Beyond the Basics: How to Keep Your Technique Growing - PHH 144

Foreign.

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 me 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. Let's take this as a given. Our technique is at the heart of everything we do at the harp. Intellectually, we know this to be true, but that doesn't prevent us from being surprised when we run into a passage in a piece. We're learning that our fingers just can't manage what the heck. We've been doing our daily exercises, and most of the time our technique is up to the challenges we meet in any new piece. So what happened this time?

If you've had that experience, rest assured my friend, you are not alone. We've all been there. Sometimes a moment like that is just a wake up call, reminding us that we've slacked off a bit and we've been taking our technique work a little too casually. Technique practice, done correctly, requires our attention and focus. It also requires a plan for growth. The basic drills or exercises we rely on are scales, arpeggios, and chords. In theory, keeping those scales fresh should enable us to play about 3/4 of anything we encounter. But I don't have to tell you that's not the way it seems to work out. Keeping those skills sharp is just the beginning. We need to keep them growing too. It makes sense when you take a moment to consider. As we become more experienced harpists, we become more skilled too, which means that we are likely playing more music and more complex music too. If our technical proficiency isn't growing with the rest of our skill set, we will find ourselves blocked by passages or entire pieces of that are beyond the limits of our fingers. Now you're with me. So Far right. Good, because there's only one conclusion to draw from this, and it's one you may not be thrilled to hear. We have to keep challenging our technique so that it keeps up with the music we want it to serve. We have to keep looking for the next level of technical improvement in order to feel confident in the next level of music that we want to play. Simply put, our technique is a great enabler. It makes playing our music possible. This also means it can be our biggest roadblock, one that will prevent us from playing our music or at least from playing it with the artistry we want. So what do we do? We reach beyond the everyday technique work that doesn't challenge us and look for some ways to level up our technique to keep pace with our music. So on today's show, I'll teach you the three areas is to consider leveling up and how to go about it. Just remember, finger freedom is musical freedom. But first, I'd like to give a big shout out to everybody who attended my webinar last week. The webinar called the magic of 1%. Learn the small steps that add up almost magically to big progress. We talked about everything that you can do, both big and small, to make sure you keep moving forward. Something that ties in very nicely with our topic for today. And we talked about how to make continuous improvement, and we talked about how the speed of your improvement is under your control. So it was a terrific webinar. We had a great turnout, but I know that not everybody was able to be there. And we had a lot of people who didn't register and still wanted to hear the replay. And so we have responded and the replay is now live on the Heart Mastery homepage. So if you go to heartmastery.com you can scroll down and you'll be able to click and watch the webinar replay right there. So once again, that's that magic of 1% webinar. You should also be able to find it on our YouTube channel as well. But there's more that I wanted to share that's related to that kind of a topic. And so, coming up in just a few weeks, coming up, starting March 8th, we have a five day intensive that is happening. And it's got a very long name. It's called finish it. Get your music out of limbo and into your fingers. We'll be talking about creating your personal success plan for taking your pieces from start to finish. So we'll be talking about things like why your pieces end up in limbo instead of in your repertoire. We'll be talking about the difference between learning, practice, playing practice, and how the first steps that you take when you learn a piece determine how quickly you finish it or whether you finish it at all. This intensive has a lot of components to it. It's got some live calls, it's got pre calls and follow up calls, it's got practice implementation kind of calls. So there's a lot going on in it. And I really invite you to jump over to the page and the information page where you can sign up and register for the intensive. Now this is not a free event. This is a paid course because there's a lot in it. But I invite you to join it. If you have ever wanted to get those pieces out of the mode where you're just practicing them endlessly, never seeming to get them ready to play, that's what this is about. It's getting out of that practice mode and getting the pieces playable. So it's. I'm really looking forward to it. I think there's a lot of information that I'm going to be sharing in new ways and there's going to be a lot that you're going to be able to learn from this. So. So I invite you to follow the link in the show notes or hop over to heartmastery.com you'll find all the information about how to get to the intensive on our homepage or under the upcoming events tab. This is gonna be a really fabulous intensive. I love teaching these courses because I love being able to do the deep dive and really get into the nitty gritty that, you know, we brush over here on the podcast. Cause I just have a few minutes to talk with you about it. But we're gonna be going de this kind of a topic in the intensive and I think you're really going to enjoy it. So I invite you to join us there for that. Whew. So we won't be quite that intense today, but I think that this topic is every bit as important. So back to taking your technique beyond the basics. Let's start by going back to those basics just for a second. So we're talking about scales and intervals and chords and arpeggios and all the basic patterns that from those things. These are the kinds of exercises you find in just about any exercise book. And they're meant to get your fingers moving through as many of the patterns as possible. You've got different arpeggiated patterns with the notes in, you know, going up, going down, starting here, starting there. Maybe the notes in different order. But the thing is that most of those intermediate level exercise books don't go any further than that. They don't get to the kinds of things that I'm talking about today. So that if you want to practice these from an exercise book, you need to look a little bit further afield than maybe you have been. One of the shortest exercise books that covers a number of these topics we're talking about today, although not all of them would be the conditioning exercises by Carlos Salzato. They're great for that because they've got different kinds of patterns in them. And we're going to be talking about those in a moment. So that's one place where you can look. Grossi Method for the Harp that has the Pozzoli Etudes toward the back covers some of these things as well. The Box A Revisited Book by Carl Swanson, edited by Carl Swanson, is a great resource that is going to give your hands a workout. And he's made it not only right hand and left hand friendly, but lever friendly as well. So it's a really great resource to level up your technique skills. But you have to remember that if you're looking at exercise books that are pretty much covering the same kind of exercises you're already playing, you need to look at books at that next level. So that's something to consider. But I'll be giving you some ideas that don't require exercise books. But I still think those exercise books are a great idea because they just cover so many things. I know when I was a student, one of the books that my teacher had me learn from was the La Riviere exercises and Etudes. And I just couldn't stand that book. I was not. I didn't have the patience to do the exercises that were there. And Mr. Lariviere was very thorough in those exercises. But I'll tell you, if you go to that book and you can do so much with that book, whether you have a lever harp or a pedal harp, it covers so many things and your fingers will benefit greatly. But you have to have the the patience to work your way through a book like that. But I do recommend those kinds of books because that's that next level. And if you don't step into that level, you're going to limiting your technique. And that's really the point. That's the whole basis for our discussion today. So I wanted to sort of start by giving you something to think about. What are you working from now and where is that next level up? Because I guarantee there Is one. There's a next level up for all of us in this world. So I'm sure you can find that. So I just mentioned finger agility and patterns. And finger agility is one of those level up skills. We want your fingers to become more nimble. Agility is flexibility. And it's the idea that your fingers can conform to whatever pattern you need them to do. In essence, I like to think of it as the idea of every finger doing every job. That it's not only your right hand thumb that can play the melody, but all your fingers could be the melody finger. That you have the ability to differentiate between the dynamics that your fingers are playing so that they can play at different volumes, they can play at the same volume, but you can control the dynamic for each finger. And that your finger can work in concert with any other finger. So this is true finger independence, where you've got eight fingers that are all capable of doing whatever you might ask them to do. Certainly they have specialties. Our right hand thumb will always be a good melody finger. Our left hand fourth finger will always be that strong bass note. But they have the ability to step into other roles when that's called for. Now I'm sort of personifying this whole idea. But that's really what finger agility is about. It's about that equality of fingers, the idea that you've trained them all so that they all can work. I often describe this as a difference in skill level between being able to play three finger chords and four finger chords. That fourth finger added onto the chord creates an entire new level of complication. Not just because it's the fourth finger, but because it's four fingers all together, having to get to the notes and play a chord. And this kind of finger agility is that same level up skill where your fingers need to have that independence and that flexibility. Of course, this flexibility is something that you achieve over time. It's not a destination. It's that you are working at increasing your agility all the time. And I think that's where we can get stuck. Right. If you're doing the same exercises the same way all the time, you're not building the skills that you need to build. And so that's why I encouraged you just a moment ago to investigate some of those other exercises. And it's why you need to keep challenging yourself in your technique work every day. So what kinds of exercises help promote finger independence? Well, one of the categories that I always like to work in is one I call twisty patterns. These are Patterns in which you might be playing the notes in a familiar order, but you're using a different finger order. Suppose the notes are going up like C, D, E, F. But instead of with a regular 4, 3, 2, 1 fingering, you're playing 4, 2, 3, 1, for instance. That sort of thing, that twisty pattern that just shakes up the usual progression of fingers, is such a helpful exercise. Think about the times you've encountered something like that in a piece. Maybe a turnaround at the top of a scale passage that has a little melody thing in. The pieces that this occurs in aren't necessarily even all that difficult. It's just that one moment that you think, well, gosh, isn't this weird? My fingers have to play in this strange order. That's one of the skills that you want to be practicing. Sometimes it could be unusual finger pairings. So the conditioning exercises that I talked about before have you work through the different pairs of fingers playing together like four, two playing together alternating with three and one, or one and four alternating with two and three. So that you have those fingers working in two different combinations from the ones that are most usual that we work in every day. Remember, when you're working with these kinds of groups, whether it's twisty patterns or these unusual finger pairings, what you're doing is giving yourself fingering choices. The more fingering choices you have, and the more you accustom your fingers to working in all these different ways, the more they're going to respond, the more easily they will show up for you when you need them to do something different. So that's what you want to practice these kinds of patterns for. You might also consider practicing your scales or your arpeggios with different accents, making sure that those accents aren't always on your fourth finger or your thumb, but that you're creating the opportunity for 2 and 3. I know it's not anybody's favorite finger, but 2 and 3 to show up with an accent and as a melody finger. Those kinds of exercises are ideal for helping your fingers learn to work independently. You might also consider things like thumb slides and fourth finger slides. Those are wonderful fingering techniques that can be extremely useful in different pieces, but you need to practice them. And if you wait to practice them until you need them in a piece, you're not going to be as comfortable. So just to run through those again, here are some of the things that you can practice to help yourself develop more agile, nimble, flexible fingers. Those twisty patterns where the fingers are playing out of order patterns where they're playing in different pairings. So for instance, the inside fingers 2 and 3, with the outside fingers 1 and 4, where they're alternating, or 2 and 4 alternating with 1 and 3. Those kinds of things, they can be difficult to start with, but once you get used to them once again, it's very reassuring to know your fingers can handle this. Then scales and arpeggios with different rhythms that create different accents, so that every finger gets a chance to have its moment in the sun, to be the accented melody, sort of finger. And then I also suggested thumb and fourth finger slides. So those are the things you can look for in the exercise books that you already have. And if you don't see them there, it's time to move on and find some of the ones that have them. Finger agility is just one of the places you can level up your technique. The second one I want you to consider is working on the independence of your hands. Now, this is different from independence of your fingers, right? Because if you can get your fingers to play independently, that's great. But you need your hands to be able to do different things, too. Now, from the moment we start playing hands together, this is what we're working on. We're working on having our hands do different things. And it's pretty obvious, you know, if you take a scale and you play it hands together, but your hands are doing the same thing, that's one level of difficulty. But take that same scale and have one hand start on the first beat and start playing, and have the other hand start its scale on the second beat so that they're playing a part. And you know, the fingers are turning, crossing under, maybe at different points. You know, when your hands are doing something different, that's when you really are testing the independence of your hands. And you know, when you're putting together, putting hands together for a piece, that's pretty simple for you, not a big problem. But there are places, and this happens at every skill level, right? I mean, professionals still have to work through this kind of stuff where there's going to be a moment where your hands are just rebelling and saying, now, wait a second. How do you expect me to do this when the other hand is doing that? And so that's when hands separately practice works. And you have to do some backing into your hands together practice. And I'll talk about that in just a second. But the independence of the hands is so crucial to our playing. This is the reason that I stress with my students not to spend most of their early practice time on a piece, practicing hands separately. You need to do as much hands together playing right away as you possibly can, because hands together playing is where harp playing is. And the more skilled we get at hands together playing, the more music we can learn and the more quickly we can learn it. And hands together playing is all about the independence of the hands. Now, most exercise books work hands separately. Often when they're working hands together, it's the two hands doing the same thing, which is not exactly what we're talking about. In fact, it's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about them doing different things. So picture playing a scale that starts up in your left hand at the same time that your right hand is starting going down, so that your hands are playing in opposite directions. We call this contrary motion. That's a wonderful way to start getting your hands accustomed to doing different things. And what's nice about doing this as an exercise rather than trying to just work on hands together in a piece, is that it takes away the struggle for notes and rhythm and that kind of thing. And of course, it's just a scale, so the fingering is pretty easy. So at least we should be used to it. So the scale itself isn't so hard and we can concentrate on the motion, the doing different things. Even though they're both playing scales, you can do the same thing where they're doing one hand arpeggios. Just maybe, you know, four, three, two, one up, you know, four, three million two, one going up and then two, three, four, going down. So you're going just up and down and up and down. Do that in one hand going one direction, and at the same time do it with the other hand going the other direction. That kind of contrary motion is wonderful for getting you accustomed to the idea that your hands can do different things at once, even when they're both complex. So that's one way to work on the independence of your hands. There are some other skills that you should work on as well, and I think that hand crossing is one of them. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about times when you know, you're playing a big arpeggio or a big scale and you're doing a hand over hand scale. What I'm talking about is having maybe your right hand playing one pattern and your left hand cross coming up to play a higher note. Maybe it's jumping from a low note to a high note, to a low note to a high note. Or maybe it just reaches up into the stratosphere. To play a portion of a melody while your right hand is lower. The same could be said where your right hand might be playing lower than your left hand, although that's a little bit less common. But crossing hands, that will absolutely test your hand independence. And it's a great thing to practice. So anytime that you're doing different techniques at the same time, doing hands together but in different ways or different directions, that's the kind of thing you want to practice. You will find that in many exercise books. The Lariviere that I mentioned before gives you plenty of practice in that. So you'll find it there. You'll find find exercise books that do that quite a bit. But once again, you have to look at the more difficult sort of exercise books. But you can practice this on your own as well. And you can take passages right from your pieces, passages that you're trying to work on, that you're having trouble with. And you can do some little drills I'll describe right now to help you with this. So it'll help you learn your passage and work on the independence of your hands at the same time. First of all, it can be very helpful if you have a difficult passage to have both hands play one line. So take your right hand line, have your right hand play it, have your left hand play it, play it hands together. Then play the left hand line with the left hand, then the left hand line with the right hand, and then hands together. Obviously, one hand's going to be playing in a different octave than the other one, but this will help you learn a passage like that. But then try this. And you want to do this with a passage that's not quite so difficult. Take your right hand and have it play the right hand part, but down an octave. And have your left hand play the left hand part but up an octave. This is a real brain twister, but it's very interesting and it's worth trying. Don't do hours of this, just do a couple of minutes. But it will help break up the patterns of thought that you know that your hands are used to and will give you a taste of doing something different. And what I mentioned before, play scales. Play scales in opposite directions. Play them starting in the same direction but starting at different times. Play them in tenths, play them in sixths. Anything you can do that breaks up the usual pattern of this hand is doing the same thing the other hand is doing. We want them to be independent. So that's what you're looking for in exercises there. As I said, you'll See some of these drills in some of the more advanced exercise books, but you can make them up on your own as well. The third place that you need to keep growing in your technique is with tempo, with speed. It's all about being comfortable playing faster. It doesn't mean that you want to play super fast pieces, but it means that when you want to be able to play faster, you are able to play faster. It's going to mean the difference between taking a long time to get a piece up to tempo or not taking nearly so long, and being comfortable being more comfortable when you're playing it at that speed. Oh, sure, there are ways to work up individual pieces and individual passages to a certain tempo. I mean, I talk about the tempo pyramid all the time, so. But that's not what we're really talking about. What I'm talking about here is the ability for your fingers to play fast. Not to necessarily play this piece faster and this piece faster and this piece faster, but to be able to have this big range of speed at which they can play. That sounds difficult. And I know that playing fast is scary for a lot of us because it feels like you're out of control. You are. That's okay. That's part of the process. And you might be worried that if you try to play fast, you're going to be developing bad habits and messing stuff up.

You're not going to do any permanent damage because you're not only going to play fast. We need you to get started. Playing faster doesn't mean you can't go back and check everything more slowly. You're not going to ruin all the good, careful work you've done by doing this. This is going to amplify your ability. Will you have to endure a little bit of messiness along the way? Yes, but that's just part of the change and the growth that's going to happen. Do slow things down again. Do check your technique and everything that you need to check slowly, but push ahead to that next tempo. I think that harpists lose a beautiful opportunity if they're not pushing their technique. Work faster. If you're only waiting to speed things up when the situation calls for it, then you're fighting a couple of different things. You're fighting the fact that your fingers don't want to go that fast, and then you're trying to make them do something that's unaccustomed with a bunch of notes that might have rhythms and fingering that are not particularly familiar either. So work on your speed in your technique. Practice so that maybe twice a week, even once a week is good, but twice a week you have. Okay, I'm going to work on my speed today. So I'm going to do my usual exercises, but I'm going to do them. I'm going to go, I don't know, 25% faster. Go twice as fast if you can. Depends on the exercise, right? But you let yourself experience speed. Let your fingers get used to playing it and then play it slowly again. Get them used to doing both things. There's no point in only playing fast, right? We want them to be comfortable at a range of tempos. So get them playing faster in your technique work where you're not fighting difficult notes.

Maybe you do a nice slow warm up, and then you do some exercises or etos or whatever you want. And then you do some scales and arpeggios in patterns that you like and are familiar with, and do them quite quickly. And I mean fast, not just like a metronome notch or two faster. Make it a big notch, a big notch, a big step. You need to really step up the tempo here because remember, we're looking for growth. And while the overall growth may seem incremental, you don't have to wait for that growth to happen. You can push it. It's not, in this case, just like waiting for a seed to grow, where it's going to grow in its own time. There are some things in heart playing that are like that, but this isn't one of them. You can move quite a bit faster, you can make progress faster, and this is one of those places you can do it. So be bold.

Spin that metronome dial. Get playing faster, speeding things up, speeding up your scale, speeding up your arpeggios is a first step, but remember, that's helping to build the foundation for playing faster in your pieces. And that's how all of this starts. So this kind of nicely rounds out the whole idea of taking your technique beyond the basics. It's not just about being able to play scales and chords and arp. Arpeggios and intervals. It's about being able to really have your fingers know the harp. Having them be so comfortable that they can just, you know, trill their little way around the harp, whatever it is you want to do, so that they can be nimble, be agile, your hands can respond differently in different situations, and be independent. And you can play not only beautiful, relaxing, slow music, but you can play speedy, happy music as well when you want to, and that your fingers will do that job. But that's the step up that happens in technique. And as I mentioned before, it's the process that we continue to use to grow and to stretch and to move our technique forward. And that's how you get that flashy, dependable, secure technique that lets you play anything with confidence. And it starts right there. I hope this discussion inspired you to look for new ways to continue growing your technique and give you the courage to break out of whatever technique practice rut you may be in. We all get in those from time to time. It's okay if you want to continue doing your same familiar favorite exercises, but see if you can incorporate some of the ideas we talked about today to make them more powerful, to enable them to help you to get to that next level. Or look for some of those more difficult technique books, ones that will push you a little further when you challenge your technique, your technique will help you rise to the challenge of whatever music you want to play. So I hope that that was inspiring. Next week on the podcast is a play along episode so you can listen at your harp. Now if you're not used to listening while you have your harp with you, maybe you're in the car, maybe you're walking or exercising, that's fine because you can listen and then go back and play along later. But this episode is called Rediscovering your Sound. And so we're going to be working together at the harp and working on some listening skill. We're there. So that's next week on the podcast. Remember we have the March Intensive coming up, the intensive on finishing called Finish it. So we are going to be talking about putting the the pieces you need in place to play your pieces. How's that? To actually finish them, to get them out of limbo, get them into your fingers and get them out into the world if that's what you want to do with them. So that intensive is coming up. It's really going to fun and I'm so excited about teaching this one. So I certainly hope you join me for that. You'll find all the information again. There's a link in the show notes or you can find it@harpmastery.com right on, right on our homepage or in the upcoming events tab. So I look forward to seeing you next week on the podcast. And as we talk, we'll be working on the at the harp doing our play along episode. Remember, until then, 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 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.