8 Tips for Perfect Lever Or Pedal Pushing - PHH 125

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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. I'm a pusher, and I hope you are one too. A lever or pedal pusher, that is. Just imagine a world of harps without levers or pedals. Certainly there are folk harps that don't have levers and still play beautiful music, but to me that's a little like living in the forest. There's endless beauty in the forest, but I like the seashore and the prairies too. The world of music has so much harmonic richness, and I really love having my pedal harp to explore it all. Of course, that harmonic richness isn't exclusive to harps with pedals. Lever harps can play music every bit as chromatically varied as pedal harps, and sometimes even more easily. But perhaps you're new to the world of pushers of harp music, either lever or pedal music with accidental changes that require pushing a lever or pedal. If so, or even if you're not a newbie to pushing but would like some help with ways to improve your pedal or lever technique, then you're in luck, because that's what we're talking about today. So often students don't really learn to push those levers or pedals before they're playing music that calls for them. It's not just about pushing the right lever or pedal. The art is in knowing when and how to push. You may not have tried any drills to help you learn the right technique, but plenty of these drills exist. Unfortunately, not all of those helpful drills come with an explanation of the important aspects of this technique. Even fewer attempt to unravel the mysterious and very inconsistent ways. The changes are marked in music. But never fear, my friend, by the end of today's episode, you will have all the info you need to become an intrepid pusher. Accidentals, those flats, naturals and sharps that occur in the middle of a piece don't have to cause accidents while you play. And I have eight, eight tips and maybe even an extra one or two that will help you breeze through those changes with ease. I love talking about stuff that helps you breeze through something with ease. I love making things easier for you, and I hope you know that by this time. So with that in mind, I would like to invite you to a new webinar that I have coming up in less than two weeks from the day this episode airs. It's coming up on Wednesday, October 18, and it's called Cut to the Time Saving Harp Hacks. You need to know Now, I know hacks we think of those evil computer hackers. Well, there are good computer hackers too, but a hack is really something that just saves you time and energy. It's a shortcut. And in this particular case, what we're talking about are the right ways to learn things so that you don't spend more time trying to do it than you need. There's that gap right between the stuff that you think you need to know and probably the only stuff that you actually do need to know in order to get something done. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but I certainly have. I sort of work out a solution to a problem that I've got and then I run into somebody later on and I tell them about this wonderful solution I worked out. And they said, they tell me, well, you know, yeah, really all you needed to do was to do this. And it's like, oh darn, I never thought of that. So the nice thing about HARP stuff is that you've got somebody to talk to, namely me, who has been through this a couple of times and been able to work through the best solutions, not just any old solution, but the ones that really help you get stuff done quickly. So that's what we're going to be talking about today on my webinar. That's Cut to the Chase. And it's coming up on Wednesday, October 18th. It's at 7:30 Eastern PM and have no fear, if you register for the webinar, you will be able to not only get the the PDF webinar guide that goes along with it, but also seven days of access to the replay. So that Even if you can't make it live, you'll still be able to get all this good information and all those wonderful hacks that will, that will help you speed things along for yourself. So please, you will find the link to register for the webinar in the show notes for today's episode. You will also find it on the homepage@harpmastery.com and I certainly hope that you are able to join us for that. So today our harp hacks are all about petals and levers. So I'd like to start with just a little story. I'll tell you about my first experience with a petal harp. Now, I started the harp when I was 8 years old and I started on a troubadour harp. So that is a lever harp made by Lion Healy. And I played that harp and it was, you know, it was everything I wanted. I wanted to play the harp. And there, that was my very first harp. I had been studying piano for at that point already four years, so I knew quite a bit about music and I progressed pretty quickly on the harp. So by the time I'd had that troubadour harp for only eight months, my teacher decreed that it was time for me to move to a pedal harp, which was even more exciting. But I was still only 8 years old and not, you know, not a grown up. So a petal harp was big for me. Not just a big deal, but a little bit taller than I was. I'm not a short person by any stretch of the imagination, and I was a pretty tall kid, but a petal harp was still bigger than I was. So we got my first petal harp, which was a line Healey style 15, which was one of their smaller petal harps, but still bigger than I was. And, um, they got me a high stool to sit on so I wouldn't be sitting quite so low. So the stool was fairly high. And there I was with a big petal harp. So that was a lot of fun, except that I couldn't reach the pedals. Now you can buy pedal extenders so that if, you know, you're a small person or a young child and you're playing a big pedal harp, you can make those petals a little bit more accessible. But back then they didn't have those. My grandfather invented some for me, a couple sets. He made a set that I could have on my harp at home and a set that I could keep at my teacher's house so I could play on her harp. But it was still kind of a trial and As I got to more advanced music, I found that I couldn't reach the outside pedals, especially not at the same time. So it was a struggle to get to the A pedal on the right and a struggle to get to the D pedal on the left. A little bit limiting. I would have to sort of jump off the stool, push the pedals, jump back on. My mother was instructed by my teacher that I could push the pedals a little bit better if I had some more leverage. So she got me a set of plastic sort of toy high heels. They were made out of red plastic, but the heels gave me a little bit of leverage so that my heels could sit down on the ground and I could push the pedals. So they have better systems for all of this today, but we were sort of jerry rigging it and making it up as I go. So I'm sharing this with you just so that you know that my own early petal pushing experience was not the smoothest, but I did have a wonderful teacher who not only showed me how to push the pedals when I grew big enough to actually do it well, but over the years gave me all kinds of little shortcuts and little tricks to learning to push them better. So that's partly what I want to share with you. But this isn't an episode just about petals. It's really about the accidental changes that we have to make, whether we're playing a pedal harp or a lever harp and making those changes well. So that's where I'm going to start, and I have quite a number of tips to share with you, and we'll get a little bit specific as we go along. So if you're ready, that's what we're going to dive into right now. The very first tip I want to share with you is sort of an oddball one, but this is what I run across with a lot of my students. They will have that first moment where they need to push a pedal or a lever, and they'll sort of freeze, and it'll seem like sort of a big deal. So the first tip that I want to share with you is not to be afraid of those pedals or levers. Push them and be definite. Just push it. You can't sneak into a pedal change or a lever change. And if you've tried, you know what I mean, you're going to get a scraping sound or a buzzing sound. If you try to be too careful with pedals or levers, then you're going to get that sort of sound. Just because the. The push is too slow, and I know we want to be careful, and we make a big deal, especially on a pedal harp, about being noisy with our pedals. We don't want to have noisy feet. But you know what I would like to tell you? Go ahead and have noisy feet for a while. When you get better and more comfortable changing those petals, you'll get, you know, you'll get more subtle. It'll be easier to be quieter. It's most important, whether it's pedals or levers that we're talking about, that you are not tentative with that push. You want swift and sure. You want those changes to be exact. And we'll talk about exactly why they need to be exact in a moment. But you want them to just happen. So don't worry too much about that noise will fix the noise later. But the idea here is that the real noise that we want to avoid is the one that happens when you're trying to be too careful and you buzz or scrape on a string that's already vibrating. And you're going to avoid that best if you make the change quickly. So promise me, if you get nothing else from this podcast, promise me that you'll get that. That you'll approach those pedal changes or lever changes with the attitude of being swift and sure and definite. Don't try to sneak them in. That's the hard way to do it. You can get sneaky later when you're a little bit better at them. Okay, that's the first and the most important one, I think. Although I may end up telling you that these others are equally important because they pretty much are. So when it comes to actually pushing, we really need to think carefully about the rhythmic placement of the push.

You want to put a lever change or a pedal change on a specific beat, wherever it is. It might be just a hair before the beat. That might be the way it happens, but it's going to be at a specific time every time. So think about the implications of this.

When we're practicing just regular notes, right? Those notes have to happen in a specific place on a specific beat at a specific time. From a practical standpoint, it makes sense to have those accidental changes, whether they're levers or pedals, happen at the same time every time you play. Just because they become part of the coordination of the piece, they become part of your learning of the piece. They're systematic. You don't have to think about them. They become part of that coordination. They're built in. So that's one reason to Put them on a specific beat. The other one is that once you find out what works for you, then you know you're going to eliminate more of those mistakes, more of those noises too, by keeping those changes happening at the same time every time. So make them part of your counting.

Which brings me to point number three. Practice your changes. Pedal or lever, Practice your changes even if you are practicing a part of your piece hands separately and you don't actually need it. Like, okay, I would normally have an F sharp that I'd have to push there, but guess what? My right hand isn't playing an F sharp. That only happens in my left hand. So I'm not going to push. Wrong. You are going to push. Make that change part of the practice, whether you are actually playing it or not. So practice those changes even if you're doing hands separately and that hand doesn't need them. Once again, this is part of what you need to do.

Going along with that, you can practice those changes by themselves, but with the counting, just as if they were sort of a third hand, right? You practice your right hand by itself with the counting. You're going to practice the left hand by itself with your counting. Well, practice your changes with the counting as well, and do it with the metronome so that you know exactly how it goes. Now you can even sort of hum the melody or hear it in your head, but just get the changes exactly right. Now, if you are doing pedal changes, this is the best time to be sure that you are learning to feel where those petals are. Because we can't look at them. You're not supposed to look at the petals when you change them. Your feet are going to learn where the petals are all on their own. So you want to practice the pedal changes by themselves with the counting, so that you know how far you have to go. You get the feel of where your foot belongs. And in fact, if there are a lot of changes, you can practice those changes without even actually pushing the pedals, just moving your foot to the right pedal to the correct one. So if you have a lot of changes, you can just practice them. Boom, boom, boom. Move to the B, to the F, to the E, to the D, whatever it is, and practice them that way without actually pushing them. Then you can practice pushing them.

So let me back up just a step with petals, and then I'm going to get to levers here in a second. Think about the different stages that you could take to practice them. If you have a part of your piece that has a lot of petal changes in it.

And you're not secure on them. Put the harp down and look at your feet.

And just practice the counting and say the petal names to yourself without even moving your feet. Just look at the pedals, track the music, look at the pedals and look at where your feet are going to go.

Then step two. Touch those petals at the same time with your feet. Of course, as you're looking, that's fine. Now it's harder to push the petals when the harp is is down. It's easier to push it when it's back on your shoulder. So that would be the next step to count, say those petals and push them and practice getting your feet where they need to go.

There's a lot of benefit from just practicing the petals and the counting by themselves. And then you can get up to practicing them. Hand sep with one hand, right. A hand separately practice or with both hands. That's a great way to do it. Now, levers work a little bit differently. Most of the time you're going to be pushing your levers with your left hand. Every once in a while, right hand creeps over and helps out. But usually you're going to be pushing them with your left hand. So this becomes part of your left hand practice. And I would suggest that when you have levers to push, you don't practice your left hand without practicing the levers as well. Even if you don't need them for the left hand line.

That left hand coordination is really tricky, but you can still practice the levers by themselves with the counting. So following sort of the same idea that I outlined and the same steps I outlined for the petal harp, here's what you can do. Take that passage that you want to work on and look at where the levers are that you need to push and touch each one of those levers, just making sure that you know exactly where they are. This is such an important part of your preparation because it's really hard to push the levers. Well, if you're searching for which of those E flats you have to push. So you really want to look for this ahead of time. So start there, identify those levers, then practice counting and just doing the levers. I think it's okay to leave out the left hand notes to just try the levers. I don't like it the other way around, but I like it this way. So you're going to count and just flip those levers. You can practice taking your hand from. Just put it on the soundboard so that it's down and then up, and then down and then up to exactly, you know, flip the C, 3, 4, E, 2, 3, 4, D, whatever those levers are, and you can count and you can push. And I think that that's a really great exercise and one that we don't often remember to teach. Then get your left hand to incorporate the notes and the levers at the same time, and then you can add your right hand as well. But that's, I think, a great place to start because you don't want to be searching for the levers. You need to know where they are. Notice that whether we're talking about levers or pedals, the counting is essential. This is part of your coordination. You have to be able to get them in time. You can't be playing, playing along, playing, playing, and then stopping while you make change. You need to have it incorporated into the correct rhythm of the piece. So be sure to always practice that counting while you're doing it.

Whew. Okay, so that covers some of the real basics, but let's talk about some of the other things that you might find helpful. One of the things, and I just touched on this a little bit ago, but I want to make kind of a bigger deal about it right now is say the names of those changes. And as you push so you don't have to say C sharp, you can just say C if that fits you better. But say whatever the. Whatever the note is that you're changing, it will help draw your attention to those changes while you're practicing so that you don't forget them. It will also help you incorporate those changes into your understanding of the piece. You'll know where they are, and of course, if you're always putting them on the same beat every time, it will really help. Think how this will help with memorization. Think how it will help with the flow of the piece and your coordination. Saying the names of those changes, very, very helpful.

But to dive a little bit deeper, you might want to take some time and to look at the changes you're making and understand why they're there, if you can.

Are they pointing you to a new key? Is there going to be an. A new key coming along? Or maybe it's just a related key. Often in pieces in major, you will find that there's sort of a subtle motion to the fifth scale degree that will incorporate.

An accidental change so that, for instance, if you're in C major, the fifth scale degree, fifth note in the scale would be G. And you might find that there's A little way that the piece emphasizes the importance of the G by adding the F sharp, which we would find in G major, but not in C major. Now, I realize this means that you need to know a little bit of music theory, a little bit about keys. And if this is not something you know a lot about, well, I'll talk to you about that at the end of this episode. But that's okay. It's all right if you don't. If this doesn't mean anything to you, then it's not helpful information. Don't worry about it. But if you can think about why that accidental might be there. Maybe you're in a minor key and it's raising the seventh note in the minor key, which happens frequently. Maybe it's for a glissando. Maybe it's for an enharmonic. Enharmonics are one of those things that a lot of instrumentalists don't think about, but we harpists think about a lot. And that's because there are some times when we just don't have the note we need. And we use an equivalent pitch on a different string. That's what an enharmonic is. Two notes are said to be enharmonics. If they have the same sounding pitch. They sound the same, but they have different names, like a C sharp and a D flat.

Many instrumentalists would play those as if they were the same note. They'd play them the same way. If you think about them on the piano, they're the same key, but for us harpists, they're different. We would play a C sharp on a C string and a D flat on a D string. But if you're a lever harpist and your piece all of a sudden has a D flat, maybe your lever harp isn't tuned to have a D flat. So what do we do? We play an enharmonic, and we can play a C sharp instead. So sometimes you'll see pedal changes or lever changes that help us play the piece by giving us a different option. So that instead of having to tune that D flat, you could just play it on a different string and you wouldn't have to retune your harp. For pedal harps, especially this, the enharmonics are the things we use to make our glissandos sound so special. Right now you can do those glissandos on lever harps, too. I realized that. But those enharmonics are something that come up for pedal harps a lot.

They do for lever harps as well, but not Quite as often, not in this exactly the same ways, but it's another reason that that petal change or lever change might be there. So if you can understand why they're there, sometimes that can help you keep it in mind and can help you just be more prepared for the change. Sometimes understanding it is all you need to help you perform it better. Now, so far, we've talked about the way those changes happen in a piece of music that you might be practicing. But let's talk about practicing your pedals or your lever changes by themselves. Apart from a piece of music, you really can do drills that are just pedals or levers. And you would want to do that because it gives you a chance to practice the motion and the timing without adding in the extra challenge of notes. So you can do drills that just are pushing. I mean, take the hands, take the fingers, take the notes out of the equation. Totally put the metronome on to give yourself a nice steady beat. And then try pushing a pedal or a lever. Do a scale. So start on C and just push a lever up, or push a pedal up or down and push one on each beat so that you're going to go C, D, E, F, G, A, B. And then let's go. Let's do it. And let's go up to C and let's go down. Push those levers the other way once you get to the top, right? So C down, B, A, G, F, E, D, C. And just practice pushing and moving from note to note. You can. You can practice arpeggios that way, too, Right? We just did sort of a pedal scale or a lever scale. But you could do this in arpeggio, where you push the C, then the E, then the G, then the C, then the E, then the G. Now, on a lever harp, you can actually cover different octaves, and you can start with your lowest C and then go up the harp and then go back down. On a pedal harp, just push the petals. Start with the petals and flat and push them down. Keep pushing them down until you don't have any more downs and then start pushing them up. Okay? Now, the challenge for pedal harpists that lever harpists don't have is that we have two different motions. We have the motion of pushing down and the motion of pushing up. Levers go up and down pretty much the same way. Pedals go up and down very differently. When you slide a pedal down, you want to sort of scoop it in toward the middle. Don't think about making it as two motions. Don't Think about down and then in. Think about sort of scooping it down. And then when you go to push a petal up, you slide it up and just out of the notch, and it will go up by itself. So you just slide it up, out. Rather slide it out and it will go up by itself. So doing a drill without playing anything gives you a chance to really think about the technique for your pushing mechanism, right? Whether it's levers or pedals. Now, you can add notes to that. Start playing the scale along with the pushing, and that'll give you sort of the. The whole kind of concept, because you'll get to hear what those changes are doing. You can do this for a scale, you can do it for an arpeggio. You can do it for just about anything that you want. There are books that have wonderful examples. Renee, in her method book, has some wonderful ideas about pedal pushing. There's an excellent book called Pedal Exercises for Harp by Jacqueline Pauloff, which is wonderful. Yolanda Khandanasis, in On Playing the Harp, has pedal drills as well. There are some lever drills that you'll find, but they are fewer, fewer to find. So you probably want to just start making those up on your own. But if you start with the basic scales and arpeggios the way I just outlined, you should get plenty of practice. You can also experiment with just changing the pedals or levers as part of your daily exercises or warmups? I mean, it's going to change the sound for sure. But what would happen if you changed a pedal or a lever in each measure of your exercise or in each measure of your warmup? What would that, you know, what would that do? It would give you some extra practice in pushing. What kind of sounds would you create? You could get really interesting sort of things. What if you decided to push random levers or pedals while you're playing? You can make it a game. The more fun you have with this, the less you'll feel intimidated or challenged by those accidental changes when they occur. So just sort of have fun with it that way.

Now, I've saved the most problematic topic about levers and pedals for last, and that is marking them. I believe that absolutely you should have them marked in your music.

There are so many different thoughts about this, and I'll give you my ideas, and then, of course, you will make up your own mind. Now, in pedal harp music, we see several different kinds of markings. Some composers don't put in pedal markings at all. Other composers try to put them all in, and if they're not harpist composers. Most of them are probably right, but you might miss some, that's for sure.

Harpist composers.

Have different ways of marking things too. Some of the French composers mark in pedals that they think you're going to need to push. That you don't see as accidentals in the music, but if there's an accidental, that is pretty obvious. Like you're playing in all naturals, and all of a sudden you have a B flat. If that B flat is marked in the music, in the notes, they don't always indicate a pedal for it. So that's just one of those things to know. Of course, with pedals also, we have the. The debate of does right foot go over left foot or foot go over right foot, or does it matter? I was taught to always put my right foot markings, like for the E pedal, the F pedal, the G pedal, or the A pedal over my left foot. Markings B, C or D. Other people do it differently. Put left foot over right foot, it doesn't matter.

Some people mix it up and, you know, put sometimes right foot on the top, sometimes left foot on the top. I think that's the least effective. Not that it can't work, but frankly, my feet learn to read. And I don't know how they learned to read, but they did. And so when I see right foot over left foot, my feet know exactly where to go. If the markings are left foot over right foot, it takes them a second to translate, but they're okay. But if the markings are mixed up, I find I actually have to think about it, and it's not as automatic, so.

So that's why I think it's important to be consistent. It doesn't matter. I don't believe which way you notate it right over left or left over right. But pick one and be consistent with it. You pedal harpists might also have noticed if you've been playing any music by French composers, that they often don't use letter names to designate the petals. They use the French solfege syllables, do, remi, fa, sola, si, do. So just to clear up any confusion about that, for those syllables, do is always C. Re is always D. Mi is always E. F and FA are the same. Sol is G, La is A and C that's S. I is B. So those are always the same. Those are traditional solfege syllables, and they do not change depending on what key you're in. They're always the same. So there's a little bit of help for that.

Now, for lever markings, you Lever harpists. Wow, you have it really hard. There are so many different systems for notating levers. Some people write them in the middle, some people write them above, some people write them in the staff as you go. There are diamond shaped notes, there are letter names, there are letters with numbers, numbers. There are all kinds of systems and it's just not standardized at all. So you need to become extra adept at deciphering what these systems are. So when you look at a new piece of music, the first thing you have to do, and I'm sure you've already figured this out, doesn't take much lever heart playing to realize that you're going to need to do this. The first thing you do is figure out what system the composer is using here. Are they using the triangle? The triangles, the diamonds, the letters, the number, what are they using? And then figure out what's there.

This is where practicing those levers independently of playing the notes can be very helpful. Helps you find out what's there.

And if you need some sort of highlighter to help you find them in the staff, sometimes that's useful too. So, you know, adapt the markings as you need. But I think you need to be really flexible and understand those different marking systems, figure out what you're looking at and, and then do your best.

But the debate doesn't end with all these differences either. There are a number of schools of thought about when you should push a lever or a pedal and when you should write that marking in. Do you write the marking in so that you change that note as soon as you can, or do you wait till closer to the time you actually need it to push it and, you know, what do you do? Well, the story I'd love to tell about this was told to me by the composer Daniel Dorff. Danny was, we had commissioned a flutist friend and I had commissioned Danny to write a piece for us. It's quite a wonderful piece. And Danny and I were working together and he said, okay, so I'll tell you, he said, I, I, I was going to ask you where you wanted your petals notated. Did you want them close to the change or, or wherever? And I said, Danny, you know, you do what you think and because I'm probably going to end up changing it anyway just for, you know, to put it exactly where I want it. And he said that the very first harp piece that he ever composed was for a harp duo. And he was working very hard to get this pedal thing right. And so he talked with harpist A who said, ah, I want to push the pedals as close to the moment I need them as possible, because that way I can see it in the music and it makes more sense to me.

So he said, oh, great, I can do that. Then he talked to the second harpist in the duo, harpist B, who said, oh, I like to push mine as soon as I can. And that's the best way to do it, just to write them in as soon as I can possibly push it. And then that way it's already done. And so that just confused him because he was looking for a definitive answer and didn't get one. And of course, there isn't one. So.

My best advice for when you need to push a pedal or a lever is don't push it so quickly after you've played the string that you want to change that. It's going to create excess noise, but don't put it so late that you're not going to be able to get to it in time. I think that that's the real key. And you'll find as you practice exactly where that pedal needs to be or where that lever needs to be, and then once you've put it there, that's where it is and that's where you practice it. Just the way we're talking about it before now, that's a lot of information about how to practice pedals and levers, both by themselves as little drills and in the context of learning a piece of music. I'd like to remind you, though, of the very first thing that we talked about. When you're pushing your pedals or your levers, be definite about it. Don't be tentative, be swift, be sure and get it done. Just change it. You can always make it more subtle later, but just be sure that you are confident and you don't try to sort of sneak in that pedal change or lever change at first. Just do it and it will work. You'll get better at it, I promise. So I want to remind you about the webinar that I have coming up on October 18th. That's a Wednesday at 7:30pm Eastern. And yes, there's gonna be a replay, but it's called Cut to the Time Saving Harp Hacks. You need to know now. So I think you'll really enjoy that. We've got some ways to reframe some of the common harp dilemmas so that you can cut to the chase and get it fixed. Also, I sort of gave you a little hint earlier in this episode that we have some interesting stuff coming up for you at Harp Mastery about Theory. So we're going to be launching very soon a theory intensive taught by one of our certified coaches, Naomi Hoffmeier. And Naomi is going to be teaching this intensive about the music theory that you need to know and only the music theory that you need to know. This is the kind of stuff that if you could take everything else away that was just interesting information but maybe not helpful, and if you could take the information that was helpful and apply it to the harp instantly so that you could see how the theory was applicable and practical, that's what this course is about. And you're going to love it. So stay tuned. We're not I don't think we have all the pieces in place for you there, but it's coming up at the end of October, and I just want you to be sure that you're on the lookout for that. In the meantime, you can go ahead and register for the Cut to the Chase webinar, and I look forward to working with you on that webinar. Next week on the podcast, we'll be talking about creativity, about engaging your creativity, making your practice make music feeling more creative, ways to stretch your creativity, why you should do it, how you should do it, all kinds of good things about creativity. It should be a lot of fun to talk about until I talk with you again next week. 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.