Could You Learn a Piece in a Day? - PHH 159

The other thing that I think keeps people from learning music quickly is the fear of making mistakes, the fear of doing something wrong. So that, you know, if I take my time and if I learn everything properly, that's going to be the best system and that's the way to get where I want to go. If that's you, if that sounds familiar, I'd like you to adopt a different, different idea. I want you to think about this saying let go to let flow.

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 plan. Playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you now. I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists and anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're Ready for you. Join us. Just go to harpmastery.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now.

Welcome to the show. At one of our Harp Mastery retreats several years ago, I presented a workshop called Learn Anything Fast. That sounds like a pretty ambitious topic, and I imagine that some of the retreaters were a little skeptical. After all, learning a piece of music takes time. But my point in that workshop was, does it have to take as much time as it's taking you now?

There's no golden rule about how long it should take you to learn a piece. That's something students would often love to know. And it would be wonderful if each piece came with a guarantee like all those infomercials have. Learn this piece in 30 days or your money back. There's no 30 day guarantee for a piece because each harpist approaches each piece with a different set of individuals, individual skills and strengths. Each piece requires specific skills, either technical skills or musicianship skills, or both. How long it takes you to learn a piece is a combination of the demands of the piece, your own skill development relative to those demands, and the systems or learning habits that you bring to the piece. That's where I think we can make big changes, the kind of changes that could drastically shorten your learning timeline for any piece. So on today's show, we're going to look at what exactly goes into learning a piece skills you already have in your pocket that can help you learn that piece faster. And I'll give you some tips to tweak your learning system so you can leapfrog ahead and start playing that piece sooner. In one day. Maybe. Let's find out. But before we start, I'd like to invite you to our next Harp Mastery Retreat. I teach workshops like this at the retreat and of course because our group is small, there's a lot of personal information. There's a lot of really hands on stuff that we can do in this very small environment. So a topic like this, which we can talk about in broad terms on the podcast, we can really get into specifics about at the retreat. And we always mix up the workshops, talk about different things, but the learning is always fun and I love to work with the students in this particular kind in this particular setting. So our next Harp Mastery Retreat is in Kissimmee, Florida from October 9th to October 13th. I would love for you to join us. You can look here in the show notes for the link to click through, learn more about the retreat and reserve your spot. Or you can go right to heartmastery.com and look, look under upcoming events and you'll see the link there, whichever way you decide to click through. I hope that the retreat information intrigues you and that you want to come and learn with us at the retreat. We'd love to have you. Now, let's get on with the rest of the show. Let's start with an imaginary scenario.

Pretend that you were playing someplace, and after your performance, a member of the audience came up to you and they said, that was so beautiful. I'm not a musician, I've never played an instrument. And it is just amazing to me that you can play a piece of music like that and have it sound so lovely. How do you go about learning a piece of music like that? Now, this isn't your garden variety sort of how do you learn a piece? Question that you could answer with, well, I start with looking at the key signature and the time signature, and then I play this three times or I start hands separately or hands together. You can't answer that question that way because these people have no frame of reference for that at all. What this person wants to know is, how do you start from this printed piece of paper and have all those notes come out? How do you learn it? What do you. What happens to turn that piece of music on the page into a piece of music that we can listen to? And that's a more mysterious process, and it's a little bit harder to describe if you don't feel. Think in terms of, well, I play this section three times and then I go on to the next one. And that's truly, those are the mechanics of learning a piece. But that's not truly what learning a piece of music is about. While learning the piece of music may ultimately be about the music itself, really learning the piece of music. Learning any piece of music for us comes down to the tools that are in our toolbox. It comes down to the skills that we have, the things that we already know that enable us to play a particular piece. It would be kind of nice if every piece in the world came with a little list of prerequisites. Like, you know, okay, you need to know how to. How to do this. You need to know how to do this in order to play this piece. Of course, life isn't that easy, right? But let's think for a moment about the skills that you have, those tools that are in your toolbox that you need in order to approach any new piece.

This is also a hard thing to think about. But in order to do that, let's go back to the very first days when you started the harp. What did you need to know for those very first pieces that you learned? Yeah, right. A lot. That's why the very first pieces that you learned were likely very uncomplicated and simple. You still had to learn your way around the strings. You had to learn where to put your fingers on the strings, how your fingers worked each one of them separately, and then your fingers together. Remember the first time you learned about placing you. Or the first time you learned about closing your fingers? Right. There's so much to learn. And of course, some of those things we keep learning over and over again in the course of our harp studies. You had to know the names of the notes and which notes went with which strings. You had to understand key signatures enough to know what levers or pedals you had to set. You had to understand and learn to understand those meter signatures, the time signatures, right? 2, 4, 3, 4, and what they meant and how to count them. Then all of those basic technical things. You know, how to play thirds and where those. How those fingers worked together or how to play a chord or how to play an arpeggio. You worked at scales. You learned what tempo meant. You learned about how to create expression on the harp. How do you make a crescendo, how do you make a diminuendo, how do you do a retard. You learned about flow, how to make those hands work together and how to have those pieces have, you know, a beautiful continuous flow beginning to end. And many of these things are things that we work on at different levels all through our harp study. So if you were going to take those things and begin to explain to someone, well, you know, how do you learn a piece? Well, you need to know this and this and this and this, that whole long list of prerequisites. And I think the list I went through is kind of basic. I think there are plenty more things to talk about there. There's really a lot that goes into learning a piece of music. And it's kind of interesting in that sense to think, wow, that was really a good question, even if it was an imaginary one that I posed. You know, how do you learn a piece? But it's a really good question to think about, because you know a lot. In order to play everything that you've played in your harp life so far, you have learned a lot.

And that's important for our discussion today, because I want you to know what you already know.

That's where you're learning a piece in a day or just faster than you usually do is going to start working from your strengths, understanding the skills that you need and applying them in the right way. The good news here is that there are going to be a lot of those skills that you're good at or certainly good enough at. You might be, you know, you're fine at counting, you have no problem with rhythm, you have no real problem with your technique. Your fingers basically work. Most of the skills that you need for. For the kinds of pieces that you're playing, you already have or you wouldn't be able to be playing those pieces. So acknowledge that you have a lot of strengths, right? You might start out your harp journey with kind of nothing. But that skill set grows and grows quickly. So it's worth doing an honest assessment of what you're really good at, you know, okay, got no problem. My fingers will do what I want them to do. Or maybe you're a terrific sight reader and, and reading the music goes quickly for you. That's good to know. There are lots of things that are important to playing any piece of music and those skills, those really basic ones, the technique, the counting, the reading, those kinds of things. If you have strengths there, be sure that you use them. If you're a good sight reader, that's going to help you learn a piece a lot faster because it's going to speed up your first approaches to the piece. If you don't have to worry about your technique. Oh, yeah, no chords, no problem scales, no problem arpeggios. I got this. Then that's an aspect that won't slow you down, right? You know, your fingers will do what you ask them to do. You just need to have them learn these new patterns in a new piece. If there are deficiencies in these skills, and I don't mean that in a. In a really bad sort of way, it's just that, you know, sometimes we have areas we need to strengthen. And if there are things you need to strengthen, then this is going to be really apparent when you start a new piece that calls for those particular skills. If your four finger chords, something I talk about a lot, if your four finger chords aren't fluid and easy for you yet, and the piece that you want to play has a lot of four finger chords, that's going to slow you down. You see what I mean? It makes sense, right? The interesting thing about these skills, skills that you need to develop to play a piece, the more pieces you play, the more those skills develop. Because remember, it's not just by doing One thing over and over again, that we get better at everything, we get better at that one thing. So if you played one piece and you played it really well, and you played it for your whole life, you'd be really great at that one piece. But that doesn't mean that any other piece would be easy for you. If you do one set of exercises, your fingers get really, really good at that one set of exercises. But that doesn't mean that they can do all the things that they need to do equally well. This is why I usually recommend that you take an exercise book or an etude book and you work through front to back, pretty quickly. Do everything. Don't spend too much time on any one thing. Sure, there might be a skill that you really want to work on, but you want to develop that overall set of skills, because every piece that you meet is going to use the skills that you have in a slightly different way. And so you want your fingers, your eyes, your counting, your musicality, everything to be used to, making different choices. You want to build in that flexibility, flexibility, adaptability, overall experience. Those are perhaps skills or tools or qualities that we often overlook. So while focus on one thing is important for getting that one thing better, remember that that's not going to train your overall harp readiness. So working through those set of skills, working on different pieces all the time, rotating through things, working on different etudes, the more you play, the more you will be able to play.

But what about that one piece that you want to learn in a day? But then so much comes down to that individual piece, doesn't it? That piece that you thought that looked so easy, looked totally manageable when you just looked at the music, turns out to be a little bit more complicated than you thought. That happens all the time, and it happens to all of us. I will say that the more you play, the better you get at, you know, finding a piece and accurately judging how hard it's going to be for you to learn. But still, there are passages that look totally innocent on the page, and then you get in there and you find out just how devilish they are. So if you're going to experiment with the systems that I'm going to share with you in a second for helping you learn a piece faster, remember that the piece you choose is important in a more general sense. The speed at which you learn a piece is not only governed by your own skill, strengths and experience, but it's governed by the piece itself. So as you're thinking about pieces, you might have them in a few different Categories in your mind. Pieces that are, you know, Someday pieces, Someday I'd like to learn this big fancy piece, whatever it happens to be, you know. So Someday pieces are great. That's probably not the kind of piece that you're going to learn in a day ever, right? Because Someday pieces, those Someday pieces are usually kind of big and they're kind of long and they're kind of tricky. And so even when your strengths and your skill sets are totally ready for that piece, it still doesn't mean that you're going to just sight read it and it's going to be ready to go. It's still probably a piece that's going to take some time. Then there are your level up pieces. They're not as hard as the Someday pieces, but you know that it's a step up from the pieces that you're playing right now. Level up pieces are the things that you learn next. Right? Like, okay, so I've learned little fountain, and so I've worked on my downward arpeggios. So that's a piece that's a nice step on the way up to a big piece like La Source. Same idea where the skill is pretty much the same, but we're going to have a piece that uses it in a smaller context, which will help prepare us for the piece that uses it in a more challenging context. So we have the Someday pieces, whew, far off the level up pieces that are just, you know, the next step up for you. And then there are those easy street pieces, those pieces that, you know, they're right at your level. They're not, you know, not a challenge for you. That's where we can work. We can work with a piece like that to improve your learning system, your music learning system. We can find where we want to speed that up on one of those pieces. So as we're talking about the systems that you can use here to speed things along. Remember that don't try these out on a really hard piece to start with. Get used to the systems on a piece that is right at your level. Now granted, pieces that are right at your level, you can sometimes have those tricky passages right in the middle, those things that don't seem quite as easy as they look. That's okay. We'll. I'll give you some ideas for dealing with those passages too. Just remember that we want your music to inspire you. We want it to be something that you can aspire to, that you can think, okay, one of these days I'm going to play this. That's Terrific. But think about the pieces at your level as the kinds of pieces that you can learn in a day. Remember, I'm using in a day as a metaphor for learning faster than you probably already learn. That's the process we want to speed up. And let's talk about some of those systems right now. Let's start by looking at the system that you're learning right now. After all, if you've got a system that's working, or at least parts of that system that are working for you, what, we don't need to fix that. But if there are places, you know you get stuck, it's worth knowing exactly where those places are. So these are the questions that I think you can ask yourself that are going to be really important. How do you usually start a piece? Now, you know I'm a big advocate of starting hands separately and hands together. Doing hands together right from the beginning. Hands separately work to learn what you need to do, but hands together right away because it's a very different coordination. You've heard me talk about that before. And however you start learning a piece is okay. But I want you to be sure that that system that you use to start a piece is serving you. So if you feel like you're getting off to a slow start in a piece, the first thing I would say is, are you playing some of this hands together from the very first? You've heard me say this before, but I'll say it again. The very first thing I do when I get a new piece is I play the entire piece hands together, beginning to end. Now, it can be really, really messy. It's got a lot of stops and starts and figuring out it's. It doesn't resemble the real piece of music at all. But by the time I've finished that first hands together run through, which can take quite a bit of time with a new piece at least, there's nothing there. That's a mystery to me. I know everything that I'm going to face. It's like looking at the map of a big hike. I mean, suppose you were going to take a huge hike. You were going to hike up a mountain. Wouldn't you want to know what you were going to encounter? Well, this is the same thing. Getting that beginning to end look at a piece. And I don't just mean look. I mean, play of a piece gives you that real idea of what's going on and why is playing important? Well, for the same reason, I've just been explaining to you that sometimes things don't look as tricky as they really are. So by playing it all the way through and by doing it hands together, you're going to have a much better idea of where the challenges are going to be in this piece. And on the bright side, some of those things that look so challenging may not actually be so challenging once you try them. And you'll discover that too. After that, as you start to learn a piece, don't do the measure by measure technique, right? You want a bigger section to work on. I mean, even a four bar section is better than measure by measure. But if you can look at, okay, I'm going to do the first few lines of this piece and I'm really going to learn them as a section, you'll get not only a better look and at the stuff that's going on in that, but you'll learn how to connect and do the transitions between little groups of measures. You'll learn more about the actual music, the way the music flows. So looking at bigger sections rather than measure by measure can be extremely helpful and get your piece off to a much faster start.

Also, as you're working and playing, however method you're playing, working at a steady tempo and counting, this doesn't have to be with a metronome, especially not at the very earliest stages. But you need to use your inner metronome to try to keep this as steady as you can. It can go as slowly as you need, but don't neglect your counting. This will help prevent your practicing in errors. If you can count one and two and three, and while you're playing, you at least are keeping in mind where the notes you're playing are going to line up eventually, even if they don't seem to line up there right now. So working for a steady tempo and trying for a steady tempo right from the beginning, and certainly with counting, very important. Also, if on your initial run through, you do find a section that is going to be really technically challenging for you, this is great because you can start working on that section and drilling it right away, even if it's on the last page of your piece and you're not going to be up to, you know, playing the rest of the piece there for a while. Just imagine what a boost it would be if by the time you actually get to learning that part, you've already been drilling it and it's not so hard. So working on those super hard, challenging, twisty things or whatever from the very beginning will also give you a faster start on that piece, or if it's not a faster Start, at least it'll get you to the finish faster. Maybe the. The weakness in your learning system is that you get stuck at some point in a piece. It goes along okay, and then you just get stuck, and you're just in slow gear. You can't keep moving forward. Doesn't seem like things are changing and the piece, you know, starts to die a slow death. So, first of all, if it's your fingers, if it's a tempo thing, listen to the podcast from a couple weeks ago. I think it's episode 157, where I talk about learning how to play faster. But here are some other ideas. If your piece gets off to a good start, but then it just seems to take forever to get anywhere else, don't let it get to that point. Once you've made that start and the piece is, you know, just starting to kind of come together, then push it. I want you to push it way beyond that point where you would usually just play it over and over again. So it's kind of like taking off the training wheels. Remember that when you take training wheels off a bicycle, the first thing that happens is it's scary and the bike wobbles and you probably fall over. You may scrape your knees a couple of times. There are a couple of bruises that happen, but that's how you learn to ride. So don't be afraid of just saying, well, okay, I've gotten it this far, but what would it be like if it were at tempo? What would it be like to play the whole thing through, to actually finish it? See, I think a lot of people get stuck with the idea that I'm just going to practice it and practice it, and one of these days it's going to miraculously become a piece. It won't become a piece if you don't ask it to be. If you don't push it to that point where, oh, your fingers have to get from section to section without stopping. Oh, they have to play the entire piece without stopping. They have to add dynamics. They have to flow and play past mistakes. If you don't do that and do it on purpose, that's not going to just happen by itself. So way before you think you're ready, push it too close to the tempo you want to do, if not the tempo you want to do, play it all the way through. I think this is something you should be doing from the very beginning, right? Not. Okay, well, the first week, maybe you spend learning those notes, or if you're doing it in a day, maybe you spend the first hour learning notes. But then play the piece, play it right away, see what happens. Where do you not need to practice what actually works pretty well? And what can you enjoy about that process? What can you enjoy about that piece when you actually start playing it and stop getting stuck in practice mode? The practicing goes a lot better. I know it seems a little counterintuitive, but trust me, it works. The other thing that I think keeps people from learning music quickly is the fear of making mistakes, the fear of doing something wrong. So that, you know, if I take my time and if I learn everything properly, that's to be the best system. And that's the way to get where I want to go.

I'd like you, if that's you, if that sounds familiar, I'd like you to adopt a different idea. I want you to think about this saying, let go, to let flow. You need to let go of some of the worry about making mistakes so that your peace can flow, because it won't. If you're always concerned about, I need to do this exactly right before I move on to the next stage. If you're always there, you're going to get stuck there. And that may be one of the things that's keeping you from learning your music quickly. Don't be afraid that as you speed something up or as you start to play past your mistakes, you're going to put practice mistakes in or you're going to learn, unlearn the good habits that you've worked so hard to learn. You're not going to learn bad habits from doing this. You're going to start playing and you're going to find out that there are things that happen when you play the piece all the way through, when you play it at the tempo it's supposed to go. When you start putting the dynamics in it, there are things that are different, things that are going to have to concern you differently. Also, when you're playing a piece slowly, you're learning one set of coordinations. You have enough time to think about this note, to think about this hand, maybe to think about your thumb closing, I don't know. But to think about all those things. You have time, and you know what? We don't always have time when we're playing faster. So slow practice is essential. And I never stop doing slow practice. The pieces that I am playing, perhaps playing on a recital, I'm practicing them the way I want them to go, at tempo, with the dynamics, all of that kind of stuff. But I'm also practicing them quite a bit slower. You know, half or three quarters tempo so that I can make sure that everything is still lining up accurately so I don't stop playing slowly. But if I only played slowly, I'd never be able to play the piece the way it's supposed to go. You can't let your fear of mistakes keep you from playing the music. It doesn't even seem right, does it? If I can leave you with one more thought, it would be this. Your practice is creating your music, and you need to let that happen. Don't let your practice get stuck in just practice mode. Let it go to music. So that when somebody is asking that imaginary question, how do you learn a piece? How do you learn a piece? Well, it's all the skills that you've been practicing since you started the harp applied to this piece of paper that has this composer's idea and bringing life to it. So it's your skill set, it's those years of practice that are bringing you to the point where you can play that piece. It's a mysterious process, but it's one you've been involved in, I'm guessing for years you've been building that skill set, you've been playing other pieces, and everything that you already know is coming into play in this new piece that you've learned. So remember your strengths, work from your strengths, speed up your system, enjoy the music and let go to let flow. Now remember, this was part of a workshop that I taught at one of our retreats, and I'd love to see you at our next retreat. It's in Kissimmee, Florida, again from October 9th to 13th. You can use the link in the show notes or the link under upcoming events@heartmastery.com to get in there and reserve your spot. Now, I'd love to have you there next week on the podcast. We will be talking about a very important topic, one that I talk about a lot that I'm not sure I've ever really explained to you before. We're going to be talking about musicianship, what it is and what aspects of musicianship you need to be paying attention to. So that is next week right here on the podcast. But in the meantime, I'd like to remind you, as always, 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.

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.