5 Techniques for Your Left Hand - PHH 165

I don't know what it is about the left hand. Now, maybe it's just me, but my left hand always seems to be lagging just a little behind my right hand in terms of its technical agility. My left hand is a specialist, just like yours. It has things it does that right hand can't do with nearly the ease or fluency that my left hand can. But left hand, although it's the accompaniment specialist and is asked from time to time to do things that are usually the domain of the right hand, like speedy scales or, heaven forbid, melody. And when the left hand has to do those things, I can tell that it's just not as adept as my right hand.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Anne 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.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence, and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.com join now. That's harpmastery.com joinharp hyphen now welcome to the show. I was googling around the Internet the other day when I ran into an article that began with this question. I have completely different fingerprint patterns on both hands. On my right, each finger has a very distinct and similar loop pattern, but on my left hand, each finger has a distinct whirl pattern. Why does this happen?

According to the article, there's not a definitive scientific answer for this, but the question still intrigues me, particularly in light of our topic for today in harp playing, our right and left hands have very distinctive roles. At least most of the time. Our right hand usually plays melody while our left hand plays an accompaniment. And most of the time the melody that our right hand plays is made up of connected notes. Our fingers need to place from one note to the next to make the melody sound singing and smooth. Our left hand accompaniment, though, is often made up of chords and low notes so that our hand needs to lift to negotiate the necessary jumps between the octaves. Our hands may be playing the same harp, but they're doing very different things. Usually it's our right hand that gets the spotlight, but today we're going to focus on the left hand. I want to walk you through the technical details of some of the most important patterns the left hand plays, as well as help you prepare your left hand for those moments when it gets the spotlight. These five key techniques will help your left hand be ready for anything that comes its way. As usual, there are some goodies in the show notes for you too. We have a blog post 3 Strategies for Left hand fluency that you might find helpful and sort of a nice addition to what we're talking about today. I also have a link for a free PDF of left hand techniques. It's a little practice sheet with some drills on it that are related to what we're talking about today. So that if you want some A couple pages, it's two pages long. If you want a couple pages to help you practice the sort of things that we're talking about, this would be terrific resource for you. And it's easy. It's free. You can just use the link in the show notes to opt in. Remember the the show notes probably show up in whatever podcast app you have. But you can always go to the podcast page on the heartmastery.com website. And you're looking for this episode, which is episode 165. So that's how to find all those resources because the show notes are there for you on the website. I also am pleased to announce something very special and brand new that's happening at Heart Mastery. And it's just for teachers. I'm holding my first Live well virtual one day intensive. That is a teacher accreditation seminar. Now, you know that we have certified coaches that teach in our coaching program and help with the My Heart Mastery calls. They're part of our Harp Mastery team and they are such an important part of it. But the techniques that I have developed that we use in the coaching program and in the Gold Circle program, which I teach personally, those techniques are so valuable. They've proven so helpful to me, to the coaches, and to our students that I thought it was time I shared them with you. So if you are a teacher who's looking to make a bigger impact for your students, this is something I really want you to consider. It's a small group class. I'm not taking a lot of people for this. I am teaching it personally. It's not a seminar that's about curriculum or pedagogy. I know you know how to teach. You know what to teach. I don't need to tell you how to teach technique or repertoire. This seminar is going to show you how to become the kind of teacher whose students don't struggle with frustration or fear, but enjoy musical growth. It's going to show you the systems and processes, the documents, all these things that you can put in place that will help your students achieve more steadily and help you work more easily with them in your lessons. Now, I know that you have a great relationship with your students, and I'm not looking to change that. I am looking to make you and your students an even stronger team, pulling together in the same direction. And that's what we do in our coaching program. And I'm going to share as part of this seminar, I'm going to share all the documents that we use with you. So you'll come out of this seminar not just with the knowledge from three terrific workshops that I'm giving, but you'll also have access to this document vault with the templates that you need to use to create the same kind of programs that we create here at Heart Mastery. There's a lot to this seminar, and I'm really, really excited to teach it so I want you to use the link in the Show Notes today. Or you can go to heartmastery.com look under upcoming events, find out what's included, and please join me if you can for this event. We've never done this before and I'm hoping that this will be the first of several of these. There are lots of special benefits that we're offering to this course, so I really want you to go and check it out. I'm excited to be able to share this information. Once again, this course is only for teachers. If you're not a teacher, it's not going to help you. So it's just for teachers. But please get in there and sign up. Because the seats are limited. I can only teach a small group at one time, but I'd love to share this information with you and have you be able to use it to serve your students and yourself even better. So that's our one day teacher accreditation seminar happening August 10th. Check it out I don't know what it is about the left hand. Now, maybe it's just me, but my left hand always seems to be lagging just a little behind my right hand in terms of its technical agility. My right hand plays scales faster, certainly does trills better, plays melodies with more expression, all that stuff. My left hand just seems to be a little bit of a slow poke. That's not really fair, of course. My left hand is a specialist, just like yours. It has things it does that right hand can't do with nearly the ease or fluency that my left hand can. Things like open hand octaves, and right hand never does those. Or those jumping accompaniment patterns with octaves followed by chords. We'll talk more about those in a minute. Of course, my right hand's excuse is that it doesn't ever need to do those things. And that's true enough. We but left hand, although it's the accompaniment specialist, is asked from time to time to do things that are usually the domain of the right hand, like speedy scales or, heaven forbid, melody. And when the left hand has to do those things, I can tell that it's just not as adept as my right hand. Of course, this isn't because there's anything wrong with my left hand. It's just because I don't practice those things with my left hand. Or at least I don't practice them enough. So today we're going to look at some specific left hand techniques, things your left hand does all the time, and talk about how to play those even better. And I Will also share how I help my left hand prepare for those moments when it needs to step out of its comfort zone and take the lead once again. The PDF that is linked in the show notes will be a good reference for you. You don't need to follow along with it now, but when you get a ch, it's worth downloading so that you have a quick reference for what we're talking about today. So if you're ready, let's get started. Any discussion of left hand techniques really needs to start with octaves. Left hands and octaves just go together, peanut butter and jelly. But let's talk about how to play an octave well. And we're going to talk about a closed hand octave, right? You might know that there are two kinds of octaves. One that is in a closed hand position, meaning that it's in your usual playing position with 1 and 4 extended and 2 and 3 dropped in towards your hand. We also play left hand octaves with an open hand where our hand is sort of flat with our fingers open. 2 and 3 are open and we kind of reach in and grab with 1 and 4. I'll talk about open hand in a second, but let's talk about closed hand. So 2 and 3 are dropped towards your hand, 1 and 4 are extended. The key things to playing a really rich, resonant and clean octave when it comes to a closed hand octave is these three things. These are what you need to know. You need to think about centering your hand. When you place it on the strings, be sure that your hand isn't pulled back towards your thumb or pushed too forward towards your fourth finger, but centered right over the strings that you want to play so that they can sound equal just like that. Then once your hand is centered, you want to close your fingers. Be sure you don't pull away. You're going to close them just the way you were taught when you started. And then the third ingredient in a good octave is the lift. After you've centered your hand and closed your fingers, your hand needs to just lift to help project that sound. It doesn't have to do anything dramatic. Just a little bit of lift will help move the air and project that sound a little bit better. So that's your basic closed hand technique. Now, when would you use closed hand octaves? Closed hand octaves have a lot of resonance and they help you move more quickly to other notes and they allow you to get some really clean placing. So here's a scale of octaves played with closed hand octaves. You can Hear that? Everyone is clean.

Placed cleanly, no extraneous sound or noise.

At least if I do it right.

And you also hear there's a lot of over ring. There's a lot of resonance from each of the octaves that have gone on before, because I haven't muffled anything. And that's a key feature. That is a nice thing. Remember that harps have a lot of resonance. It's part of who we are, part of what the harp is. And so allowing for that resonance is a good thing. So closed hand octaves have their place, but much of the time, not all of the time, but a lot of the time, we like a little bit more clarity down there. Now, I'm going to play that same scale of octaves, but I'm going to use an open hand octave. So an open hand octave, right, is where my hand is completely flat, my fingers are extended, my thumb is up, you know, as if I had put my hand on a wall. That's what my hand looks like. And I'm going to put my thumb on one string, right? My fourth finger on the other. Sometimes people use three. I'm not a big advocate of that, but it's not a big deal. But with your hand flat on the strings, then get your fourth finger there, extend your hand so you're not on the strings anymore, right? You're going to pull your hand away a little from the strings and then close. So your hand is not in traditional typical playing position, but it's a nice octave nonetheless. Be sure to close. An open hand octave does not mean that you don't have to close. The close and the lift are still part of this. You don't have to worry so much about the centering because your hand is going to be sort of centered automatically just because of the way it's placed on the strings. What's different and important about the open hand placing and the open hand playing, of course, is that you get to dampen the previous octave as you're placing the next octave. So that as I move up the scale here, in open hand octaves, I place my hand on the strings.

Then play the next octave.

So you can hear the separation, you can hear the gap in the sound.

So now I don't have the over ring. I don't have that extra vibration because I have been creating clarity for each one of those octaves. This is a valuable technique too, because we sometimes need that kind of clarity. It can help project a harmony better. If we don't have extra over ring, it can prevent lever noises, or most often pedal noises with this kind of thing. So it can really help to make our playing cleaner and less noisy. The nice thing too, about open hand octaves is that you can decide how long you want those notes to be. You're actually choosing the duration of the note, which is something that we don't generally do. Right. The harp is a funny thing, and I know you know that, but when you play a note, you have to use almost as much effort to stop the note as to start it. If you were playing an instrument like a violin or a flute, all you would have to do would be to just plain stop playing. But once we've stopped playing and let go of that note, it's going to ring until we stop it. It takes a second motion for us to stop it. So the open hand muffle allows you to decide how long you want that note to be. Because of the muffle factor. You can make those notes nice and.

Sort of the way I did before.

Or you can make them quite short.

So that you can get staccato notes this way, and you could do them slowly this way, or. Or you can do them a little faster.

So the open hand gives you a little bit more control over how long those notes last. It can also give you extra clarity if you're worried about pedal buzzing or extra over ring. But the closed hand can allow you to get a beautiful ringing bass line. And it can also help you move more quickly. If you're playing octaves and other notes, it can be quicker to move between those octaves and other notes, just because you don't have to switch the position of your hand. Right. Which brings us to technique number two, and that's really jumps. The left hand is so often about geography, getting from here to there in midair, just the way a trapeze artist would. Right. Well, think about what your left hand does. Lots of the time it will play an accompaniment like this nice easy waltz accompaniment.

And it's going back and forth between registers, isn't it? It's going down for those low notes and up for those higher chords. Knowing geography is part of the left hand specialty. It needs to be able to do those jumps, and that is something that you absolutely need, need to practice. One very simple practice technique is to take a scale and a triad and practice geography that way. Let me show you what I mean. We're going to take a scale of octaves and we're going to take the triad above each of them. So here's a C and here's a C triad. So I'm playing the octave C way down with my fourth finger on the wire. Circle my thumb on the C below middle C. And then I'm jumping up to middle C with my third finger to play a C, E G triad. So this is 3, 2, 1, middle C, C, E and G. And then the octave, the octave below that. So I'm nice and low. Boom, boom. And if you just take these for a moment, you can realize that your hand is jumping almost two octaves. With your fourth finger down on the bottom C and then your third finger up on middle C. Your hand is really moving quite a bit. And it's a good idea to just practice that motion.

See what you can do to make that motion. A very smooth arc going between the low octave and the higher chord.

And then turn it into a scale, the C. Now we'll do the D.

Now we'll do the E.

Now we'll do the F.

And the G. My left hand's quite high now, isn't it? The A, the B.

And the C.

And I would practice this with the octaves in closed hand position and in open hand position so that you can get the feel of doing both. So that's a great geography drill. And it can be fun to take that drill and close your eyes. How close can you get? How you know, how right can you be if you're not looking? Also, it's not just about right or wrong, but it's about learning to feel what your arm is doing so that you know what it's doing even if you're not looking at it. That's part of the point here. Now, of course, just playing the chords isn't the only thing the left hand does. So it's worth also practicing those chords in different patterns. On the PDF that goes with this episode, I have a couple of chord patterns that are just here with three note chords. I. But you also might consider arpeggiating those chords.

Right? So. And you can do that same scale drill if you like, take those same triads and just arpeggiate them. Remember, it's not going to change your placing. You're still going to place all those triad notes at the same time. It's just you're playing them at different times. Placing doesn't change. The placing is going to be key here. And of course, you could play those arpeggios the other direction too.

And then I thought I'd let you in on one more technique. Lots of times you might see that there are. There's a left Hand octave, and then there are two smaller chords after it. Oftentimes you'll be able to connect those chords so that you can place once and play twice. One of those things I love to do, place once, play twice. You'll see this written out on that PDF as well. But instead of just playing a simple triad like this, or like the ones we've been working on, the ceg, I'm going to play the octave and place the C, E, G. But then I'm going to play three and two together while I'm holding on with my thumb. Then replace my second finger and play one and two. So it sounds this way.

Right? You're placing once and then playing the bottom two notes and then the top two notes. This is a very handy technique to know to be able to place once, play twice. All right, so much for jumps. Let's move on to some arpeggios. Left hand accompaniments often have arpeggios in them. And the important thing about playing these arpeggios is that we want them to be clean, to be legato and to be smooth. They need to be sort of an undercurrent texture to the melody. Usually. Sometimes there are differences here, but often we want them to be just that. Gentle accompaniment doesn't mean they have to be soft, but it does mean that they do need that legato touch. They need that smoothness. They need to be clean and fairly noiseless. Not always easy to do when you're playing those nice thick bass strings. So remember too, that arpeggios are essentially broken chords. And so that most of the time, and I'll give you an important exception in a moment, most of the time, they need to be placed like a chord. In other words, you're going to place all those notes at once. This is particularly important when all the notes are just going in one direction.

Random. Just playing simple triads with an octave on the top and playing them. 4, 3, 2, 1. Place all those notes, they're going to work. Or maybe the arpeggio is going up and down.

Same thing. Place all those notes going up and then going down together, right? It'll keep it nice and clean.

Also, as you practice them, be sure that you're thinking about them as being lovely, not just.

Well, that was noisy and ugly, wasn't it? We want it to be legato and smooth and expressive in its way.

So you can work with it to create different sounds, different dynamic palettes, if you like. But think about making them legato, smooth and clean. That's what we're looking for. Now, a couple interesting ideas here. One is, we know that famous left hand chord, right, where you have the C, the G and the E, the root, the fifth, and then the third on the top.

It's nice as a chord, but it often will show up as an arpeggio.

You want to place this all at once too.

If you can. I realize that a tenth is kind of a big stretch for some people's hands. So if this is the accompaniment pattern that you see and you can't reach it all with your hand, place four and two together and practice placing four and two. Then after you play four, pivot up on your second finger to reach your thumb.

If you're having trouble reaching it, but you think you can, one little tip is to think about placing your second finger and then reaching outward from there. Get your second finger on the right string and see if you can get your fourth finger and your thumb on there. Don't think about placing from the bottom of that arpeggio because it'll leave your thumb further away and it has to do with your hand centering. Again, when you think about the center of that arpeggio, it's going to be your second finger might not be the exact note center, but that's where you're going to want it. So think about where your second finger goes and then position your hand around that, and you may have a little bit more success with that. And then, of course, there's the arpeggio cross under right, where your left hand plays a pattern perhaps like this.

It's an arpeggio with extra notes on the top. And there are different ways to finger this, and depending on the situation, you might like one or another. But there may be some specific fingering that feels more appropriate in a given circumstance. What I suggest you do is practice this. I'm just playing CGC and then a D and an E, so I just have two single notes on the top, almost like a little scale. I would suggest that you practice connecting it all instead of jumping, which may be a good choice in some circumstances, but practice connecting it because it's good for your left hand. And there are two fingerings that I suggest you practice, and I would do both of them just to give you some extra flexibility. So you're going to start with four and two on the bottom. This is my C and my G. My thumb is on the C and I'm going to cross under with my second finger and play two and one on the D and the E. So C, G, C, D E is 42121.

You also might try crossing under with three and playing 4:2, 1, 3:1, or even something I particularly like, 4:2:1, 3:2. Not putting your thumb on the top.

It can give you a very gentle last note. I will warn you that the 421-32- fingering will require you to move your hand a little bit more than the 31 or the 2 1. You'll feel it. Remember to think about that centering of your hand. But practicing your left hand arpeggios always important. I just told you a moment ago that placing all those notes at once was key. And it is. But of course, only if the notes go in the same direction. You don't want to place around the corner, is the way I call it. If the notes are going up, then down, then up, then down, you only want to place all the notes that are going in the same direction at any one time. So in the next pattern, that is an arpeggiated pattern and, and is so important for our left hand because it's so typical, you're actually only going to place the next note. You're only going to place one note ahead at a time. And that pattern is the Alberti bass pattern. The Alberti bass pattern is a broken arpeggio pattern and it was named after Domenico Alberti, who was a composer who lived in the first half of the 18th century and used it extensively. He didn't invent it, he wasn't the first to use, but it got named after him anyway. And you will know it when you hear it. It's just this.

Right? So I'm playing, in this case, a C major triad, C and E and G. But I'm playing the C, then the G, then the E, then the G. And an easy way to think of the Alberti bass pattern is that it's low, high, medium, high, low, high, medium high. And I'm fingering it, of course, the. The easy way, right? 3, 1, 2, 1.

This pattern is something that the left hand needs to be accustomed to because it shows up all the time. And if you ever improvise, it's extremely useful because it will work for everything from a Mozart sonata to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. You can use it for everything. So the Alberti bass pattern is one that needs to be very clean, very clear. You want it to be noiseless. So when you are practicing this, and you can do it just the same way we've been practicing everything else, just practice it up the scale in triads, you can practice it in inversions as well.

And on the PDF you'll see that there's a little four bar phrase that uses some different chord patterns with the Alberti bass. But you want to practice closing your fingers and making it very clean so that there's no extra finger noise. And to prevent the finger noise, think about having no extra finger motion. You just play and close, open and place, play and close, open and place. And you can only place the next finger because you're changing directions all the time. So you will only ever have two fingers on it every at any given time. The one that's playing or about to play and the one that's going to play right after. So that's the Alberti bass pattern. And don't worry too much about the placing order. It's going to be very intuitive for you. Just remember, you're not trying to grab everything at once. You just want to take it as it comes and play and place the next note. That's the Alberti base pattern. Loads of fun to experiment with and a great thing for your left hand. Our last technique for today is actually left hand melody. There's not a specific drill to practice this, but yet we need to practice it because when it shows up, we want our left hand to be able to just jump right into it and not be struggling to play a beautiful line. So what I suggest for practice is this. When you're doing hands separately, practice anyway and your right hand's playing a lovely melody, work on it with your right hand and then work on that same melody an octave lower, perhaps with your left hand. Try to make your left hand just as beautiful as your right hand. When you can get your left hand used to playing melodies, then you don't have to worry when they show up in your music, right? So keep that left hand melody going. In general, I think it's a good idea that anything that you practice with your right hand, you practice with your left hand. So be sure that if you're practicing scales and arpeggios and chords with your right hand, do those same scales, arpeggios and chords with your left hand so that your left hand gets a workout that's similar at least to the workout that your right hand is getting, it will do so much for your left hand and for your own confidence as a player too. So, left hand, we're going to have it step up this week. Remember to look at those show notes for everything that you need to help you with this episode, there's the blog post that talks about three strategies for left hand Fluency that will be very helpful for giving you some pointers about practicing your left hand with melodies in mind. Of course there's the free resource with the left hand Techniques practice sheet that you will find useful and and just for you teachers, there's that link. Also to find out more and register for our one day Teacher Accreditation Seminar. I'm really excited about this seminar, so if you are a teacher, please go to that page, check it out and I hope you want to register so that I can share all these goodies with you next week on the podcast. I'm talking about the role of gesture in harp playing and not just those raises that I learned as a Salzado Method student, right? He called those aesthetic gestures in his writing we often call them raises. But you know, any variety of those, right? The lifts, the things that we do with our body that may be related to the music, at least we hope they are. But what kind of a role do they play in in our performance and in our playing? Either from an audience perspective or from a player's perspective. It's interesting and important to think about. So that's what we'll be talking about on next week's podcast. In the meantime, 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.