7 Skills That Mark Your Growth - PHH 094

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I, although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show. If you're into computer games, you know it's all about getting to the next level. Well, even if you're not into computer games, you probably know what I mean. Many computer games are built in levels, and moving to the next higher level requires the player to complete certain tasks or amass a specific number of treasures or experience points. And until you can complete all the tasks, find all the treasure, and do it in the time allotted without using up all of your game lives in the process, you can't move on. You're stuck at that level.

Lots of gamers, I might even venture to say most gamers get a little obsessed in the attempt to move up. They play the game over and over again, looking for the secret sequence or the hidden treasure that will give them access to the next level. What I find interesting about this phenomenon is that it is so similar to getting to the next level in harp playing. Now, I know you didn't think you had much in common with hardcore gamers, but you might want to think again. Both are solitary pursuits which require determination and focus. Success is exhilarating, a lack of progress is frustrating, and there's always that next level. One advantage I see for gamers is that eventually they can win the game. There's that final level that when you conquer it, makes you indisputably a master of the game. Music doesn't have an endpoint built into it. There is always a next level.

Well, on today's show, I'm going to share with you my ideas on the specific skills you need. That's harp skills. You need to level up in your harp playing. Now, similar to a computer game, each major advancement in your harp study will involve Conquering key skills. And just like in a game, until you master those skills, you can't move on successfully. Unlike a computer game, though, you can try to move on, but you will find that progress is discouragingly slow. But if you know what key skills you need for that next level, you can forget the frustration and move up quickly. As I mentioned on last week's show, we have a little challenge going for the entire month of March over in the Harp Math Hub. If you haven't heard of the Hub yet, the Hub is our free online community. It's sort of like social media, but it's just for Harp. And there are no, you know, no pictures of your lunch, no discussions of anything else. It's just Harp and it's our platform, so there's no advertisement, no sneaky data stealing, and it's really Harp, social media, and just about nothing else. So. But we've got challenges, we've got videos, we've got lots of conversation, and it's a really terrific group that's been already involved in the Hub and working on things. But we have a challenge there. It's a free challenge. All you have to do is join the Hub. Doesn't take anything but registering to join the Hub. And the challenge is the entire month of March, and it's about little practice skills, little tweaks that you can make. It's all about the little things in this challenge. Every week there's a new one. It's a very simple little step, and all you have to do to complete the challenge is just let us know that you did. All the directions are there. It's really, really simple. And you'll find the challenge easy, easy and fun. And there are lots of people there to do it with you, which is even more fun. Right? So I'd love you to hop on over to the Hub, join the conversation, join the challenge if you like. I'm not going to tell you everything about what's in the challenge because it's more fun when you do it step by step. So get on in there and, and enjoy the challenge. It's running the entire month of March, and then next month we'll have a new one for you. But this will help you find those things, those make those tiny little tweaks that can make your practice and your playing even more fun. But right now we want to talk about the important things that are going to get your playing to the next level. Think back if you can, and try to remember when you first started the Harp, those very first harp lessons. You had. And if you started a long time ago, you may be reaching back into the dim recesses of your memory. But if you started more recently, that might not be quite so hard a task. But think about it, right? You learned how to sit at the harp, how to position the harp, how to hold your arms and your hands, how to position your music stand. You tried those first few passes at the strings, whether it was a glissando or a little beginning scale, all those things we brand new and they all were tricky. Trying to close your fingers and then trying to make all that work while you were looking at the music, right, There were notes on the page and you had to associate the notes on the page with the strings on the harp and get the right finger. And then you had to learn about placing. And there was so much to learn, so many new skills. And of course, some of those skills that we learned right at first or were exposed to right at first are things that we still work with at any every stage of our heart playing, right? Remembering to refine our technique and check our technique for those very basic things, remembering to close our fingers and note reading. All that good stuff happens early on and throughout our heart playing lifetime.

But you might remember that one of the first skills that was sort of a watershed moment for you.

Was when you first encountered hands together playing. Now, in very early harp studies, lots of times the hands play together, but they play the same thing an octave apart. But when you finally get to the point where your hands are doing different things at the same time, it's a challenge. And for lots of us, it stays a challenge all the way through our heart playing.

A different kind of a challenge perhaps, but a challenge nonetheless. I mean, it is tricky. And as I have often said, a right hand plus a left hand does not equal hands together. So that, you know, the, the right hand might know its part, the left hand might know its part, but putting them hands together is not a given just because you can play both parts. Hands together is a totally separate process and it needs to be learned and practiced as its own process. Hands separately playing is for checking things and, you know, maybe just making sure you've got the right fingering and the right rhythm and all that good stuff. But hands together playing is really where the rubber meets the road. This is a level up skill. Granted, it happens at a lot of levels. So at the very first levels of heart playing, your hands together skills are going to be basic, right? Simple rhythms and simple fingerings. The more advanced you get, the more different the Lines become the right hand line and the left hand line. And the more of a challenge it is to put them hands together. So hands together at many different places in your heart. Playing is a leveling up skill, which is why I mentioned it first. If hands together playing is slow for you, if it's difficult for you, this is an area where you can do some extra work and make that level come to you just a little bit faster, you'll move toward the level a little bit faster. Hands together playing is an essential part of music learning. It is the thing that we harpists need to do in order to learn our music. Our hands have to be able to work together. It's a key skill in sight reading. If your hands don't work almost automatically independently of each other, and coordinate well one with the other, sight reading is going to be nearly impossible. I've had students come to me complaining about their sight reading, saying I need to be able to learn music faster or sight read it faster. And the difficulty really is that their hands together coordinate coordination is not at the level it should be for what they would like to do.

So what do you do about your hands together playing? Well, here's the thing. If you're struggling with hands together playing, it's probably that you're not doing enough of it soon enough in your learning process. So here are some things that you can try.

First of all, when you're starting a new piece or when you're starting your practice for the day on a particular piece, start it hands together, not hand separately. Start thinking about hands together as your normal practice mode and hands separately, the sort of remedial practice mode. If you need to check something or work out a particular fingering or a particular rhythm, that's great for hands separately practice. That's a perfect way to use it. But most of your practice and most of your playing should be done hands together.

And I'm guessing that if hands together playing is still really slow for you, you're balancing your practice the other way. So try turning that around. Do 90% of your practice hands together.

And 10% hands separately. See what that does. Or you could try sight reading hands together daily. If your skills are just a little bit better, but you want to keep improving them, sight reading is a great way to work on that because you need to sight read hands together.

Exercise and etude books obviously are a great way to do this.

But just remember, the basic.

Way to practice hands together playing is simply to do it. Now, there are lots of skills and drills and all that Sort of stuff that go with it. And this isn't the podcast for that. We will talk about that. But the basic rule here is if you want to play better hands together, you need to make sure that most of your practice is hands together practice.

So that's why we started with that skill. I think it's the biggest level up kind of skill followed quickly by note reading.

It's amazing to me how many times somebody's treble clef reading, for instance, will be fabulous. It'll be quick and fast and the bass clef note reading will be lagging behind. And lots of times there's a good reason for that. You know, maybe they played a treble clef instrument and bass clef is kind of new for them and that's okay.

But it is a level up skill. So you can work at your note reading easily enough by taking just a couple minutes in your practice every day and saying the names of the notes as you play them. This is a great time to use hands separately practice. You can say the notes of one line of your music as you play it, play the left hand and say those notes as you play it, play the right hand and say those notes as you play it. Or of course, my very favorite drill, play one hand and say the notes of the other. Even better. A great note reading skill and a terrific way to level that skill up. You'll be amazed at the difference it makes in your playing.

And level up skill. Number three goes with that. And that's counting. I know counting seems really basic, right? It seems like one of those sort of baby skills. And why would this be a level up skill? Well, first let me tell you that every professional musician counts. You have to count. Now, if you're playing a wind instrument, you're not counting out loud. If you're singing, you're not counting out loud. But counting out loud is a huge advantage, and we harpists have lots of disadvantages when it comes to playing our instruments. So the fact that we can count aloud should be counted among our advantages and we should exploit it, use it to the fullest. So what's the deal with counting? Well, counting helps keep your place in the music because it helps you know where you are in the measure. This can also be a very valuable memorization tool because if you are counting while you're playing, your mind will continue to track that counting when you're playing from memory. And it will help you keep your place back that way too.

Counting aloud can help you spot rhythmic mistakes. It can help you notice what's going on things that, oh, you know, look at that. I thought I was playing the right thing, but now as I count it, I realize that I'm playing that one measure twice as fast as the as the others. Counting can help you fix that.

Counting is also wonderful for helping you remember the subdivisions of the beat, right? Because a quarter note isn't just a quarter note. It's also worth 2 8th notes or 4 16th notes. And you need to be sure that all of those subdivisions are included in that quarter note. And counting will help you do that. So if you don't count, start counting now because you're. It's going to be terrific. It's also, of course, an absolute essential if you play in any kind of ensemble, whether it's a harp ensemble, a harp circle, or an orchestra, or you're accompanying another instrumentalist or a vocalist. When you count, you know where you are and you're being a responsible chamber musician. So counting is really important. If you are not comfortable with it, get comfortable with it. There's no substitute for it. And in the same vein here, a metronome does not substitute for counting. A metronome will help you count beats that are evenly spaced, right? It will help you count those beats in the right place. And it's an important tool, but it's not a substitute for counting. So that's something you need to do. Now, those first three skills all seem very basic, but they are very important facets of not just our musicianship, the way counting is, but are very important. Harp skills, playing hands together, being able to read the notes quickly enough that we can learn our music faster. And sight read more, faster, more faster. Sight read faster.

So apparently not talk better. Okay, so those first three are pretty basic skills, but supremely important. But let's go on to some others that you might not have thought of or maybe you have. One of the levelers that I talk about often are four note chords.

When we start playing the harp, we play, you know, one note at a time and then we get around to two notes at a time and it's a big deal. And we learn two notes at a time because our second finger and thumb need to learn how to play well in opposition, right? How each one needs to move and how they balance your hand.

And once you've learned that, it's not so tough. And then you put a third finger with it and play those three finger chords. It's a nice move up in your heart playing because all of a sudden stuff sounds lush and it sounds full in A way that it didn't before. 3 note chords are great.

4 note chords are way better. 4 note chords are the real lush harp chords, those ones that just sound so magnificent, but they are exponentially more difficult than three note chords.

I've had harpists come to me and say, well, I don't understand why I can't play these chords well, these four note chords, because I play these three note chords just fine. And then I explain that four note chords are way harder to get. That fourth finger on the string is very much more difficult. Particularly because usually the fourth finger that we're putting on the string is indeed our fourth finger. And they're not always very strong and they're not always very coordinated and they'll often misplay or misplace. So four note chords are hard. And if you want to level up, what you need to do is start practicing those four note chords. You can even practice the bottom three notes of the chord and then the top three notes of the chord and then put all four notes together. There are plenty of drills in the world about how to play four note chords and how to sort of step up to them from three note chords.

But they are important.

So much harp music, no matter what style of harp music you like or what genre you like to play, so much of it is built on four note chords. You can do a lot with three note chords, but four note chords are magnificent. And this is a skill to work at. Don't let it daunt you. Just know that you can learn four note chords the way you learn anything else in your harp playing and get to work. If you're a My Heart Mastery member, we have plenty of themes and calls and exercises about four note chords because it's the big level up skill. So you can take a look at those and see what you think.

Number five on my list of seven skills is playing faster. You knew this was going to come up, didn't you?

We just sometimes need to play fast. And if you're not playing fast regularly in your practice, it's always going to feel intimidating and feel out of control and feel too fast. The fact is that the first time we play something fast that we've been playing slow, it is going to be out of control, it is going to be sloppy, it's not going to be the way we want it.

But that's how we learn the coordination. That's how we tell our fingers what we need them to do. And many times you'll find that the things you thought were difficult in your piece turn out not to be the real difficulty. They turn out to be much easier. And you might find that other things are a little more challenging. When you change the tempo, you change the parameters of the problems, you change the challenges.

So you need to play fast. And you can't just, you know, keep dipping your toenail into the water and hoping that, you know, one day you'll get your whole foot wet and then maybe you'll get up to your ankle and then maybe someday up to your knee. You need to embrace the disaster that comes when you start to play at a faster tempo and just get in there and try it. You can always play slowly again, and I would encourage you to do that in the same practice session. Play it. Try something at your goal tempo. See what it's really going to feel like. Even if it means you stop every measure or every half measure to sort of catch your breath and figure out where you are. It's going to give you an idea of where you need to go and then you can step it back. But you need to practice playing faster. And until you let go of the slow and start to embrace that faster tempo, you're not going to get to play some of the music you want the way you want. Playing faster is a level up skill.

So, believe it or not, is rolling cords. Rolling cords seems pretty clear cut, and we do it from fairly early on in our harp studies, but it's hard to do it well. And studying how to roll a chord and making sure that you can roll it evenly and roll it on time.

Is an important skill. Now, of course, I realize I just covered that skill. So if you're looking to improve your rolled chords, go back a couple of podcast episodes, I think it was episode 92, and take a look at the quick fix for rolling chords. Once you can roll chords beautifully and confidently and they become part of your expressive palette in your playing, the world opens up in a brand new way for you. So don't be afraid to roll your cords.

Speaking of rolling, it's time for a drum roll because we're going to talk about the last skill that is necessary for leveling up. Now, fair warning here, it's not the only other skill, but it's a biggie and it might be one that's been a challenge for you. So drumroll, please. The last skill that we're going to talk about today for leveling up your playing is learning how to finish a piece. Ta da. Now, notice I didn't say finishing a piece. I said learning how to finish a Piece. Now, in learning how to finish a piece, you are going to finish one. But so many people stop before they actually finish, and then they wonder why they can't finish a piece. And it's really because you have to. With at least one piece to start with anyway. You've got to persevere to the end and actually finish it. So my recommendation is to take a piece that's below your current skill level, something that's fairly easy for you, and finish it, learn it, polish it, get it ready to play and play it. Because until you've taken a piece all the way from the messy middle to the finished stage and actually played it for someone, you won't have experienced exactly what you need to do to make that happen. It's a completely different process than just practicing a piece. Learning to finish it to the playing point is different, and you need to do that.

That's where the musicality is. That's where the flow of the piece is. That's where your control of the pieces. That's where your confidence in your own skill and in the music is.

That's where the real harp playing is, the kind that you've been wanting to do. It's in finishing a piece and whatever it takes. You need coaching. You need to find an easier piece to do. You need to find a piece to play it, but you need to finish a piece.

In fact, this is why Sharing our music is part of the Scale of Success curriculum. That's in my Harp Mastery for all you my harp mastery members. That's an important component of playing the harp, and we teach that right from the beginning because you need to be able to experience what finishing a piece is like. And then, of course, you get to keep it in your repertoire and you get to review it. And that's the fun part you get. Yes, you get to have that piece and play it and all that good stuff, but you need to learn how to finish it. So don't shy away from that. Finish stage, learn how to get through it. And to get the piece polished and familiar and comfortable and to perform it.

That is going to be a huge leveler for you. It's really going to help you move up and at any particular skill level in your playing, you don't have to be an advanced player to do this.

You just need to finish your pieces. You don't have to finish all of them, but you do need to finish one, and then you'll find out how much fun it is and you'll finish another one.

Okay, so those are My seven Leveling up skills. I would urge you to think about them and see which one feels like the skill that you want to work on. Now. There are plenty of resources for working on them. Certainly you can find resources at Harp Mastery and you can talk to your teacher about them. You can work with one of our certified coaches. They'd be thrilled to work with you on one of those skills. They know how important they are too.

There are plenty of resources. But when you choose one of those skills that you think you need to develop so that you can level up your playing and then you work on it and you find what waits for you at that new level of heart playing, you are going to be so glad you did and you're going to wonder what took you so long. That's okay. It's not too late to start now. And if you're looking for an accountability buddy, you might just find one in the Harp Mastery Hub. Please take advantage of that. Hop on over. It's a free resource. We're doing this for you. There's videos, we do live Q&As. There are challenges, there are tips, there's a lot of harp conversation, all with the annoying part of social media left out. None of that stuff at our Heart Mastery Hub.

You will find the link to join the Hub, by the way in the show notes here or right on the Harp Mastery homepage. It's easy to sign up and it's free. So do get in there and I will look forward to seeing you there. Now, all of this month we're looking at some of those key skills and we're going a little bit more in depth on some of them. Next week we are going to focus on finger facility. And yes, finger facility is all about speed, but it's also about flexibility. And as my good friend Suzanne likes to say, it's about finger smarts. So we're going to be talking about finger facility on the podcast next week. And until then, 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. I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. 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.