3 Things You Can Do to Make Your Music Smoother Instantly - PHH 261

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way. I'm Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world-class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear step-by-step solutions. The same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity, and joy, you're in the right place.

So let's get started. Welcome to the show. I'm always wary of instant cures, of instant solutions. You know what I mean? Those ads that promise you can lose 10 pounds overnight or become a fluent French speaker in 2 weeks. The funny thing is that nobody believes the promises in the ads, But still we buy those products just in case. There is something powerful about an instant win. It's the tantalizing idea that we could get exactly what we want for almost no effort or investment of time. It never seems to matter that the instant results seem improbable. The idea of something for nothing, or almost nothing, is too powerful to resist. So today, when I tell you that I'm going to share 3 things that will make your music smoother almost instantly, I wouldn't blame you if you're more than a little skeptical. But I'll bet you keep listening, and I hope you do, because although these 3 things aren't easy to put into play, they will make an incredible difference in how your music flows. I promise it's not snake oil, it's just Solid Heart Playing. Making our music smooth is just about the most important thing we need to do, and yet our desire to make our music right sabotages the smoothness with every note. Do we play a wrong note and keep going, even when we practice? Should we correct our mistakes so we don't get into bad habits? Do we do both? Neither? Are you confused yet? There really are several things you can do which will change the way you practice and play. They will make your music smoother, not because they're magic, but because they teach you to think about how you play and what you play differently. Even more importantly, they are critical for each one of us, whether we're used to playing music smoothly or not. So if you're an old pro like me, this is a valuable reminder, or maybe even a reset. And if you're just trying to figure out how to make your music flow, this podcast will save you a lot of time and trouble. So while these may not feel like instant wins, they are very quick to get you results. I promise that. So I would like you to think about this as you listen to it, listen to this, engage with it with an open mind. I also invite you to check out a blog post that deals with another aspect of what we're talking about today. That blog post in the archives, it's called Beyond the Bar Line: The Secret to Seamless Music. And although we aren't talking about this today, you may very well have experienced the idea that you have trouble getting across the bar line smoothly to the next measure. And this blog post touches on some of the aspects of that as well. So I've put the link to that in the show notes. If you can't see the show notes, go over to heartmastery.com, look for this podcast episode, it's episode 261, and you will see the link right there. Also, I encourage you, if you don't already have the Heart Mastery app, get the app. It is the easiest way to stay in touch with everything that's happening at Heart Mastery. So right in the app, you can see the link to the podcast episode. You will see a video 2-minute tip that either I post each week or sometimes the tips are from one of our coaches. And those tips just are real quick little looks at things that you might not have considered about your harp playing or things you might decide to do, just quick, fun little things. But that's in the app and that's the only place you'll find those. Of course, we also have the link to the Harp Mastery Hub there, which is our community. So if you have a question that you want to post, that's the place to do it. There are also some courses that we offer only in the app. Some of them are free courses, some of them are not, but there's so much you'll find in the app. And the nice thing is that it puts everything right at your fingertips, whether it's your tablet or your phone, wherever you're going, Heart Mastery is right there. And if you're one of our My Heart Mastery members or you, you own courses through Heart Mastery, you can access your library of courses right from the app as well. So it's a really easy way to just stay in touch with everything that's going on at Heart Mastery. So I've put the link to download the app also in the show notes. It's available for, um, Android or for Apple devices. So there will be a way that you can stay in touch with us for sure. So the app, the extra blog post, And perhaps it's time for some of those instant wins. Let's start by thinking about what smooth music really is. We talk about our music being smooth or it having flow, and really I think it's music— to put it in sort of a negative sense— it's music that has no hesitations. It has no bumps. It has no stops and starts and redos. It has no unintended changes of tempo. All of those things are definitely not part of smooth music. Okay, so what is smooth music? Smooth music is something that has that sense of continuity, and along with that sense of continuity, it has a sense of at least rhythmic inevitability. Now that's a phrase that sounds pretty good, right? Rhythmic inevitability. And it's not nearly as, um, as highbrow as it sounds, imagine you're at home and you've got some music on in the background. You're going about your daily business, but you've got, you know, music playing and, and it's, it's kind of there and you're sort of hearing it and relating to it. You're not paying attention to every note, but as you walk around, you're kind of tapping your foot and you're following the beat. This is essentially the listener's experience. They're not paying attention to every note. They're following along with the beat, with the pulse. That's what I mean by rhythmic inevitability, that sense that here's one beat and here's the next beat, and we can anticipate the one that's after that. Now, certainly real pieces of music have places where they speed up on purpose or slow down on purpose, or the entire beat changes, and A listener goes along with that, but they experience it as a change, and they're following through the music, and they're guided. Their whole experience is driven by the continuity of that beat. So the things I talked about a moment ago, the hesitations, the bumps, the stops and starts, all of that works against that flow, works against the beat, against that rhythmic inevitability. What happens is that when we have one of those hesitations, our ear as the listener, our ear is drawn to that. Oh, something different happened. And then we start paying attention. And then in retrospect, we realize that, oh, perhaps that wasn't what was really intended in the music. So compare for a moment the way a listener experiences smoothness and flow and the way we do when we're playing and when we're practicing. The listener is guided by that pulse, by that rhythm that the piece sets up. And what they experience are the deviations, and some of them will be on purpose. That's what makes syncopation so interesting to listen to. But if we create extra ones that don't belong in the music, they're the little, you know, herky-jerky things that draw our attention when they shouldn't. But when we're the ones doing the playing, what we experience is, oh, that, that's a wrong note, or, oh, my left hand's not ready to get to that chord, I need some more time. So you put in a hesitation. We're involved in the doing of it, and we're not enough outside it to experience it the way a listener is going to experience it. Compare it to the experience of being a student driver or maybe in the car with a student driver. We are sitting next to them, perhaps we're teaching them to drive. Oh my goodness, isn't that a difficult thing, right? Perhaps we're sitting there in the front seat, we're next to them, we're teaching them to drive, and the first thing they do is start with a jerk. It goes, "Brrr." And you're like, "Oh, okay, no, wait, no, just ease onto the accelerator pedal." And then they try to stop and they slam on the brake and we nearly go through the windshield and we say, no, you can put the brake on firmly but gently. It's, it can go on a little more gradually. And you explain whatever it needs, it is you need to explain to them. Of course, the whole thing gets magnified if you're teaching them to drive a standard transmission where they have to manipulate a clutch pedal and a stick shift and get all the different gears, right? I know that you have been a student driver or been in the car with a student driver at some point, you know how unsmooth that experience can be at the beginning. Now, what happens with the learner driver is that they get experience, right? They practice driving and everything gets better. Here's the difference between a student driver and a harpist who's trying to make something smooth. The student driver is experiencing the same herky-jerky things, the same quick and sudden starts or stops that a passenger is because they're sitting in the car too, and it surprises them just as much as it surprises a passenger. But when we are practicing, we don't have the listener experience, we have the doer experience, and that makes it more difficult for us to really feel the impact of the choices that we're making as we practice. And that's a big word. It's a choice. The bumps, the hesitations, all of those things that we put in, they are our choices. We might not be aware that they're an actual choice. It's just like, oh wait, my left hand's not ready to play yet. Gimme another second. But it's a choice in that we don't have our left hand ready to play on time. So the choices that we make in our practice are how those things are created. And that's what I wanted to help you with, with these little fixes today. Now I'm not specifically talking about having your left hand ready. I'm sort of talking about some bigger concepts than that. But the idea is that we have learning habits that we are used to, and they can work to help us as we're learning a piece. If, for instance, we need more time to play something to get our fingers on the right strings, but the listener experience won't allow us to do that. And so to break the habits that work against the listener's experience is what we need to do. And it is harder to do than if you were a student driver, because you're going to feel the, the jerks and the, the, the awkwardness of your motion just the same way any passenger would. We are often able to shut that off as we practice and we have, you know, we'll put in some time distortion without really noticing it. Of course, that's what the metronome is for. It helps us realize what we're doing that may not be correct. But I'm not talking about the metronome today either. What I'm talking about are 3 important habits that you need to think about and decide if this is something that is going to make a big change for you. Because if it is and you can change it, your music will be instantly smoother. That's what I'm talking about. And I'm gonna start with the first one right now. I want you to stop watching your fingers. Yes, I said don't watch your fingers. 'But I have to look at my fingers and I have to find where the strings are.' Yes, I know you do. I'm a harpist and I get it, right? We do need to see where we're going. I'm not talking about looking at your fingers from time to time. I'm not talking about glancing at the strings so you can be sure you're in the right place. I'm talking about watching your fingers. Now, there is a time to watch your fingers, and that's when you're doing your technical exercises and you're working on your mechanics and you wanna be sure that your fingers are working properly. Properly. That's when you can literally, absolutely watch your fingers. But the rest of the time when you are playing, you need to trust your fingers to do their job. You have spent a lot of hours teaching them where the strings are, teaching them how to play, and a lot of hours on these particular notes that you're trying to play. Or if not, you will be spending a lot of time on them, right? If it's a piece you're just starting, they know what they need to do. You don't need to watch them. And the reason this is so important is because when you watch your fingers, you're taking your attention away from the music. When you take your attention away from the music, particularly with a piece that you're learning, You have to go back to the music and find your spot in order to continue. Guess what that can create? It can create that lurch where you're going back to the page and you can't find exactly where you are. We don't want to take our attention that far away from the music. Now notice that I'm really talking about watching printed music here. If you're playing from memory, this is a whole different ball game. Go ahead and watch your fingers. You've got nothing else to watch.

But if you are playing from a piece of music, that's where you need to be tracking.

And you don't need to be looking at your fingers. Your fingers don't need you that much. So what I'd like you to consider is watching the music. Keep your face— your nose is what I like to say— keep your nose pointed toward your music. Use peripheral vision when you need it. Turn your head as little as possible to see what you need to see in order to get that jump correct. There are times we need to check the strings, but you shouldn't be watching. That's the difference. If you have to watch your fingers and then go back to the music, You are creating possibility, probability, likelihood, I don't know, for that lurch, that hesitation. Where am I? What does it look like? And what do I need to be doing now? Remember that the exercises, the technical work you're doing, that is supposed to build trust between you and your fingers. Your fingers will know what to do. They will know where the strings are. They don't need you as much as you'd like to think. Frankly, we watch our fingers because we need confidence. We need to think that, okay, if I'm watching them, they're gonna do the right thing, like sort of like a little security blanket. But that's not what we need. Our confidence is going to come from knowing that they'll get where they need to go most of the time on their own, and we only need to help them out from time to time. Think about what tracking the music does for you. In addition to keeping your place so that you don't have those hesitations, those lapses, those little bumps, and there's like, oh wait, that was the wrong measure that I came back to, where am I on the page? In addition to eliminating those, learning to track the music as you play without looking at your fingers so much allows you to sight-read. It allows you to play with an ensemble. It allows you to learn music more quickly. Our attention needs to be on what we are trying to learn and trying to play. Once we have a piece memorized and we no longer need the music, we don't need to watch there. We can watch our fingers and we're good, but we need to be able to track the music. We need to be able to stay connected to what comes next as opposed to what our fingers are doing. I'd like to follow up on that phrase I just used, 'what comes next.' This is a theme for everything we're talking about today. Musical flow or smooth music or continuous music, or, you know, the rhythmic inevitability, however you want to call it, Flow is about the next note, the one we're about to play, and the one after that. Flow does not exist in the note we just played. It's never about the note that we just played. It's always about the one that's coming next. Flow is forward moving. So anything that we do, like watching our fingers and having to come back to the music. Anything that we do that doesn't help that forward motion is going to work against the flow. So when we are watching our fingers, we're paying attention to them, and if we don't need the music, that's fine. But if we need to get back to the music, we are suddenly out of flow. And when we are out of flow, the music is likely to be out of flow as well. I know that watching your fingers doesn't seem like a big deal, doesn't seem like it's going to cause so much interruption in the flow of your piece, but it will. And what a wonderful, powerful habit to start developing where you begin to watch the music more and your fingers less. You can glance, you can check, Try not to move your head. We don't want that tennis match head, right? That's going left and right and left and right. Your nose can be pointed toward the music and just move an inch or so to look at what you need to do. Occasionally you might need to look more if you have a jump up to a very high note that's behind your head on the harp. You know, there are circumstances and you do what makes sense. You don't have to be rigid about this. But you have to understand the main principle, which is you don't need to look as much as you might think you do. All right. I promise that will make an incredible difference right away in how your music flows. It might take you a moment to get used to the idea that your fingers don't need you and that you really don't need to watch them. But being able to track your progress through the music by keeping your attention on that printed page will create the forward motion that allows your music to flow. Okay, let's try the next one, and it goes right along with it because it is to focus on the next note. Now, You might think that that's what you're doing, but how many times have you caught yourself paying attention to a mistake and say, oh, that was a wrong note. That's thinking backward. That automatically interrupts the flow. Remember what I just said, right? Flow is forward listening. It's not— it's forward playing for sure, but it's not just that. It's listening in our head to the note that is about to come. Whatever we have just played is over. It's done. We don't get to go back. We have to keep going to the next note. And if your attention is drawn to what you've just done, you will stop. You can't keep both tracks going at the same time, the track that's moving ahead in the music and the track that's saying, wait, what did I do wrong? Did I miss a pedal? Did I play a wrong note? What did I do? That doesn't work for us. We have to live in the direction of the music. So to keep that attention on what's coming next is something that often needs to be practiced because we tend to pay attention to what we just did. We want it to be right.

Yeah.

But when we are thinking in terms of the continuity, in terms of the forward motion, in terms of that note that comes next, we are creating flow. We are going forward. And that's where flow lives. Flow is about the next note and the one after that. A lot of people say, well, if I, if I don't pay attention to the mistake, I won't know that I have to even go back and fix it later. Eh, you'll remember. And if you don't, no problem because you're gonna play it again anyway. And if that mistake happens again, you'll remember. If it happens a second time, you'll notice. But you need to notice with that most fleeting of attention. Wrong note. Boop. So that it doesn't create that, you know, warp in the time-space continuum or something, or I don't know, whatever it is we— however it is we want to talk about that. The jazz player Miles Davis had an interesting quote that sort of straddles these two concepts. He says, you know, if you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's a good note or a bad note. I'll say it again. If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note you play that determines if it's good or bad. Now, he was talking in terms of jazz soloing and complexity, not necessarily actually wrong notes, because it's an often believed statement that there are no wrong notes in jazz. That's okay. We are not going there. I think the idea is applicable for us. If you hit a wrong note, if you are playing the next note with the intention you intend for that next note, then that wrong note was fine. We're not counting it. But if you let that wrong note stop you in your tracks, then it was a bad wrong note because it's going to cause that gap in the flow. It's going to make your music not smooth. So, all right, I've asked you to consider not watching your fingers. I know that's a tough one. And to focus on the next note. Here's the third one, and it's equally difficult. You need to turn off your inner critic. I think this is a really hard one Partly because we need to be self-evaluating, right? We need to listen to what we're playing and decide if there's something we need to address, if there are mistakes we need to fix, errors we need to fix, if we're doing the dynamics the way we want, if we're playing the phrases the way we want, if it's at the right tempo. There are so many things. So many ways we judge what we do. And I can't cure, you know, perfectionism if that's part of what you suffer with. But here are some thoughts that I want you to consider when you are practicing and you are saying, "Oh, not right. Oh, not right. Not right. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again." First of all, don't keep score of your mistakes just because keeping score is really demoralizing. It's like, I got that wrong, I got that wrong. My harmonics aren't coming out. My technique is bad. My finger, my second finger's sticking out. My counting wasn't even, you know, there are 101 things we can find in anything we play that we want to improve upon. But keeping score of that isn't very helpful. Just addressing a mistake is kind of the best we can do. We want to fix it, so if we see it, we fix it. If we hear it, we fix it. And I have some thoughts about that too, but don't keep track of what you're doing and internalize it. That's not helpful. So [Speaker:Anne Sullivan] But here's where it impacts flow. When you are thinking about the mistakes you're making, every time you keep track of a mistake, you are thinking backward. It's kind of what I said about the focusing on the next note. Same idea. But this time we are not just think— we're not just noticing the mistake. We are actually investing ourselves in the mistake and say, oh, that was wrong. Instead of just oops. Okay. And going onward. When we hear the mistake, yes, we need to register it, but only in that split second where we know we can still concentrate on that next note coming up. And we don't wanna stop and fix every mistake every time. Why? Because when we stop to fix it, we compound the error. When we stop to fix an error, we have broken the flow on purpose. And that's not a habit we want to instill as a permanent habit. So remember that stopping to fix is something that we can do some of the time, but it's also working against making our music smooth. We need to learn how to play past those mistakes and coming and come back to them later so that we can fix them. But the inner critic takes this to, I think, a really difficult level to get out of. If you start judging what you're playing by the mistakes that you're making, you cannot rise above that mistake level, above that critique level, to feel the flow. And until you can feel the flow, you can't create it. Okay, that might have been confusing. Let me try to explain. If we're practicing and playing through something and paying attention to the things we do wrong, our mind, our attention isn't in the right place to think about the arc of the music, the arc of the melody, the, the way it is going to speak, the way it's going to communicate to a listener, what it's going to communicate to a listener, the story it's going to tell, the picture it will paint, any of those or all of those if you like. But our attention isn't on that bigger picture. It's on the detail. And even worse than being on the detail, it's a judgment about what just happened. That is going to make creating the music very, very difficult. So to create flow, to have your music be smooth, you have to learn how to turn that judgment self, that critical self, off. You have to tell your critic that you'll let it take care of all those mistakes on the next time through, but right now it's not going to pay attention to that. What we're going to do is think about the music as if we weren't even hearing what we were playing. No judgment, no wrong notes are registered. There's no good, there's no bad, there's just the idea. That is the purest approach to flow, to smooth playing, where the smoothness itself is the goal, above the wrong notes, above the dynamics, above the pedals or levers, above all the stuff we have to do. Just putting the flow of the music— and this can include not just rhythmic flow but musical flow as well— to put that as our first and primary goal, the thing that's most important. That's when we can begin to really make music smooth. So you can see why I said this was a difficult one. It will give you instantly better results as soon as you can learn to do that. It's not easy, and that's why I'm suggesting that you try to tell yourself, I know I'll get in and I'll get all those details correct next time, but right now I'm just going to play it the way I imagine it, whether it comes out that way or not, the way I hear it in my head. As if I were playing along with this particular harpist whose performance of it I really like. There are a few different scenarios that I just gave you to think about how you can do that, how you can put your attention in a whole different place, a place that is centered on the music itself, the story that it tells, all of that is the flow. It is the smoothness. And it's the, the big paintbrush, right? That's just going to wash over everything. Not the little teeny paintbrush that is painting in every single eyelash on the portrait. This is a broad brush kind of thing. You're going to have mistakes. That's all right. In real life, what's going to happen is you're gonna practice that big picture, that broad brush thing. Then you're gonna go back and you're going to be picky and you're going to work at those things that you actually want to correct. And over time with your experience of this piece, the more you practice it using both those systems, the more they will merge, the closer they will get. So that your broad brush playing through that is smooth for the flow will be more correct. And your playing that is focused on getting everything correct will also be more smooth. That's how that happens. And it starts by learning to release that critic, to release the judgment and go forward to the music. So those are my 3 fixes: don't watch your fingers, learn to track the music instead; focus on the next note, not the one you just played; and to turn off your inner critic so that you can begin putting your attention on that music where it belongs. Those 3 things will make your music smoother, and assuming that you could do each one of them instantly, they will make your music smoother instantly. I can say that as soon as you begin to work on whichever one of these seems like it's the most important for you, you will notice a difference right away. None of these are simple fixes. Right? There's no such thing as a, as a magic fix, and these definitely are not magic, except that they truly work. They're habits that are hard to give up, however. Watching your fingers or paying attention to your mistakes or worrying about it not being right when you need to be thinking instead about the bigger picture. They're not easy to do. I know that they go against the grain because we want our music to be correct, because that's important for our— to make our music beautiful too. It has to be right, but we can't just work at the right and expect the smoothness to come too. That needs to be part of what we're doing, and these 3 techniques are, I guess maybe we shouldn't even call them techniques, right? They're just habits that we have that if we were to let go of them, we could find the smoothness much more easily. Remember that flow, smoothness, whatever you wanna call it, is directional. It moves forward. And when we can keep ourselves moving forward, the flow will happen. When we start thinking backward or having to look backward, or when we do that, it's not just interrupting the flow. You can think of it as, as really messing with the current in a river. If that current starts to go backward, we don't have flow anymore. We have a whirlpool. Definitely not what we want for our music. So I would invite you to give these a try. Try one of them. Don't try all of them at once. They'll probably be overwhelming, but try one of them. See what you can come up with. They will make a difference. I can promise. Next week, we're gonna talk about how to learn and play a piece that you can't listen to. You know, you, found this piece and it's by a composer that you like and you think you'd like to learn this piece and it looks like you could learn it, but you have no idea how it sounds. How do you approach it? What do you do? How do you do that first? Well, that's what we're going to be talking about next week. And it's kind of fun. We'll play musical detectives and we'll learn how to learn a piece that you can't listen to. Until then, remember that 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. So you go find that flow. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time.

Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly Harp Happiness Boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.