7 Ways to Place Chords: Beyond the Rules - PHH 258

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. When was the last time you took a moment to just play some chords on your harp and let yourself simply enjoy them? When you hear that rich resonant sound, you know that this was what your harp was meant to sound like. Perhaps hearing someone else play chords like that was why you decided to play the harp. It's goosebump territory for sure. You can feel it in your bones, in your core. I don't know that there is a more beautiful sonority than a big beautiful harp chord, perhaps lushly rolled, but I also know that there isn't a day that goes by that I don't have to stop in my practice to to check my chord placing to make sure I can play those chords the way I want. Just because they're beautiful doesn't mean they're easy, but you already know that. One of the first things we harpists learn about chords is that the key to a well-played chord is in the placing. Getting the right fingers on the right strings at the right time is the biggest hurdle we face. I'm reminded of a famous quote of J.S. Bach: "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." Now this seems to me to reveal an overdeveloped sense of humility where Bach is concerned. Playing an instrument is definitely not that simple. But when it comes to playing and placing chords, getting our fingers on the right strings at the right time is certainly a good place to start. Now today's show is indeed about placing chords, but I want to offer you a different perspective today. One that is less about the technique of placing chords and more about the musical situations that may call for strategic changes in the way we think about how and when to get our fingers on those right strings. In other words, I'm going to talk about when the usual right time isn't the right time. When you should consider breaking those rules that I know you worked so hard to learn in order to make your chords sound the way you want. So get ready to break or at least bend some rules today. Now I've talked about this topic before in more practical, down-to-earth sorts of ways. And I've put some resources in the show notes for you in case you want to check those out. One was an earlier podcast episode, a pretty recent one in fact. It was Episode 205, and it's called Placing Chords: How to Find the Right Strings the First Time. And you might find that very helpful because it's really practical. And if you want to look at some more ideas about placing chords, uh, there's a blog post in the archives that you might want to check out called How How to Play 4-Note Chords Without Finger Fumbles. So those are 2 resources that we have for you right on the website. And of course, if you want to experience the freedom that comes with really knowing how to place chords at the right time and getting some really personal, or, you know, definitely up close and personal sorts of insights from our coaches, you can become a My Heart Mastery member. If you're already a My Heart Mastery member, you know you can just search all the courses that we have on chords, and we've been talking a lot about those this month in our theme, our course that we've been studying. But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, there's so much there that helps you with these day-to-day kinds of things, these things that you really want to learn, because we have calls on these topics all the time. We're— they're video calls, and we archive them along with PDFs and worksheets and all kinds of stuff. So there's all sorts of resources there for you as a My Heart Mastery member, and you can get to them when you want. How's that for a deal? So if you want to check out My Heart Mastery membership, ah, I've put a link in the show notes there too. So definitely give that a look if you're not a member already. So you've got your podcast episode resource, you've got your blog post episode, or I don't know, blog post resource, there we go. And of course, all the resources we have inside the My Heart Mastery membership. But as I said, today we're talking about placing chords from a slightly different perspective. Perhaps one you haven't thought about before. Let's start out by acknowledging that placing chords is hard. Chords are hard. We're not just finding one string at a time. We're finding multiple strings at a time. And we have to find them not only at the same time but in time, right? So finding a chord with your hands, you're looking at the music, you're trying to manipulate all these sorts of things, and getting those fingers on the strings is hard. I wanted to start there because I want you to, to realize that what you're doing is difficult. I mean, I know you know that, but it's difficult for all of us. It's always a challenge. And yes, the more you play, the more years and the more experience, the more music you have under your felt, as it were, the, the easier it will be. The more accustomed your fingers will be to it, and we hope the more you'll be able to trust your fingers to do it on their own without your attention. But it's hard, and so I wanted to start by acknowledging that because I don't want you to think that I think this is an easy task, because it's not. We all struggle with this. It's just part of what we do. And you've heard me talk before about the difference between 3-finger chords and 4-finger chords and how chords with 4 fingers are so much more difficult than chords with 3 fingers. Another thing you know. But remember, this is the point: we want to be able to play those big chords, so we need to work at them. All right, we also know that in order to play chords well, you have to place them well. And in order to place them well, you need to be able to recognize those notes as a group, not just read them one at a time. If your right hand, for instance, is trying to get C, E, G, and C on the strings, we don't want to be reading a C and an E and then a G and then a C. We want to be able to look at that group of dots that are, that are stacked on top of each other on the staff, those notes. We to be able to look at them and say, "Yep, here they go." And there are a lot of ways to do this. Some people talk about, you know, finger sandwiches— looking at which fingers are close together, which are far apart. What does that shape look like? That can be helpful. Other people look at that and say, "Oh, C major chord!" And that's how they place it. Also helpful. There are any number of things that may be helpful for you personally at any given time. Could be one of those, could be something else. And actually, I'd like to tell you that it doesn't really matter what works for you. I think, for instance, that there's a lot to be gained by understanding what the chord is, to be able to just look at it and say, 'C major chord.' But if that's what you're doing— when I do that, for instance, maybe that's a better way to put it— when I look at a C major chord, my mind is so accustomed to that idea that it makes instant decisions based on that one little thing. Yeah, it's a C major chord, it's got this note on the top, this is the spacing, but a whole lot of pieces fall into place at a level that's not a conscious thought level. And so that, you know, the name C major chord and looking at the, the particular C major chord I have to play causes a lot of little, you know, gears to be set in motion mentally so that I can get my fingers on the right strings. And it happens nearly simultaneously, right? Nearly instantaneously. But maybe that's not the way that you really relate to chords, at least not quickly. So don't force yourself to go there. I mean, a little bit of knowledge is great, but it has to be useful for you. So if you look at it and you say, all right, you know, it's a C and it's got this spacing, and that spacing is what you see first, then go for that. But whatever system, whether it's one of those or something else, seems to work for you, I want you to realize that there's information to be gained by another system as well, so that you're not always relying on understanding what the chord is, or you're not only always relying on seeing those finger shapes and putting your fingers on the string, but you have a little bit more knowledge behind that too. So all of those things are helpful, maybe not all at the same time, but they give you multiple ways to put the information in so that you get the right playing out, right? So that your fingers can play the right notes. So all of those systems are good. They're all helpful. Anything we can do to get to the right strings at the right time is helpful. But placing chords isn't just about technique. If it were, if it were just about getting to the right strings at the right time, we'd be able to drill it and fix it. To a certain extent, we can, but what you'll find the further along you go in your harp journey is that sometimes the right way to do it, that technique that you've practiced, isn't exactly what you need because it doesn't fit the musical situation. Placing chords isn't just about doing it the same way every time. It's about making sure that the way you are placing the chords is allowing you to play them the way you want. So I'd like to, to help you shift your thinking just a little bit and think about the musical results that we're really looking for with our chords. We want them to contribute to the feeling of the piece, to the sound of the piece. We want them to be lush, if that's what we're looking for, or crisp, or gentle, or reflective, or emotional— whatever we want the chord to be, that's what we're looking for. And some chords are bigger, some are smaller. So sometimes you might have discovered this already, If a chord is very big, we might need to place it a little bit differently from one that fits nicely in our hands. And if a chord is really close together, if the notes are very close together, we might find that our usual method of placing is just a little bit messy and we end up bumping into the strings. So if we want to think about the musicality of the chord, We need to think a little bit about how we're going to play it, what it's going to sound like when it's there. And we need to think about how we're going to approach it. Can we make it clean and fairly noiseless? You know, not with a lot of buzzing or a lot of fumbling around. Getting to those right strings calmly and efficiently, that's going to be helpful. So think about what those musical results would be. And then you can actually play the chord by itself out of context and see what you need to do to make that chord sound the way you want. This is about listening. This is about thinking about that bigger musical picture. But that's where we want to end up, so that's where we really need to start. So it's not just about making sure your placing is correct. It's about making sure your placing is correct for the results that you want. Now you may be thinking, "Well, why would normal placing need to be anything different? Why might I need to do some other kind of placing?" Well, because we might have too much noise. We might not be able to reach the chord. The chord may be awkward for us to play, or it may be more challenging for us to read and to learn, or it could just be that getting to that chord from what we're playing before is a little bit more tricky. So what I'd like to suggest for you is to think about what that chord needs to do, particularly if it's a chord that you know you're struggling a little bit to have come out right, that you're not getting there on time, or that you're not playing it well when you do get there if you're trying to keep it in tempo. Think about what it needs to sound like and what it's sounding like now. What needs to change in order to make it sound the way it's supposed to sound? And it— you might be saying, well, um, I somehow need to be able to I can't get to this big reach in my left hand, or I'm not playing the right note with my thumb, my right thumb all the time, or I can't find the middle two notes. My second and third finger don't seem to know what to do. If something like that is an issue, it can be solved perhaps just by, you know, paying attention to how we place. But there might be other choices. And so if the usual placing isn't working for you— and that is always the best place to start— if that's not working, you need to know what else you could do that will still allow you to get to the right strings at the right time and play them in the right way. And that may involve bending some of the usual placing rules. Now, just so that we could talk about them easily, I came up with sort of 7 different ways to look at placing chords, and any or all of these might be helpful to you at one time or another. So let's start with the first one, which is the one that we know and I hope love, and that is getting all your fingers on the strings at once. I'm talking about just, you know, your hand is in one place, and when you're ready for the chord, all 4 fingers— if that's the number of fingers that this chord requires— all of those fingers go on the right strings right at the same time. This is a very efficient way of placing because you're just getting everything there, and it takes the least amount of time. You see it, You place it and you can play it. And this goes for whether you're placing just a chord in one hand or whether you're placing a chord that— where you've got chords in both hands, be a better way to say that. So where you've got, you know, 2 chords at once, right? Place all 8 notes together. That is the best way to place. That is the rule. It will give you the fastest placing. It will give you the cleanest placing. And 99 times out of 100, or perhaps even more than that, it will be the best choice. This is why we practice it, and this is why you really want to train your fingers in this. Do those chord drills. I know you've got them someplace. They're really helpful, really, really useful. But it's not the only choice. If you're having trouble for whatever reason, and it might be the context of the music, if you're not able to get all those fingers there at once, Or if that's just noisier than you want for some reason, these other 6 ways are things you can try. The first one, or really the second way to place chords, would be try placing the top note first. This is very good for a right-hand chord where your right-hand thumb is the melody note. Chances are you can see that note and you can get that on there first. And then get the other fingers on immediately after. Don't let them draggle onto the strings one at a time. That's not what we want. But if you need to place that thumb just a smidgen ahead of the other fingers, it may give you a good landmark and a really good way to place the chord. This is also helpful for left-hand chords that are very large. Sometimes reading all the way down to the bottom of the staff. Not that it's hard, not that we don't know what those notes are, but sometimes the music we're looking at has so much going on that we feel like as we're practicing we don't have time to look to the bottom note of the chord. So start with the top note. Place that left hand thumb and reach down. Once again, don't reach down note by note. That is never a good idea— placing a chord one note at a time. Could possibly work for an arpeggio as an emergency fingering, but not for a chord. But putting that thumb on just that tiny fraction of a moment ahead of time will be helpful. Now, I started with the top note first. A lot of people would have started saying, oh, well, try placing the bottom note of the chord first. And so this is my Method number 3. This is also very helpful. It covers sort of different circumstances. The bottom note, particularly of the left hand, can give you that nice strong base and a good foundation, and it can work very well to get the bottom note first. So that's something to definitely try. The right hand, maybe not so much, but even so, I have at times I thought if I could get my right hand 4th finger on, I can stretch up as far as I need with my thumb to get that on. So once again, placing that bottom note first could help you really find where you're going. So that's another, another thing to try. Once again, don't let your fingers creep on one by one. Just get that 4th finger on or that bottom note, whatever it is. Aim for that one first and get the others on immediately after. A lot of this is about aiming, so I should probably take a moment and just explain that, that it's not that you are absolutely just placing that note as much as it is you're aiming for that with your finger and to a certain extent with your eye. You can even keep your eyes on the music. That's okay because you know that you're focused on that note. And maybe your 4th finger has to hit an E, so you can focus on that E and then stretch to the rest of the shape of the chord. That can be a really helpful way to sort of get your hand where it needs to be without all the clutter, the mental clutter of trying to read all of the notes in the chord. Do you see the difference here? It's not just about placing one finger first. It's really about aiming for that one finger and trusting your other fingers to find the shape or the rest of the notes. And the more secure you can be in your aim for that one note, the more secure the rest of the chord is likely to be. But you have to try these out because there's no one right solution for everything. All right, so we've looked at everything all at once. We've looked at the top note first, the bottom note first. You can also consider if you have a hands-together chord, try placing the hands not together but one hand before the other. This is actually a practice technique that I use when I've got a lot of 2-hand chords, a whole passage maybe of 2-hand chords, I will help myself learn it by practicing the chords in alternation. Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand. And placing them alternately. And then going back and placing right hand first and then left hand. And this gives me a chance to read the chords and see the notes without having to place all 8 notes at once. So that's a practice technique that I use. But it could be helpful in a musical context as well. If you have an 8-note chord, aim for one hand and let the other one get on ever so slightly after if it needs to. But just aim for one. You've got two hands you want to, want to get on there. Trust one of them. Probably trust your right hand. Look for your left hand and let your right hand try to find the strings on its own. So much of the harp playing is training our fingers and our hands to do what they— what we want them to do without our looking at them. And this is one instance of that. So that was number 4. We're going to take a chord that was a hands-together chord and focus on one hand and let the other one fend for itself. Okay, all right, now let's talk about a couple ways that are really good if you're having trouble making a chord clean, you know, that things are buzzing and you're not quite, you know, you're not happy with the way the chord sounds. I would suggest that if there's a note in the chord that is buzzing, it's like, ah, this one, I always hit this with my fingernail, you know, this is the one note that's always wrong, try aiming for that note first. Try placing that note first. If your third finger is the one that's causing the buzz, get your third finger on there a fraction of a second before everything else. Once again, this is less a matter really of placing than it is a matter of focus. If the third finger is buzzing, we're going to focus on the third finger, get it on the strings, and then let everything else get on around it. So placing that note that's buzzing first will often help you clear up that buzz. Now I'll warn you, it may cause another finger to buzz, and that's part of the process. You can, you know, once you've cleaned up your 3rd finger, you don't have to continually place that 3rd finger first. You get to move on. If that's made your 4th finger buzz, well, now let's focus on the 4th finger and let's work at that one too. And this will help you place all of the notes more accurately. You see, buzzing is caused by inaccurate placing. The more accurate our placing is, the more direct it is on the string, and the less it's wobbling and hitting other strings, the more intentional it is, the less buzzing we get. So if you're getting a lot of buzzing, this is what we're trying to correct. We need to correct your placing. And yes, placing all fingers at a time is terrific. It's an ideal, but sometimes we can train your fingers to be more accurate by placing the notes that need more accuracy first. And that's what all of these techniques have been about when you think about it. So I'm going to offer you another one. We talked about the top note and the bottom note, but what if you placed the inner notes first? Say you've got a 4-finger chord. We talked about placing your thumb or placing your 4th finger. But what about 2 and 3? Particularly in chords where 2 and 3 are right next to each other, where they're playing adjacent strings, it can sometimes be challenging to read those chords pretty quickly and to decipher what those middle notes are. So just placing those inner notes, aiming for them, focusing on them, and getting them on the strings cleanly before you worry about thumb and 4 can be really, really helpful. You can do this as a drill where you actually place 2 and 3 and then 1 and 4 so that it's, you know, it's almost like placing twice, right? Because you're going to go 2, 3, 1, 4 instead of just 2, 3, 1, 4. Do you see what I mean? A little hard to explain, but if you take time after you've placed 2, 3 to then place 1 and 4 accurately, that's a really good placing drill. If you're just trying to solve a placing issue, aim for 2 and 3. Aim them on the strings and let 1 and 4 find the strings right after that. Once again, we're trying to keep the placing as close to simultaneous as we can, but you're really aiming for those inner notes first. The inner notes is a great way to to help decipher chords that have unusual shapes. It can be a really powerful way to do that. And I'll tell you, if you've got a series of chords where the shapes change a lot and they're different, and maybe they have a lot of chords where there are pairs of notes that are on adjacent strings that are right next to each other, you can go through that chord passage and just play the notes that are right next to each other. With whatever fingers come up. That can be very helpful for learning the notes in that passage. Just as a little extra here. Now the last way I'm going to tell you about today for placing chords is this: What if you didn't place it? Okay, that sounds a little bit, you know, a little bit like I'm breaking all the rules here. And I'm really not, but I'll explain that in a second. It's not that I want you to put your fingers on the string one at a time. That's not what I'm talking about. But if instead of thinking about placing the chord and then playing it, what if you thought about just grabbing the strings? You're sort of diving onto the strings, and the moment your fingers touch the strings, you play the chord. Yes, this is more like grabbing than placing. And there's a— we don't want you to have to compromise the way you're actually playing the strings. When you get to the strings, we still want your fingers to close and to play with all the proper technique, all that stuff. But rather than thinking about my hand is in the air, my hand is on the strings, my hand is playing the strings, we're gonna cut that middle step out and just say, my hand is in the air, my hand is touching the strings and playing them at the same time, just diving right in and playing them one fell swoop, as it were. That kind of grab and play— we're just gonna dive bomb in and play them the second we get there— can be a lifesaver. First of all, it's very quick, right? We're not placing and then playing, we're placing and playing all at once. Which is really what you do in a faster chord passage. We don't want our fingers just kind of waiting on the strings before we play them. They need to get on the strings and then they need to get off the strings. There's really not a lot of extra time. So if you think about this as grabbing— oh, there's got to be a better word— but if you think about it as dive-bombing in and then touching the string and playing them at the same time, You will have very speedy chords. As I said, you have to watch your technique so that you're still playing them well and not just, you know, playing with, with tension or with whatever part of your finger hits the strings. But you can practice diving in, getting there, playing, and getting back out, sort of like a surgical strike. Yes, so That kind of placing is actually precisely what we want because your fingers are going to go to the right strings. They're going to play the strings as soon as they get there, so they're not going to be able to fumble around and look for a different string. They've got to get in there and play and get out, and the only way they can do that is to place all at once, which is where we started, right? But with a slightly different emphasis. Now, instead of placing all those fingers at once and then playing, you, you have to place them all at once because you're going to play as soon as you get there. This is also a really interesting technique for just finding out which finger really isn't getting to the strings, because if you do this technique, you'll know instantly which finger is not getting there on time. Because it just won't be able to play. And that can be the first step in solving whatever is uneven about your chord and correcting the placing and the notes. All right, so we've talked about placing them all at once. We talked about focusing first on the top note, then on the bottom note, alternating a hands-together chord where you're thinking about placing those hands one after the other instead of together. We talked about placing the buzzy note first or the inner notes first. And we finished up with just dive-bombing into the strings, that surgical strike technique where you dive in and play them almost at the same time your finger hits the string, which is a terrific way. It's one of my favorites because you know instantly what isn't working and you can fix it so easily with one of the other, with one of the other techniques. So now you have sort of a repertoire of things to try with your chords, and I want to just make a couple quick points and make sure that you heard this part of what I wanted to tell you today. First of all, this is really not about a change to the placing rules, as fun as that sounds, but it's really about where you're focusing and how to put your focus on different notes of the chord so that you can place it more easily, so that you can see what you need to see in order to get on the strings Faster, right strings, right time, right? So it's really about focus. But beyond that, we're doing this because we want to play the chords the way we want to hear them. Remember, this is at heart about thinking musically, about listening to what we're doing, about opening your ears to what the music is saying, opening your mind to to research and explore possibilities for how to make it sound the way you want, not just trying to fix it. It's a very different mindset, and you can elevate yourself to that mindset as you're working through this. Remember, it's about how the chord sounds. That's what we're trying to do. So I would like to offer you this little question to sort of challenge you a little bit as you consider this material. What would you do differently if you thought of a chord as this beautiful sonority rather than just as a hurdle that you had to jump, something that you had to do correctly? What would you do differently if you were remembering the musical focus and intent of a chord? Kind of fun to think about, right? And it gives everything you do just a slightly different edge, and one that is rooted exactly, I think, where we want to be in the music itself. All right, now next week we're talking about something a little bit different, but something that's not unrelated because it's about a mindset thing. And if you are a perfectionist, if you consider yourself a perfectionist, or if you're just not a perfectionist but you feel like sometimes you've gotten stuck in that practice circle where you go around practicing, practicing, and it never seems to get right, we're going to be talking about when right is actually wrong, about how too much right can actually stifle your progress. So we're going to be talking about what that is and how to deal with that. And, uh, I've got sort of a, a brand new framework, a different way to think about it. So we'll be talking about that here on the podcast next week. Uh, remember, we've got those extra resources in the show notes. And of course, if you're ready for a deeper dive on this topic and on any kind of harp topic like this, we've got all that waiting for you inside the My Heart Mastery membership. And I would love for you to come and join us. I put that link in the show notes too, or you can find it at harpmastery.com. So with that, I'd like to remind you 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. Thanks so much 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.