second rule wasn't something that would be useful for them at this earlier stage of their learning. Thanks to Beverly, for that example, because that's how I want you to understand what I'm going to give you today. It's not a grammar rule, obviously, but it's a way. Three ways, actually, to start learning a piece. I can almost guarantee that these ways will either sound exciting and inspiring to you or terrifyingly impossible. But what's important is that I think you will see that they make sense as a way to leverage the growth you have already made. And have no fear, I'm going to give you three different ways that are appropriate at different levels of heart playing. So there's going to be one that suits where you are now, and I'm also going to give you a good way to step up so that if you're at the beginning stages of this and you only know one way to learn a piece, I'll show you how to step into that next level of learning so that it doesn't feel quite so uncomfortable. So even though you might be super comfortable with the system you've been using, I'd like you to consider the idea that although it was a system that worked well at the stage where you were, there might be a better system for the stage where you are now. As usual, I have a couple of things I want to share with you before we get started. The most important, I think, is that our 2020 HARP Happiness Challenge, which has been happening in our Harp Mastery Hub, is officially over. Now, some of us are still getting in our entries, but after Wednesday, January 31st, I will be closing the challenge so no more entries can be made. And I'll be looking for that pool of people that have completed all four weeks of the challenge. And from that pool, I'll be doing a random drawing for someone to win a $25 gift certificate to anything in our Harp Mastery shop. So that was just a little incentive to help keep you motivated and moving right along. So what I want to let you know is that I'm going to be doing this drawing live. So I'm going to be tabulating all the. All the people who are eligible here. I'm going to be putting all those names in a hat, and I'm going to be drawing the winner live in the hub on Friday, February 2nd. I guess it's not a coincidence that that might be Groundhog Day. I don't know. We'll be drawing it in the hub February 2nd at 11am Eastern Time, and you are welcome to join me there. If you'd like to join it and watch live as I draw the winner, you can do that by going into the hub, looking at the meetups, and you'll see that we have a meetup that that is scheduled for that drawing, and you can join that meetup at the appropriate time and we'll draw it all together. So that's happening. And I have to say that it has been so much fun all through the month of January to see these entries, to see everybody who's helping grow their own harp happiness by doing their practicing. They're playing, they're learning, they're connecting, and the ways that they're sharing it with others as well. It's been really, really fun, really inspiring. I particularly like some of the creative entries that have been there. So if you've been in that challenge and you haven't paid attention to what other people are posting, this would be a great time to do it before we take that challenge down. So if you're participating, you've got to get your entries in by Wednesday, because that's when I will be closing the challenge and drawing the or getting ready to draw the winner on Friday. So there is that. Remember that you can always check out the show notes to the episode for the links to things that I'm talking about. I always put a link there also for a blog post that I've written. It's in our archives that is related to the topic that I'm talking about, but maybe perhaps addresses it from a slightly different angle. And so there is one of those for today too. So I'll let you go check that out. If you don't see it in your podcast app. App. Be sure to just head on over to the website and look for the podcast. And we are here at episode 141 so you can find it easily and check it out. Okay, I think it's about time that we talked about those three great ways to start learning a piece and the one way that's not so great.

When someone asks me how long it should take for them to learn a piece, I know that there's a problem somewhere that's an indicator that they're getting stuck someplace in the process. Whether it's starting the piece or getting stuck in the messy middle, just not getting to the finish. There's some place in that continuum where they're getting stuck. And the place I like to start addressing this is from the beginning, because I think it's so important when we get off to a strong start with a piece, when we can jump start and see that progress quickly, then the rest of the process doesn't seem to take so long. We know that there's a lot of work that goes into that messy middle stage. We know that the finish is one of those things that, you know, we sort of get there, but then it just keeps on finishing forever. So it's the beginning where we can make the biggest difference. The right start to a piece can not only make the difference in how long it takes to finish it, but it can actually make the difference in whether or not you actually do get to the finish point with it. So the problem with this is that everybody is at a different place. So how long it takes to learn a piece is a function of a lot of things. It's a function of your own current skill level, what it is you can do, how experienced you are, how easy all the different components of music learning are for you. It's also a function of how difficult the piece is in relation to your skill level. Is this something that presents a lot of new skills that you need to learn? Is it much longer than something you've worked on before? Is it very much similar to things you usually do? For instance, is it about the same length? Is it very similar to another piece you've done? So you can easily rely on the progress that you made with that other piece to inform the learning that you're going to do in this one. So there's no one particular answer about how long it should take to learn a piece of. But that's clearly where we need to start. Makes sense, right? We're going to start at the beginning. Okay. So I did a little bit of googling just because I wanted to see what other websites are talking about as far as learning a piece of music. So I googled this for piano. You know, I looked for, okay, different pianists. How long does it take? Or how should you start a piece on the piano? How do you, you know, how do you start learning a piece on the piano? Because I thought, well, that will give us a pretty good idea of what a lot of people are saying about this. Not surprisingly, I saw a lot of the Same instructions, from YouTube video to YouTube video to website to blog posts, all across the world, in fact. So a lot of the instructions are very similar, and they're going to sound very similar to the ones that you have heard for your own harp. Study. Study the score, right? Study the part, read it through, see what you can learn. Watch the videos, listen to recordings. Break the piece into sections. Work slowly and carefully. Repeat each section 5 times, 7 times, 10 times, 100 times, until you get it right. That's one of the places that those websites really differed. Some people were all about, okay, seven times is the magic number or ten times is the magic number. Truthfully, we know there's no magic number, right? If you've been playing for any length of time, you realize that 10 times isn't necessarily better or worse than 5 times or 25 times. It all depends. These same websites talk about very cool things that are extremely helpful and interesting to know. Things about chunking, about interleaving, about deep learning and short term versus long term memory. These are all interesting things, they're all good things and they do play a role in how we learn. But it's not so easy to take those things and apply them to what we're actually trying to do in our practice on a day to day level. You know, when we're down in the trenches and trying to actually get something done, they're not necessarily systematized for us to a place where we can use them. And sometimes using those things is not really what we need because we're all at a different stage. We all need a system, we all need steps that are going to help take us through that beginning stage. One of the ways that we are taught to learn right from the beginning of our studies, particularly if we had music studies as a young child, you want to learn the first measure, then you're going to learn the next measure. And we're going to work in little pieces and we're going to do as if you were studying Harper piano, something where it worked like this. You were going to do hands separately, you were going to do hands together, and all these skills were going to come in these small little chunks. It's a good way to learn when you're just starting, but it's a terrible way to learn further down the road.

And so why is it so terrible? Well, because it doesn't leverage what's gone on in between. When you are a beginner, your skill levels are pretty rudimentary and you're fighting with a lot of new things. Think about how complicated the harp is, right? We've got fingering, we've got levers or pedals, we've got connecting, we've got chords, we've got hands separately, we've got hands together. And all this on top of the standard musical things like keys and rhythms and expression and all that stuff. There's a lot going on. It's complicated. So for beginners who are trying to put all those pieces together, we do work in very small chunks and we keep the learning portions small so that they can all develop the skills that is that they need and then they can put them together and they have a piece. It's why beginner pieces are short, it's why they're uncomplicated, so that we can get the through them in a reasonable amount of time. You would never give a beginner an eight page piece because it's just too big a mountain to climb, right? So things are scaled down when your skill level is just brand new. But what happens is that if that's the system that you know and you know how to learn that way, by the time your fingers know a lot more about placing and connecting and your technique is developed and you get this hands together thing and you're further down that road. If you're still learning that way, you're keeping yourself stuck, you're keeping yourself slow. Because there has to be a way to learn a piece that leverages the learning you've already done. That makes sense, right? It's not that learning slowly, learning measure by measure is in itself a terrible way to learn, but it's a terrible waste of time and energy if you don't need to do that anymore. It doesn't allow for your expanding abilities and it doesn't allow for the possibility of you continuing to grow. It actually holds you back. It's like being in a little box. If that's how you continue to learn your own skills, don't grow. Your learning skills don't grow because you're not challenging them. So it's not just you that have grown and you can do more, but you ought to be doing more to be continually developing those skills. So if that's the only way you've known to approach a piece of, then we have to give you a new system. And that's what I want to do. Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, we're going to be talking about three different sort of levels of systems. We're going to start with the one that might make you the most uncomfortable, and then we'll scale it back a little bit so that you can find something that perhaps is a little bit more approachable. I won't kid you. I'm starting with the hardest one just because it'll make the others seem a little bit less daunting. But then I, I will also leave you with a way to step into that next level of learning so that when you want to approach your next piece, you don't have to suddenly start something hard. We can give you a way to sort of ease into that. So if you're ready, that's where we'll start. We'll start with the very hardest way. But what I think is a really fun way to learn a piece, the essence of this system is one sentence. Play it for a week, then practice it. Right? You're going to be playing it for an entire week before you ever dive in and practice it. Now, I know that sounds totally backwards, but if this piece is at your skill level, if it's something that you're familiar with, or if you're a pretty advanced player, this will make sense to you because it goes along with my other philosophy, right? Which is don't practice anything. You don't have to. If you can play something, then you don't have to practice it, you can play it and you'll be achieving the familiarity. Think about the stages of musical development again, right? What we're talking about is the very first stage. That first sight stage is what I call it. The messy middle is where we do all the perfecting, where we start really, you know, knowing the piece. But if you don't have a lot of complication in the piece, or maybe even if you do, if you can develop the familiarity, the understanding of the piece, the. The knowledge of what is there, even if you can't play it correctly yet, if you can develop that knowledge right from the beginning, this is going to save you a huge amount of time in the messy middle, because you'll have the context for what you're working on, and you won't be working on anything you really don't have to work on. Plus, it'll save you time in the finish stage because you will already have built in some of that familiarity. So this is a huge shortcut system. Play it for a week, then practice it. I urge you to give this a try. Maybe even if you're a little, you know, not sure how this is going to work for you, give it a try with a review piece. Pull out a piece that you have played that you want to review. Play it for a week and see how many of those things that were rusty when you pulled the piece out on Monday have sort of resolved themselves by Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. There's a lot that comes together just by playing a piece. And I don't mean necessarily just play it once through a day. Play it several times, but give yourself that big overview. When you have that overview and you've been playing it for a while, then you know what really needs practicing. And you can go in there and do It. Now, as I say, this system to start a piece isn't going to mean you don't have to do all the hard work that comes in the messy middle and the work that comes in the finish stage, but you're going to be able to skip over some of it because you're going to have eliminated the work that you didn't need to do. Right. Compare this to, you know, starting a measure at a time. Well, lots of times with a piece, the first couple measures are the easiest ones. Right. So if that's where you're starting and you're digging into those and really practicing them, you're kind of wasting time if you know that those measures are going to come together pretty quickly. Let's start taking a look at what doesn't. Now, we'll talk about a system that uses that idea a little bit more in just a moment, but this one is all about the biggest, fastest shortcut you can take. You'll still do the hard work, but we're going to try to skip over as much of it as we can. It's almost like starting in the finished stage and then going back to the messy middle and picking up what you need to. That's why it works really well for a review piece.

Now I get it. This kind of a start to a piece is not for the faint of heart, and it's not a beginner system. Although I would encourage people at any stage in their harp journey to try this. It will be wonderful for developing better reading skills, for developing your hands together skills and your hands together reading skills especially, and it will help you finish faster. So this is a system, as are the others, but this one in particular, I think you can see that it takes advantage of the musical growth you already have achieved, and it helps push you further to grow even more, to grow your reading skills, your hands together skills, etc. So it's that double win or a triple win if you think you're actually learning a piece at the same time. Right. So it's a big win, but it's also a big system. So if that's a little, little scary, let's step it back to something more approachable for an intermediate player. I call this starter system, eat your vegetables. Now, I know you're probably a big vegetable fan, and I am too, but that might not have been your favorite thing when you were a kid. So it was always, eat your vegetables. Well, if you're smart, you learn as a kid that if you eat the stuff on your plate that you don't like, first, then you get to the good stuff, and you've got that left. This is the same concept. You're going to find the hardest part, or what you think is going to be the hardest part of the piece, and start working on that slowly right away. So you've done your basic beginner work, right? The kind we like to do. We open up the piece, we're taking an actual look at it, sort of, you know, looking at the music. Maybe you're listening to a recording while you're looking at it, and you say, okay, all right, I get it. And, boy, that part there in the middle, that looks like that's going to be hard, or, ooh, there are some big chords, and those are still a challenge for me. Or, I don't know, I've got to figure out those harmonics, and I'm not used to playing that. So while you're looking at the music and you're, you know, listening to a recording, you're going to be able to identify what you think is going to be the trickiest part to work on. And as I was mentioning a moment ago, I'll bet it's not the first couple measures. And yet we always seem to start at the beginning. No matter how many pieces we've learned, the beginning just makes sense as a place to start, and that's where we start. So in this eat your vegetable system, you're going to identify what you think is going to be the hardest part and pick, you know, four measures or eight measures or two measures, whatever seems, you know, appropriate for that particular part, and start pulling that apart, doing what you need to do with it right now while you're going back and let's go back and start at the beginning. Take, you know, eight bar sections or four bar sections or whatever you like. Start from the beginning. Start learning that part, too. So we're going to start at the beginning and work on the hard part at the same time. I don't want you just to do the hard part because once again, you're slowing yourself down. And the faster we can get a start on a piece, the better chance we have of finishing it. So, you know, our energy won't run out for it. We won't get tired of it, and we're going to see progress really quickly, which is going to help us inspire ourselves to continue. So. So you're going to work on the hardest part. That's the vegetable part, right? Think of your least favorite vegetable if you have one of those, and you're going to start with that, pull it apart, hands separately, whatever it takes, start working on that. And at the same time, start from the beginning. It's going to give you a great sense of pride, if you like accomplishment, perhaps, knowing that. Or maybe it's just security knowing that you're starting at the beginning of the piece, but you're already working on the stuff. That's going to be hard. It also avoids this funny feeling of dread we get, you know, especially if the. If the piece has a page turn, it's kind of like, okay, I'm stopping at the bottom of this page, but I'm not even looking at what comes next yet because, oh, gosh, it might be hard. So, you know, we don't want to be surprised by that page turn, by the music on the other side. So starting with the hard part, even if it turns out that there's another part that's just as challenging later on in the piece, or maybe even earlier on, that's okay. We will have started with something that seems pretty hard, and we'll be getting a leg up on that right away. So there's our plan two, our starter Plan two, the eat your vegetables plan. But maybe that doesn't appeal to you either. So I have another one also suitable for an intermediate player and definitely miles ahead of just starting with that first measure and working your way through. I call this one Diving and Swimming. Okay, it's not a very clever name, but let me explain what I mean. Think about the difference between diving and swimming. When you dive into the water, you go deep. When you swim in the water, you're just swimming on the surface. No matter how deep the water is, you're right on the top and you're swimming. And that's what this starter system combines. It combines deep dives. Review. So that's how we dive and we swim. So here's the plan. You're going to take one section of your piece, and you're going to do a deep dive on that. And this section might be several lines. I hope it's that long. If it's just one line, and that's where you are right now, that's all you can do for your learning. That's okay. Just remember that you're going to be able to take this system the way you can take any of the others we talked about today and grow with it so that if the section you're starting with is just one line, because that's all you can handle. Well, maybe in another month or two, you'll be able to handle two lines at a time. So just keep that idea for growth in mind. Okay, so you're going to take that section, however long it is, and you're going to really do a deep dive on it. And you're going to do all those repetitions you need. You're going to do all the hands separately, hands together, any of those ways that you like to use to work on a piece. That's what you're going to do. And you're going to start there, but we're not going to stop there. So you've chosen that section to do a deep dive on. Well, the next day we're going to look at that same section, but you're just going to swim with it. You're going to review it. Just review it. But do a deep dive on the next section so you can play through section one, we'll call it, several times, just to review it to, you know, to sort of refresh your mind and your fingers on the work that you did in your deep dive. But we don't want to deep dive on that same section two days in a row. You want it to sort of marinate, to sort of sink in. So you review it, and then you do the deep dive on section two. And you get in there and you pull that apart, Pull that apart. Then the next day, you go back and you do your deep dive on section one and review section two. And on day four, you do your deep dive on section two and review section one. Then for the next day or two, you combine both sections, put them together, see if you can play through both sections. It's not exactly review.

Because you're going to have to negotiate the transition between the two sections. So it'll have a little bit of the deep dive, it'll have a little bit of the swimming, but you're going to combine those two sections. And now they have become one section for you, which is great. And you're going to move on to the next two. So you'll do the same thing with those of the next two sections. You're going to alternate the deep dive and the swimming, and you'll alternate those a couple of times, and then you'll put those sections together, and then you'll be able to combine all four of those sections into one. And you might want to just leave your sections at that particular combined length and then start working on the next one. But where this is a step up from the. I'm going to learn the first couple measures, then I'm going to learn the next one is that it helps build in a little bit more distance. Right away you get the deep dive alternating with the review, which is going to leap for frog you forward because you're going to be letting that deep work settle in, which is a proven technique. So you really want to do that. You've got the deep work, you're going to let that just kind of hang in there. You're going to review it, but no more deep work. You'll do the deep work on the next section. Alternate those. That's how your learning process is actually going to speed up. And then because you're working essentially two sections at a time, you're working twice as fast as that. Well, I'm just going to learn the first couple measures until I get them right way. Once again, do you see how this is a step up from that beginner learning technique so that when you start that new piece, you are projecting yourself into it and moving it forward as fast as you are able at that particular time.

And if the diving and swimming thing sounds really good to you, well, terrific, let's do that. But you know what, pretty soon you're going to be ready to say, well, you know what, that's not quite fast enough for me. I'm still going to do my diving and swimming, but I'm also going to add that hardest section, that little section from Eat your vegetables. I'm going to put that in. And so you're going to be not just learning the piece, but you're going to be growing your skills at the same time time moving through the piece faster, becoming a better harpist faster. This is a win win. But what if you are still a beginner or if you're not really a beginner, but these strategies make you a little bit uncomfortable and you want a way to step up from where you are now in your starter system to one of these other systems that will help you learn a little bit faster as you start a new piece. Well, here's the step up strategy that I was telling you about in a nutshell. The concept is that we're going to get you to move faster, to move on sooner. And there are essentially two components. You're going to choose a slightly longer section than you normally would. So that if you normally start with two measures or four measures or one measure, make sure that it's slightly longer than that. You could double it if you like. Right. If you're usually like a measure by measure, go two measures by two measures. If you're a two measure person, try four measures. If you're a four measure person. Try eight measures once again. It'll depend on the piece, of course, but choose a slightly longer section than you normally would and spend half the time you normally would on it. And you can think of it the time in different ways. It could be half the number of days like I usually spend a week on this before I try the next one. Well, don't spend a week, spend half a week or I normally spend an hour on it. Well, spend half an hour. Because if you're spending an hour of your practice time on this one section and you all of a sudden are spending half an hour, guess what? You're going to have a half an hour that you can spend on the next one. Stepping up, stepping up, my friend. Or if you normally do 20 repetitions of that measure, do 10 and move on. The idea is to get used to moving on sooner. I know that's uncomfortable because you feel like you're not getting it right. But music doesn't become right in a day. It becomes right over time. Getting something right today, practicing it until it's right today doesn't mean it will be right tomorrow or the next day. So don't waste your time trying to make it 100% right today. Get it as right as you can. Allow yourself to do fewer daily repetitions so that you can spend more time with more of the piece or maybe even with the entire piece. Because the faster you get acquainted with the whole piece, the sooner it'll start to sink in. So don't let yourself spend more time than you need. Now, I've almost come full circle here, haven't I? Right from that strategy that I, you know, that fast start strategy, that is. Just don't practice anything you don't have to. This is the same idea. Move on sooner than you think. You don't need to spend quite so much time getting that tiny, tiny section right if you still have the whole rest of the piece to become familiar with. So move on sooner, so slightly longer section and spend half the time you normally would on it and you will be moving along faster. Will it be a little uncomfortable? Yeah, sure. Will it be a little unsettling to think that you're not working at a hundred percent perfection right now? Yes. But guess what? That, that section that you got really right today, as soon as you speed up the tempo, or as soon as you put the other hand with it, everything's going to change.

So don't invest too much time on that at the early stage, there's plenty of time later. To really get all the teeny weeny little details in place. Yes, we want the fingering to be in place, and yes, all the notes and rhythms, sure. But. But they're not going to be 100% cemented in at that first beginning stage of learning. So don't try to get that there. Let yourself move on. Uncomfortable? Yes. Productive? Very much so. Something to consider. So there are my three ways to start a piece faster. We have that most advanced one, which is for play it for a week and then practice it. We have the eat your vegetables one, where you're finding the hardest section and working on that as you work on the beginning stuff, too. And then, of course, we have diving and swimming, where you alternate deep dive and review on one section while you do that same kind of alternation with the second section and then combine them. Or if you're just looking to step up your starter strategy, then try moving on sooner, working on slightly longer sections and spending half the time you normally would on them so you can get through the piece faster. Lots of ideas. Choose one and try to implement it. See how it works for you. Remember, the idea is not to learn everything right away, but to get that overview so that you know what you really have to dive into. And the rest you can start just getting that flow, flow, getting that musicality, getting the actual music together. Because the sooner we get to the music, the sooner we get to the fun part, right? Okay, so I will remind you that we've got that prize drawing for the Heart Mastery Hub Challenge coming up this Friday. If you are participating in that challenge, I'm closing the challenge down at the end of day on January 31st, so get your entries in there and we'll do the drawing in the hub on Friday.

So I would love it if you join us for the drawing next week on the podcast. I'm talking about rubato. Rubato is one of those wonderful concepts that we like to use. Perhaps we sometimes overuse or misuse, but we'll talk about the role that rubato plays in making making a piece expressive. So that is next Monday on the podcast. And in the meantime, please remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.