Ditch the Drills: 3 Better Ways to Practice - PHH 075

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

Welcome to the show. Who wants a better way to practice? Yes, please.

While it's true that music practice necessarily involves a lot of repetition and drill, there are better and definitely worse ways to go about it. Consider how many times you've gotten up from the harp bench, having spent an hour on those four nearly impossible measures and come back the next day to feel like you're starting back at square one again. I feel your pain, my friend. I've been there. Now, hopefully you're keeping in mind that progress doesn't happen in a predictable way. It happens in its own time. It's like a seed you plant in the ground, you water it and you guard it carefully, but you can't really see through the ground to see if anything is happening yet. Then one day you go outside and poof, there it is. A baby plant. Yes, progress happens over time and is nurtured through repetition. But unlike the growth timeline for a seed, we have a little bit of control of how quickly that progress shows up. Now, if you've read my ebook Kaleidoscope Practice or have been listening to me for a while, you know that I am not about repetition. Just, just for repetition's sake. Repetition is required. It's how we become familiar with our music, how we acquire all the information we need to play a piece well. The notes, the finger patterns, the expression, the flow, the meaning. There is so much complexity in playing a piece of music well that we need the time and the drill to really embed all of the all those component parts. But that embedding process is less dependent on the number of repetitions than on the focus of them. And on today's show, I'm going to show you three places to put your focus that will allow you to make each repetition more meaningful and impactful so you can do fewer repetitions and get to the fun part. Playing the music faster. Why do I think this is important for you right now? Well, because if you are looking ahead to any holiday performances, even if it's just playing for your family, you want to get that music ready sooner rather than later. There are lots of things we can do to speed up our music preparation, but cramming is not one of them. So being smart with how you use your daily practice time is what will make the difference between being excited about sharing your music or shaking in those beautiful new shoes. This is the time to ditch the excess drill and the frustration that goes with it and discover a better way to practice those sticky spots. Of course, those sticky spots aren't the only things that are standing between where you are now in your piece and where you want your piece to be. Where you want it to flow smoothly and musically and you be able to play it for anyone, confidently and proudly. So that's why I want to take this moment to remind you that our Play It With Confidence Intensive starts in just a few days. So time is running out to sign up for that. Our Play It With Confidence Intensive is a live five day course, meaning that I'm teaching every class live. And the classes I'm teaching will be doing mindset trainings to help you really prepare yourself for what, oh, what playing takes. It's a little bit different than practicing. Well, it's a lot different than practicing. And we'll be talking about what you need to do to prepare you, but we'll also be talking about those missing components in your music preparation, those ways you need to practice to really finish that piece and get it playable for people instead of just still at that practice stage. We'll be talking about how to make sure that the piece will flow, that it's really prepared. Prepared for playing, not just prepared enough for more practicing. Right. We'll take it to that next level, we'll crash proof it, and I'll show you that in a system, we already have people in the course and it's going to be starting very soon. So this is a great time to join, by the way. But the people who are already in there are looking at the training materials and talking about how detailed they are. And that's what I wanted. I want you to you to know that you're going to have all the tools you need to prepare your piece properly, to crash proof your music and use so that you can relax and play and let your music speak for itself. But above all else, I want you to come away from this intensive knowing how to take the strategies I'm teaching and apply them to any piece you learn to help you learn it faster, play it more expressively and share it with, you know, more confidence. So in addition to those little mindset trainings, there are three full on workshops where I'll be teaching you exactly what you need to take any piece to that confident stage. And of course to take you there with it. Right. It's no good if your piece is ready, if you aren't ready. So we'll make sure that all that happens. Plus we're including a masterclass. Plus there are some really powerful booklets that go with all these workshops. There's so much included in this course. I would love for you to join us and take this along with us. So I've put the link in the show notes or you can just go to heartmastery.com confidence and you can sign up there. It's going to be a really terrific course. And as I said, we get started very soon. In fact, we have a a little launch party this week where everyone who's already in the course will just get all the extra information they need. And don't worry if you're busy, you can still take this course. There will be replays of everything so you won't miss a thing. If this happens during your work hours or whatever else this is, this is still accessible for you. So hop on over there, heartmastery.com confidence and join us for the intensive. So that's preparing your whole piece. What we're talking about now is making your piece ready from that first stage where you've got those trouble spots and you know you need to drill them. But we want to make sure that those repetitions serve you and the music. And it's all about focus. So if you're ready, let's dive in. You may have heard me mention this before, but I started piano lessons when I was four years old. I wanted to play the harp, but I was told that if I had, if I took my piano lessons and did well and I still wanted to play the harp when I was 8, that we could think about harp lessons then. It was not a bad plan and I really enjoyed my piano lessons. In fact, I still enjoy playing the piano. But at that age, my piano teacher knew that she needed to shape my practice for me. I certainly wasn't capable of understanding what music practice was supposed to do. So when I still have some of those old lesson books, and when I look back at them, there is definitely a common thread I can go through page after page, and they all say, do this five times, do this 10 times, do this three times, whatever the number is. It's all about the repetitions. And this was how I learned that repetition is going to give you results. And that is certainly true. However, as I grew and got more sophisticated and more mature about my approaches to practice, I realized that there's repetition and then there's repetition. There's the kind of repetition that is doing something over, and then there's the kind of repetition that is doing something better. And I want to be really clear with the difference here, because that's the real point of our discussion today. Obviously, the good thing about repetition is that the more you do something, the better you get at it. And that comes almost without effort. If you think about it, think about something like tying your shoe, right? You had to learn to tie your shoe. And then the more you tied your shoe, the better you got at it. Makes perfect sense, right? You repeat something, you get better at it. Well, the thing about tying your shoe. And now maybe you're more particular about your shoe tying than I am. I mean, I like my shoelaces to be, you know, kind of even. And I don't want to trip on them. And, you know, that I want them to stay tied. But beyond that, I'm not particularly invested in the knot. You know, it doesn't need to look perfect. It needs to work for me. So when I'm talking, when I'm thinking about tying my shoes, I'm not thinking about tying my shoes perfectly. I'm just thinking about tying my shoes. So in that sense, the repetition that's required to help you learn to tie your shoe has a limit, doesn't it? It only needs to get you so far. When we're talking about repetition for music, there are so many more things that we want to have happen. We don't want it just to be there. We don't want it just to be correct notes. We want it to be musical. We want it to be expressive. We want it to flow. And most of those things happen differently every time. A little bit like the way I tie my shoe, but on a much more sophisticated level, with much more complexity, certainly. So it sort of makes sense to realize that the repetition that would be required for just learning to perform an action like tying your shoe is going to be not as intricate, not as focused as the repetition that we need to bring to something that's much more complex, like music practice, like trying to iron out that trouble spot or trying to make this phrase flow nicely. That's not just a matter of doing it over and over again. It's not even a matter of doing it correctly over and over again. It's actually an act of creation, not a mirror of what we did before. Not recreating exactly what we did before, but creating that passage or phrase or whatever it is, new every time and still making it better.

Wow. No wonder this is a hard thing. But this is also why I am not an advocate. Now. I know it works, and it is great for some people, but I am not an advocate of, you know, those practice beads or something where you can, you know, play it, move the bead over, Play it, move the bead over, and keep track of your repetitions that way. For a lot of people, those kinds of devices are helpful because it's a. It shows them it's a visible progress symbol, right? Okay, look, I've done all these repetitions. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But if those repetitions are truly just doing it again, even if the repetitions are, I'm doing it again correctly, those repetitions are only going to get you so far. They're only going to bring a certain level of growth because you're looking for reproduction and not creation. I know, hard to fathom, but the difference is in the focus, and that's what I'm going to explain. So, you know, when we try to focus on something, I mean, we're merely human beings, right? So we apply our focus, but our focus is instantly fleeting. How many times have you repeated a section of a piece, you know, those two bars, and you've done them over and over and over again and realized that you were zoning out a little bit in the middle and that your mind was no longer on your task.

So what's happening at that point is that you don't really know exactly what that music sounded like, exactly what you were playing, because your mind was elsewhere. When your mind is elsewhere, you are not creating what it is you're doing. You're merely letting your fingers reproduce it.

Yes, we want our fingers to be able to move by themselves, but we want to be able to make music out of it, too. And the repetitions that you're doing where you're allowing your focus to slip are about a quarter as effective as a repetition where you're actually focused on what you're doing.

But that's hard, you say, and you would be Right. To say that it's very hard to keep your focus on what you're doing, especially if you're trying to repeat something 10 or 20 times. But what I'm going to tell you now might sound like heresy. But it's a different way to look at repetition, because I'm going to tell you that repeating something 10 times or 20 times, maybe repeating it too many times, playing it fewer times with deeper and more constructive focus, will get you better results and not wear you down so much. You don't need to repeat things quite as much as you might think you do. There's the lesson. Now, I have been on calls with students where they. They, you know, will tell me how much they have, you know, much time they've done repeating something and how many repetitions they've put in. And yet sometimes when we dive into the work that they've done, we discover it hasn't quite paid off, and we look a little bit deeper and realize it's because they didn't know what they needed to work on or what they could work on while they were doing all those repetitions.

So when we're repeating a passage and we're unfocused, we have very unpredictable results. But every time we apply our focus to one of those repetitions, we get way more bang for our practice moment. And in fact, we. We bring much more of our own brain processing power to it as well. We learn so much more. So let's think about what kinds of focus you can bring. You're looking at this passage. It's a hard, tricky passage, and you know that you just need to drill it, but that's wrong. You don't just need to drill it. You do need to drill it. We need to go over it. But you need to learn something from it as you do. You need to create something with it as you do. The idea is to get more out of every repetition and put more into it. And it's way easier to do than you might think. And because it is going to be more focused, you will be able to do fewer repetitions. I know that part sounds good. All right, so here's one area of focus. Let's think about playing that passage. Whatever passage it is in your piece, you need to drill and think that on this next repetition, you are going to aim to create more understanding for yourself of that passage. We want to know more about what's going on. We want, maybe the place to look is to look first at what's happening that's wrong. What is it that's holding us up. Is it one note, one finger? Is it a lever change? But let's look not just at what's tripping us up, let's look at the role that that plays that moment in the entire passage. Is this part of a chord or an arpeggio that you could recognize? Is there a particular shape that means something to you? Do you see a pattern in the notes? Do you see similarities or differences between other things? Is there a particular note you want to remember? Can you remember that lever change in a particular way? Whatever it is, you need to know about that passage, Figure out what that is, give it a name and call it out. And yes, I do mean call it out. If there's one note that you keep missing and you're not sure what that note is, well, let's call it on out. We're going to. Every time you play that passage, when you're repeating it, right, doing those repetitions, you're going to say A. I'm going to reach the A. Coming up now is the A. Or coming up now is the F sharp. If it's a lever or pedal, you have to push or. Okay, here's the G chord. Look, take a moment, look at that G chord. Say, all right, that's a G chord. So what can I use to help? Remind me that that's a G chord or why is it a G chord? Is that the name of the key? Is it the key of this particular passage? What is it? Why is it there? Take a moment and aim to create understanding for yourself. What is in there? What do you need to know? Don't just play it again without thinking. Even if you play it correctly, without that level of understanding, you're only halfway there. So if there's a problem spot in your music that you need to repeat.

Sure, play it a couple of times just to play it, because that might make you feel good. But then really look for what's there. What is it that is difficult about this? Is it the fingering? Is it the rhythm? Figure that out. Call it out. Remember to focus on that.

I promise you that two repetitions done with that level of focus are worth 5, 6, 7 of non focused repetition. Knowing what the issue is and how to fix it is huge. All right, but so your problem isn't understanding. Your problem might be that the passage is just really, really hard or it's really, really fast and it's scary. Oh, I know about scary passages. And they always seem to sort of creep up on you. And you know when they're Coming, right? So you might prepare. All of a sudden, you find yourself, oh, you're playing along. You're playing along. Maybe you're doing this in a lesson. You're playing along, thinking, oh, my, why is my stomach all. All tight? Why is my body tensing up? Oh, it's because. Oh, that measure. That's right. I messed it up again, right? We cringe, we flinch before we get there. Well, if a passage like that is really hard, then let's create time. Let's use our repetitions to create some time around it. Now, remember that little passage, those couple of measures, they don't have to go at tempo yet. If they're not ready for. They don't need to go at tempo yet. So let's calm things down. So we want to get rid of the panic around those measures. We want to get rid of the sense of urgency that makes your fingers go flying and fumbling around the strings. We want to create calm as you approach those measures. So what we're going to do is create what I call a time warp. And what. What you're going to do is you're going to play through the bigger passage. First of all, okay, let's do some repetition before we get to that bigger passage. Let's do some repetition of just those measures and, you know, drill them to make sure that the notes are in place, that you understand everything that's going on, and that they work slowly, that you can do those. Now, we're not going to play those measures any faster than you can actually play them, but that doesn't mean we have to hold the rest of the piece back. So those two measures are likely part of a bigger section. And we're going to play through that entire bigger section at whatever tempo you're using for most of it, right? Those two measures aside.

As you approach those two measures, do a retardando. Slow everything down so that when you get to those two measures, you're playing them in super slow motion. We've created this time warp, right? We're in the Matrix, right? Things are moving really slowly, and they're moving as slowly as you need them to go for it to be correct. And then once you're out of that danger zone, you can pick the speed back up and go back to the speed you were playing. Now, obviously, this isn't something you're going to practice with a metronome, because the metronome won't help you here. But what we're trying to do is quite a number of things. We're Trying to give you some calm around those measures. I mean, if they're not ready to go fast yet, we don't have to take them fast yet. So we're going to do some repetition where we ease into them and ease out of them. They'll be at a different speed than the rest of the piece for right now. But the magic here is that once we've created the calm around those measures, we won't flinch when we get to them. We won't be tensed up when we get there. We're going to be calm as we approach them. We're going to stay calm, and that will allow you to play them more easily. You'll be relaxed. You'll be able to fit them into the rest of the piece without panicking. Now you'll take them back out of the piece and you'll do some repetition to speed them up. Use something like the tempo pyramid to make them work. But once again, notice that something like the tempo pyramid, and I've described this before, is where you're at. You know, one tempo, we move it up 20%, we move it up another 10% and another couple notches, and then back down. Those aren't just inching up the metronome kind of repetitions. They're very purposeful, very intentional, and they'll move you forward. They're just as focused as anything else we're talking about today.

So if you need to, with your repetitions, create time, you can slow them down. You can slow them down even when you're playing the passage, those measures. Right. We've talked about creating understanding to help you not make that same mistake every time and help you focus that repetition. We've talked about creating time so that you can slow things down so they work. And going along with that is our third focus. We're going to create a bridge.

Lots of times when you have a trouble spot, it's not the trouble spot itself. And this might be a great add on to the time warp drill that we just talked about. So if it's not the spot itself, it may be getting into that spot and. Or getting out of it. Often you could drill that measure or two a hundred times and still have it go wonky when you put it back into context.

So once you have your understanding of that problem spot worked out and you know that you can play those measures at a nice slow tempo, you can play them calmly and correctly. Even then, you still need to create the transition into and out of it. Now, time warp is terrific because it's going to Give you that same idea where you're moving smoothly into the section and smoothly out of it. Although right now we're, you know, in that example, you're slowing that passage down.

But now we don't have to. We can create if, you know, assuming that that passage is working. We need to create the transition where it works smoothly, at the right tempo, at the same tempo, at least, getting into it and out of it. So this is going to mean working in sections and having that. Having that happen Now. So those are just three little focus things. And let's talk about how they fit into your repetition. Okay, You've got that hard spot, and you know you need to drill it. So what do you do? Obviously, what I'm not advocating is that you play it 10 times back to back the same way, and then go on. I'm going to give you instead 10 alternative things to think about as you play each one of those 10 repetitions. Now, you don't have to do all 10 of them, obviously, and some of them are going to work better for some passage than passages than others. But the idea behind it is this. These are things that add enough variety and interest to your repetition that you're going to be able to stay mentally engaged and focused. And they're all with the. Perhaps, with perhaps the exception of the first one, they're all directed at the music, at the music that you want to create. When you're done with this, right, when your passage is working, what is it really going to sound like, and how is it going to serve the music, or at least a musically creative alternative. So Here are some 10 alternative focus ideas for those repetitions. The first one is the most basic, right? And that's playing it through very slowly to secure the notes, the fingering, and your technique. This is best done at a very slow tempo with a relaxed and full sound. It gives you the chance to make sure that your fingers are working correctly. You can make all those placings clean so they're not buzzing. You can make them accurate. So it's a very necessary way to do a repetition. And I know a lot of you do that already. It's just that I don't want you to stop there. Okay, so what else could you do instead? Well, you could practice shaping the phrase. Find the phrase that those two measures are part of, or maybe they form the phrase by themselves. Maybe it's just one measure, maybe it's four. Right? Whatever is the spot that you're trying to look at, find that phrase. Sing the phrase to yourself, even if you just have to play the melody notes to see what they sound like, and then play that passage trying to make the phrase, not just play the notes right. Or you could play that same passage with very exaggerated dynamics. Does it have a crescendo? We'll do a super crescendo. Does it go from loud to suddenly soft? Well, you make sure that you're going from loud to suddenly exaggerate those dynamics. You're helping yourself, embed those dynamics in your repetition at a very, you know, very deep level, with a lot of intention. You could also try playing this passage very fast and light. I don't care if it's supposed to be slow. Play it fast with a very light touch so that it's very even and very clean. We're giving you a different look at that passage, and we're giving your fingers a very different look at the passage. By doing this, building in that variety is building in strength and confidence. We already talked about this next one that would be practicing the transitions. Make those trans. The transition into and out of that section smooth. In fact, you can cut your trouble spot, if you like, in half and work on the. The transition and through the front half of that passage and then the back half of that passage and the transition outward. Great way to get a different look at that section. You could also think about where that passage comes in the story of the piece. You know, in the whole context of the whole piece. What is that passage doing? What are those couple measures doing? Are they another statement of the melody? Is it just adding something to the. To the music? Is it a particular change? Is it an effect? What is it as part of the story? Think about that when you do your repetition and how to make those measures feel that part of the story.

You might also try making that passage accented and sharp. If it's normally legato and smooth, think of it as being very accented and dry and clipped. If it's supposed to be accented and dry and clipped, try making it legato and smooth so you're doing the opposite articulation.

You could add some rhythmic variety. Working on the rhythmic patterns that we often talk about. When you're practicing, practicing it long, short, or long, short, short, or doing some of those rhythmic patterns to add variety. I'm sure you do those already. You could also practice saying any pedal or lever changes that happen during that passage, say them out loud. It's terrific for adding focus and making sure that those things are exactly right. And finally, you could also say, or even sing the melody Notes in that passage while you play it will help keep your ear focused on the melody. And at the same time, it's preparing you a little bit to let go of those notes and make sure that your fingers can do those notes when you were thinking about the music and working at that sort of higher level. What I want you to remember is this. We are trying to prevent you from going on autopilot during your practice. We don't want your music to be playing without you. The point here is to be fully present in your music as much as you can be in your practice, so that you can control the flow, the expression, the story of the piece, and so that you can enjoy it as you play.

Proper practice gives us the freedom to make music, not to just be a wind up toy. It's only when we are fully engaged in playing our music that we feel the magic instead of the fear, right? We have the freedom to let go of the wrong notes and let them instantly be part of the past and maybe part of what made that particular time different from all the rest. And you can start that process in your practice every day. Once again, I hope that you are going to join me for the Play It With Confidence intensive which starts oh when we have our launch party this week and we start our full on intensive next week. So I hope that you will join us for that. It's going to be so much fun. I am so excited about teaching this material. I've never taught exactly on this topic before and I've never taught this this way or taught this material this way before. And I'm really excited about being able to share all this with everybody on the intensive and I hope that you will join us for that. Once again. You can go to harpmastery.com confidence and you can sign up to join us on the intensive next week. Here on the podcast, I'm talking about being in the zone versus being on autopilot. So many times we think about, you know, I want to get in the zone. You know, I want to be playing in the zone. Well, what does that really mean? What does it mean for us as musicians and harpists? How do we get there? Do we even want to be there? And perhaps we do. And I'll tell you, it's sure a heck of a lot better than being on autopilot that we don't want at all. So join me next week as we talk about being in the zone. And in the meantime, and please 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. Thank you so much for joining me 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.