5 Quick Technique Routines to Put In Place Now - PHH 131

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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. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You suddenly realize that everything is quiet and you have 20 minutes all to yourself. Sure, you could sit down with a book and a cup of tea, or you could spend that 20 minutes practicing. You decide your harp is calling you, so you sit on the bench, you look at the music on your stand, but where do you start?

You may have had days like that. I know I have. Those 20 minute segments are gold. They're valuable little chunks of practice time, but obviously that's not enough time to get everything done. If you're used to having an hour or more to practice, that 20 minutes is four frustratingly short. Of course, I'm just using these time frames as an illustration. Your regular practice time and your available time might be different, but the idea is the same. When you don't have as much practice time as you're used to, you have to find a way to make do with what you've got. When we start to prioritize what needs to get done, the first thing we often jettison from our practice is our technique work. We eliminate a warm up and we use parts of the pieces we need to learn as a warm up. That's a smart idea. But dedicated technique work, the kind that covers all the basics and keeps our fingers nimble and strong, is usually put aside when you have a lot of music to learn and very little time to learn it. Who has time for drills and exercises.

Now? With the holiday season beginning in earnest later this week, practice time will be catch as catch can for most of us. But even with this Time Crunch I want to urge you not to abandon your technique work at this time. Your technique work is more critical than ever. Why? Because it will help your fingers and you relax. And recenter our technique is our greatest tool. All our playing depends on it. And when our technique is in shape, we can play more confidently knowing we can trust our fingers. But wait, I hear you saying how am I supposed to fit in my technique practice when I have no time? That's exactly what I will share with you on this episode. Five of my favorite super speedy ways to keep my fingers in shape on when I'm in the middle of a time crunch. Plus, I'll help you understand the particular benefits of each routine so you can choose what feels right for you. I have a special announcement for you too. We have opened the doors for new My Heart Mastery members and we have a special deal going on right now. Now if you don't know what My Heart Mastery is, then that is our live learning community. It's different from our Harp Mastery Hub community, which is more about conversation, more like other online social groups you're probably familiar with. My Harp Mastery isn't group harp coaching or one on one lessons either. What it is is live learning via live online video workshops every week. These workshops are taught by me or by one of our Harp Mastery certified coaches. These workshops are designed to support support your harp playing whether you're taking lessons from a teacher or working with a coach or just working on your own. My Harp Mastery is about the how to's of harp playing, the things most teachers don't have time to teach in regular lessons. Our recent workshops have covered covered topics like preparing to share your music. We've been working a lot on that this particular month or everything from tuning to technique to playing harmonics, playing dynamics, working on more expression, working with the metronome, just about everything. Now of course the live calls happen in real time and not all our members can be on the calls live every week. So everything is recorded and posted on our members only website so they can go back and watch at their convenience when watch the replays multiple times if they want. Or maybe just go back to a call that covered a topic that they weren't ready for when it was live, but they're ready for now. They don't have to wait until we teach it again. They can access the lesson on demand whenever they want and there is a tremendous library of workshops and courses. I founded My heart mastery in 2014 so you can calculate for yourself the extent of our archives. Plus, there are other opportunities we make available to our members to help support their practice and playing, like facilitating our sounding board groups, where members can meet in small groups to play just for each other to test out their pieces or get used to playing for others. It's totally optional, of course, but many of our members find it helpful and fun. Plus, we have a new resource which will start after the first of the year. Still top secret, but I can tell you we're calling it Practice Lab. Anyway, I started my Harp Mastery to be a resource that fills in the holes, that answers the questions that every harpist has as they learn new music with new challenges and new techniques. And because I believe this information is critical for every harpist, I wanted to make sure it's accessible and affordable. The price of membership hasn't changed since I first opened the doors. It's $47 a month, and just the access to our library of recordings is worth way more than that. But to have a live call every week as well, you can see it's an incredible value. And right now, as I said, we're offering a special deal on membership. We only open the doors to new members a couple of times each year. Traditionally, this is one of those times, and this time we're making the deal even sweeter than usual. You can sign up to be one of our My Heart Mastery members and get two thirds off the price of your first three months of membership. That's just $15.98 for each of the first three months. And after that your membership will go to the regular $47 a month. Or you can cancel at any time. But you know, for $4 a week you can hardly go wrong. And here's what we have coming up in the next few months. December. I have written a special piece just for our My Heart Mastery members, and we'll be doing two workshops on that piece to help them. And we'll be having a little holiday harp play in January. We're going to have the theme for the entire month of personal trainer 2024, how to get in Shape for the New Year. February's theme is all about romance, and it's called Playing from the Heart Making Brubato and phrasing and flow and dynamics all work together without sacrificing the notes. In March, we've got a bogo. We've got two separate courses. We have two workshops that'll be focused on sight reading, a little sight reading mini, and two weeks focused on playing a special featured piece. So that's what we have coming up. And I think you can see how interesting we try to make things at my heart mastery and how much there is there for you. So I urge you to take advantage of our special deal. This deal is only open through Cyber Monday, so it's open from now until November 27th. So just a week to take advantage of this. So I hope you hop in and do that. The link to sign up with our special deal is right in today's show notes. So you can do that. Just click that link and get over there and join us. And I will look forward to seeing you on our next live call. When we're talking about the how to's of harp playing, I think technique is one of the more important ones. We get very bound up in playing the right notes at the right time with the right fingers and getting to the right place, all those things that are really important in the playing of a particular piece of music. But our technique is our primary tool. It's how we do all that. And technique is important. It's that thing that if we don't have in shape, none of our playing works the way we want it to. And I'm reminded of that quote that is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, the quote that, you know, give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe. That whole idea of sharpening the axe, sharpening a saw, so critical and so applicable to our technique and our harp playing. Just as an aside for those of you who are interested in these kinds of things, and I sort of like this kind of trivia myself, there's actually no evidence that Lincoln said that particular quote. It's very difficult to try to attribute that to anyone in particular. There are lots of references throughout history to the same kind of idea, but nonetheless, that doesn't diminish the power of this idea. The idea being that when your tools are sharp, the job you need to do with those tools is going to go better, which is why we want to figure out how to keep our technique sharp even when we don't have enough time to work on it. And that's what we're going to do starting right now. So the first of the five routines we're going to talk about today is the Relax and Refresh routine. So let's imagine that you've been playing a lot, you've been playing all kinds of places and playing lots every day, and your fingers are just busy playing all the music that you love to play this time of year. So what they need is not more Hard work. What they need is an opportunity to just relax and to refresh the way they play. So the core of a relax and refresh routine is slow playing, calm playing, focusing on correct mechanics, making sure your fingers remember how to play precisely the way you want them to play, and on tone. So these are things that we often do in the course of a warmup. But perhaps you're not putting special attention on them in your warmup. But you can do this absolutely with your usual warm up routine or perhaps even warming up on, you know, on a piece, if that's what you want to do. The idea, though, is that you must play super, super slowly, being sure to stay relaxed and keeping your finger motions and the rest of your body calm and relaxed so that your fingers will be closing fully, that you're not putting extra pressure on anything. You don't want to play more than a mezzo forte. For this kind of technique work, you've been playing a lot. The idea is not to put more stress on your fingers. Even a mezzo piano dynamic is fine, but listen to the sound that your fingers make. We're looking for warmest, richest tone. This is a great time also to think about extraneous finger noise and to sort of clean that back out of your playing. One of the things that happens when we play a lot is we tend to get a little bit sloppy. So this is something that you can fix in a slow warm up technical routine like this. You can make sure that your fingers are placing accurately. So you're going to listen to your tone, you're going to watch exactly how your fingers work, that everything works just the way they would in a perfect world. This is your moment to create that perfect world for them. And so that's the core of the relax and refresh routine. But maybe you want something that has just a little bit more of a specific focus. So the second routine is the one I call get through the Hard Spots. This is a real crunch time sort of technique routine. So imagine you've got a lot of playing to do and you have these pieces, maybe you're playing them for a program somewhere and they have those tricky spots that just need a lot of extra practice. Well, this is the time to spot practice those trouble spots. And this is the way to do it so that they really work for your technique. Do each of those trouble spots three times, once very slowly, once again, you're checking your mechanics. That's what this technique moment is for. One, in a particular rhythm that is helpful, it depends on the passage that you have. But that sort of long, short rhythm is one that I really like. If it's a chord passage where there isn't particular rhythm, try arpeggiating all those chords. If it's an arpeggiating sort of passage, try making them all flat chords to work on the placing. So you're going to do some sort of rhythmic variation for your second time through. And then the third time through, do them one notch faster than the tempo. You know, you need to play them just to give yourself that little bit of headroom. So you're going to take each one of those treble spots and and do each one three times, once slowly, once in rhythm, and once one notch beyond tempo. Now, yes, this could take more than five minutes, depending on how many spots you've got. But most of what you were doing, you're going to do anyway, right? Most of this spot practice was stuff you were already going to do in your practice routine. So it's going to add very little to your practice time and maybe not anything. Plus, the advantage of doing each spot only three times means you get to move right along and get to everything, which is exactly what you want when you have a limited amount of practice time. Now, if you want some more ideas for spot practicing, you might want to check out a podcast I did a While back, episode 107. 107 of the podcast. I talk about spot practicing those trouble spots, and that may give you some more ideas. Ideas. If this is something you need to do, you can find episode 107 by going to the podcast page@heartmastery.com and just type in the search bar 107 and it will come up. Or you can type in spot practice and you'll find it that way, too. But episode 107 of the podcast will help you with some spot practice. Now, our third technique practice routine is a little bit different because we're not going to change anything. Wait, you say? I thought this was the whole point. I know. I call this the tried and true routine. Now, just think about this. Maybe you have a favorite technique practice standby. I know I do. Right. This my standard technical practice that I do, that I do religiously, just about are the Salzato conditioning exercises. Those are the things that I always do. And I know that when I'm doing those, my fingers are prepared for anything. When I can play the conditioning exercise as well, I can play anything well. So it's kind of a really powerful thing. I mean, just think about this. Not only am I doing those exercises and Doing them all the time, but they give me the confidence to know that my fingers are ready. Plus, they're familiar to me. So I'm not learning anything new. I'm not trying to figure out anything new. I know how those go. I just do them. So even when I'm in the middle of crunch time, the conditioning exercises are the things that I do.

So maybe you have a favorite technique standby as well. Maybe it's a set of exercises. Maybe it's some scales and some arpeggios and things that you do all the time. Don't stop doing those. Don't change anything. Now, if it's a little bit too long, then you could maybe cut that back. Even Salzato makes some allowances and he gives you a condensed version of the first six of the 10 conditioning exercises. So see if there are some. Some, you know, a little bit of a shortcut maybe you can take with whatever your routine is, that's okay, but don't change it. Don't scrap it for something new when you really need the comfort of something that you know works. So that's why this is the tried and true routine. You're going to stick with what works. Shorten it a little bit if you have to, just to fit in everything that you need. But you'll find that there's so much security built in to doing what you know already works. So don't underestimate the power of this routine. Okay, that's number three. Number four. This one's a little bit more fun, perhaps. I call this the pick me up routine. All right, so imagine again, we're getting close to close to Christmas. The performances have been coming thick and fast. There's been a lot of playing. You're feeling kind of tired, you're feeling kind of worn out, and the last thing you actually do is or want to do is to sit and do some focused practice, let alone technique work. Now, actually, when I'm in that kind of mood, this is when I focus only on technique work, because it makes me feel better. But maybe that's not you. Maybe that's not what you want. And so if that's not your kind of pick me up, then try this pick me up routine instead. Pick your favorite piece, or it could be a holiday song if you want, and play it through one time as a warm up, and then once perhaps as an etude. So we're going to take that piece. Let's just say your favorite piece is this time of year anyway. Maybe it's Jingle Bells. Okay. It probably isn't, but maybe it is. Let's just pretend. So your favorite song is Jingle Bells. Well, let's play it through once, fairly slowly, just to warm up your fingers. And by the time you've warmed up your fingers, you're already in a happy mood, because as we've said, Jingle Bells is your favorite tune. So it's making you happy and picking up your spirits. That's the whole point. But now we're going to play it again and we're going to turn it into an etude. Now, in order to turn it into an etude for our purposes right now, we're going to pick a special focus for it. Remember that one of the things about an etude is that has a particular focus, and generally it's a particular technical pattern. Jingle Bells might have one of those. I don't know your arrangement. But we're not working so much on that technical pattern right now. We're going to work on one of the important things that our technique needs to do for us, and that's how we're going to work through this piece this time. So you can play it through again quite slowly, focusing on your mechanics. Are my fingers closing? Are my arms where I want them to be? Are my fingers playing accurately, Placing well, closing fully, not making extra noise on the strings? All those things. So you could do Jingle Bells totally technique, style, or maybe another emphasis that you could use to make Jingle Bells into an etude would be to think of it in terms of tone. Okay, this time I'm going to play it and I'm going to make my tone nice and crisp, or I'm going to play it and make my tone totally the opposite. I'm going to make it relaxed and round and lush. Okay, so that's not Jingle Bells, but it's fun. It's still Jingle Bells. It's just a very mellow Jingle Bells. And that's the point, right? The point is what you're doing with your tone. Not so much playing the Jingle Bells at this point, or make it an etude to practice dynamics. Now, if you hadn't thought about dynamics as being a technical thing, you need to practice. Let me tell you, it absolutely is. Because for us to play dynamics well, we need a good deal of technical control. That's such a key word, and we don't often talk about this a lot. So dynamics require a tremendous amount of technical facility for you to be able to play a piano. A soft dynamic that is still audible, still has a center to the sound. It isn't just a little whisper. And to play a forte that is rich without being strident, this takes control. And to manage the difference, then think about how much control it takes to make a beautifully graduated crescendo or decrescendo. So often we do this without thinking, but if you do think about it, you'll see that this is about technical control. So often if you are struggling with dynamics and you're thinking, gosh, my crescendo went from like, loud to. Or my crescendo went from soft to suddenly loud, and there wasn't anything in the middle. That's a technical thing. That's control. So practicing those kinds of dynamics, whether they're, you know, gradual things like crescendos and decrescendos, or sudden changes from so to loud.

That'S a technique, practice thing. And that would be a great idea to bring to any piece that you wanted to practice. And then one of the other things that you could use to turn your favorite piece into an etude would be to practice it with relaxation. Not just to be relaxed at the start of the piece, but to be relaxed and relaxing as you play.

We don't always remember that we can relax while we play. We can use our arm gestures, like lifting at the end of a phrase, right? Even closing. Both of those kinds of gestures help you relax. They create motion in your fingers, motion in your arm, and that helps us to relax. It helps physically, but it can also help you remember to relax. And so if you're finding that as you're doing all this holiday playing, you're getting tense, this is an excellent way to practice relaxation. Play this slowly, whatever your pieces. Jingle Bells perhaps, right? Whatever the piece is, play it slowly and remind yourself every measure, every couple measures, whenever it seems necessary to relax. And to do that as you play, you can visualize the tension leaving your arms and maybe flowing down your back, through your legs, out into the floor. You can visualize it, and you can make it happen. But relaxation is so critical. I have told students from time to time about the year. It was many years ago now, but I was playing so much during the holidays, and there was one day, oh, just a couple days before Christmas that I came home, and all I could do was to lie flat on my back on the floor. My shoulders were so tight, my back was so tired. It felt like all I could do was to lie on the floor to help sort of stretch and relax and get rid of all the tension. And this was when I started thinking that, okay, I'm doing Something wrong? I'm carrying a lot of tension in me when I'm playing now. At that point, I was also carrying the harp a lot, which probably didn't help. But just to learn to relax, to be aware of it, and to know that you can do that while you play is so important. And it's a great thing to put as part of your technique. Quick routine here. All right, Here we are at routine number five, which I am calling holiday basics. All right, the basics here are the fundamentals, the things we know are our rock foundation of our technique. Scales, chords, arpeggios, all of those things. And you're going to do those for your technique routine here in crunch time. But you're going to do them holiday style. If you pull out your book of Christmas carols or whatever holiday music you've got, I'll bet you can find pieces that use scales and chords and arpeggios. Now, granted, these aren't going to be the very simplest holiday tune arrangements, but even some of the Christmas carols themselves use a lot of these things. For instance, Angels we have Heard On High. It's got a ton of scales in it. Think about what happens in those Gloria moments. Right, Scales. You could practice your scales from Angels we have Heard On High. You could practice your chords using the chords from Silent Night. I'll bet you have an arrangement of Silent Night that has chords. You could practice arpeggios from O Holy Night. Just about any version of A Holy Night uses arpeggios. Ooh. So now you have three carols that have those fundamentals built in. I'm sure you can find others. Maybe you've got a lovely arrangement of what child is this that has chords or arpeggios or something that you want to practice? There are plenty of Christmas carols that use these basic things. Well, make your own holiday technique. Warm up and pull a carol that's got scales, a carol that's got chords of carols that. That has arpeggios. And practice them for even some more benefit. Try switching up the keys so that. Okay, I usually play Angels we have Heard On High, perhaps in G major. Well, now I'm going to play it in F major. And now I'm going to play my scales in, ooh, B flat major, whatever it is. I'm going to play the chords from Silent Night. I usually play that in B flat major. I'm going also in C major. I'm going to try them in G major. I'm going to try them in D major. So you Get a lot of benefit. Now, for those of you who also took our theory Essentials Intensive, this is a great opportunity to refresh your your skills at just keys and your skills at transposition, right? So, also helpful, take your arpeggios from oh Holy Night and try those in several different keys. And be sure that if those arpeggios are just in the left hand, try them in your right hand too. Try them together, do all those things and from just the Christmas carols that you want to play. Because they only come out once a year, go ahead and make your special holiday basics technique routine can be a ton of fun and of course nicely double duty because you're practicing your Christmas carols at the same time. Now, if you want some more ideas on how to etudify these pieces, we did a podcast just recently on this. You might have heard that, right? It was just a few episodes back. That's podcast episode number 128 on etudifying your pieces. Might give you some ideas for using those little bits of your Christmas carols. But think how much fun that is, right? Use your, your scales from this one and your chords from this one, your arpeggios from this one and make those your scales, chords and arpeggios technique routine. Okay, now as much as I love the holiday basics routine and it's kind of fun, I want to just take a moment to review all five of the routines and to give you just another additional idea. So we started with the relax and refresh routine where you just keep everything slow and calm, thinking about your tone and about your mechanics. You can use a warm up for this, you can use an exercise for this, you can use a piece of for this, but that's what you're working on. Routine number two was the get through the hard spots routine where you take those trouble spots from your pieces and play each one of those three times. Once slowly, watching those mechanics and relaxation, etc. Once in a rhythm or changing up that trouble spot somehow to help you play it better, and once one notch faster than you're going to need to play it just to build in that headroom. So that's routine number two. Routine number three was the tried and true routine. Just keep on going with what you usually do. You don't need to change anything. If it's working, don't change it for sure. If you need to cut back a little bit on it just because it takes too much time, then do that, but don't change anything. Routine number four was the pick me up routine. Using one of your favorite holiday pieces, or any piece doesn't have to be holiday. And play it once through as a warm up and once through as an etude. And then of course, the holiday basics routine, which is just so much fun. But I have an additional thought to share with you. This is holiday crunch time and this is what we were talking about today, but what I want to do now is just sort of apply it to the rest of your heart. Playing the other 11 months of the year. Think about the idea of doing your technique work first, then working on any trouble spots you have, then playing through your pieces. If you've been around my teaching for any length of time, you know I'm all about mixing things up. So this isn't something you have to do all the time. You can experiment with this, but the idea of doing your technique work first is part of that, you know, sharpening the axe kind of idea. And remember that lots of the most famous harpists throughout history have spent as much as, I don't know, 50% of their practice time practicing technique because it's so important and so basic to what we do. And you don't get the same level of technical development just working through your pieces, no matter how much you etudify them, no matter how much you work on those spots, it's not the same as focused technical drill working through the basics and through exercises and official etudes. So if those famous harpists can spend, you know, half of their time practicing technique, we can probably spend a little bit more too. So that's just something to consider as you go through, as I said, the other 11 months of the year. For right now, we know we're in crunch time and I hope you've gotten some good ideas from this podcast for incorporating your technique work work even in those short little practice segments that you might have. Next week here on the podcast, we'll be getting into the holiday mood, talking about the best holiday harp gifts. So you know, what does the harpist on your list really want? Or if you are the harpist on your list, here's something that you can give to somebody who might gift you one of these wonderful things. And to go along with that, since next Monday is Cyber Monday, we'll be featuring some special discounts in our Harp Mastery Shop, both on music and on accessories. So, you know, watch your email for those things, watch social media, we'll be getting the information out. Or just tune in here next Monday and you can find out all about it. Remember also that for this next seven days, we are still offering that special on my Harp Mastery membership. I think this is perhaps the best gift that just about any harpist could give to themselves for this, for not just for the holiday season, but anytime. So I would love to have you join us there. And this is the perfect opportunity to try it out if it's something you've been thinking about, because with 66% off the first three months of membership, you know it's a deal, right? So the link to that is in the Show Notes for today. And if you can't find it in the Show Notes on your particular podcast app, look up the episode on harpmastery.com, go to the Podcast tab and you're looking for episode number 131. So you'll find the link to that special discount right there. I wanna take just a moment to wish all of you here in the United States with me a Happy Thanksgiving coming up this week on Thursday. So have a wonderful Thanksgiving and please know that I am so thankful for every one of no matter where you live. I am so thankful for each one of you and more grateful than you know that you take the time to listen to this podcast as we approach this special time of year. Remember, it's more important than ever that you continue to add more Harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thank you so much for listening. Happy Thanksgiving and I will see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into 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.