Finger Agility For The Accident Prone - PHHn020

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 today's show. Now, whether you think of it as flying fingers or agile fingers, or finger facility or speed, fast fingers are the dream of every harpist. We all want to have fingers that fly over the strings, that make the arpeggios ripple and the scales just sizzle. But. But so often it feels like our fingers are stuck in low gear. We can barely get up the hill of everyday sort of skills, let alone achieve that level of agility. Well, that's what we're going to be talking about today. How you, no matter what level you are at right now, can start to achieve the facility that you want.

I find that many harpists think that they're just too clumsy or their fingers are too stiff or they're too old and they are not going to be able to achieve the level of facility they want. But I think that in most cases, agility is achievable. It's just that you have to know how to go about it. If you think of agility as about being comfortable while you play, not just you, of course, but your fingers as well, being comfortable in what they play. Achieving agility is not a comfortable process. It is about persisting through a level of discomfort, not physical discomfort. We don't want injury. That's not a part of this at all. But persisting through some mental discomfort in order to get there. And in my experience, many harpists aren't taught that this road to achieving agility is not going to be a smooth one. It's not going to be a pleasant journey, and it's not going to happen by accident. So today, what I'd like to do is sort of change your perspective about agility, about the possibility that you can achieve agility, that your fingers can fly over the strings. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but sooner than you think it is possible. You just have to know how to work at it. So today we're going to talk about why developing facility is important. Believe me, it's worth working at. We'll talk about perhaps the reasons that you haven't gotten there yet. I'll give you three specific things to stop doing that are probably getting in your way and three things to start doing right now.

In case you are ready to start that facility journey. And I will share with you my pyramid system for learning how to speed things up. So we'll be talking about all of that. But before we start that, speaking of things that need to be sped up or things that might be slowing you down, my two Step Chord Theory System webinar is coming up on Wednesday. So if you're listening to this when it goes live, you still have time to register for Wednesday's free webinar. I will put the link in the show notes. You can pop over there and register. If you can't attend live, that's okay, register anyway and we'll be sure to send you the the replay. What's this webinar about? Well, this is my two step system for starting to incorporate a little bit of chord theory into your playing. And it's not just about learning theory. It's about learning what you need to help you play better. It's an extremely practical system. It's not going to cover every nuance of music theory because frankly, learning those nuances before they're practical for you is part of what might be slowing you down. We want to learn what's going to help us, what's important for us to know at any given stage. So this is a very practical webinar. In fact, if you are at your harp during this webinar, you can play along. It's much more of a workshop style webinar. It's going to be a lot of fun and I certainly hope that you're going to be able to join us live. But as I said, there will be a replay, so go ahead and register. We'll be sure that you get the replay and all the materials. Plus I will be talking about two new things that we have coming up at heart mastery. One of which is definitely going to be interesting to you. I don't know which one. That depends. So you'll have to listen and find out. So I'll be sharing those with you on Wednesday's webinar. And I Certainly hope to see you there. Okay, it is time to talk about finger facility. First, let's get on the same page and talk about what finger agility really means, or at least should mean. We tend to think of finger agility as something that we hear. We can hear when someone has agile fingers. They fly over the strings is one way we put it. They seem to just not make any mistakes. They're very sure and secure and confident in what they play. But agility is about more than speed. And of course, that's only the result of having agility, or the most easily heard and perceived result of having agility. But the training that goes into that is not just about speed. It's about training fingers to be flexible, to have an independent response to, in other words, be able to take on any job at a moment's notice. To be so familiar with characteristic patterns that they respond automatically, or at least seemingly automatically, to the patterns that they are being asked to play. They also have a large vocabulary, not just of patterns, but of tempos, of dynamics. They have an entire repertoire of skills that they are comfortable and familiar with. Now, I know it seems a little silly that I'm referring to fingers as beings that are independent from you, but of course, we've all had the experience of, you know, trying to tell our fingers to do something and they do something else, right? So. So this really is not as silly as it seems. We have this experience every day. So agility is about more than speed. It's about developing flexibility, developing the independent response where any finger can take care of the role of any other finger, perhaps to have that automatic response to patterns, to be able to play with different dynamics at different levels, to be even when that's called for, and to be able to have their own emphasis or dynamic different from the fingers around them when that is called for. Now, why would this be important? Well, first of all, if your fingers are flexible and capable of independent response, this can absolutely save you in mid fumble, right? If you put the wrong finger on the string, you shouldn't have to stop and, you know, put the right finger there. You shouldn't be dependent on a single fingering. If you get the wrong finger on that string, can you recover? So fumble recovery is one benefit of agile fingers. And of course, you can learn new music more quickly. When your fingers are familiar with the characteristic heart patterns, when they're used to getting around different patterns of notes, then the patterns of notes in a new piece will not seem so unfamiliar, will not take as much practice, and will come much more quickly to your fingers. And of course, naturally, agile fingers do play faster, or they can play faster and they will play more evenly. So agility is so helpful. But here's the question, why aren't your fingers agile now? Even though maybe you've been playing for a long time, you've been playing for a long time, you've put a lot of practice in. So why don't your fingers feel more agile? I know that, you know, we talk about, oh, well, my fingers are stiff or, oh, my, these are old fingers. They're never going to move fast. But I want you to consider this. I think most of the time, harpists don't develop agile fingers because they're not asking enough of their fingers. They're not training them the right way. That doesn't mean that they're not doing practice time, that they're not doing technical exercises. But the thing is that agility does not happen by accident. It does not happen just because you've been practicing or playing a long time. Agility only happens by design, by intention. I think sometimes we get trapped in thinking about that magic 10,000 hour rule, right, that if you put in the right amount of time, these things will happen for you. Whatever it is, you'll be able to play that piece of music. You'll become a master of the instrument, whatever it happens to be. Well, the 10,000 hour rule is, our rule is a little bit arbitrary and made up to a certain extent, although there is research behind it. But when it comes to finger agility, as in anything else, those 10,000 hours, if that's the number you're going to use, have to be directed to the result that you want. Agility will not happen just because you've put in the time. It will only happen if you've put in the right kind of time. So 10,000 hours not necessary to develop agile fingers, but a few hours spent on the right things will make a huge difference. Now, if the truth is that to travel fastest, we need to travel lightest, agility is the same thing. We need to stop doing some things before we can actually start on our journey to agility. So there are a few things that are quite possibly getting in your way. And you might not be thinking that these are obstacles at all, but I'd like you to consider them in that light today. So first of all, I need you to stop being such a diligent and careful practicer, okay? Don't get all up in arms. I'm not telling you to stop practicing, and I'm not Telling you not to be careful. But one of the ways that we often practice when we're trying to be careful and learn things correctly is we practice everything slowly and loudly. Right? We practice it very slowly with a nice full sound. This is how I was taught as well. And it's a wonderful practice technique. However, it will not make your fingers agile. Just playing something correctly slowly does not mean that it is going to be correct. When it's fast, it has a different purpose, that kind of practice. So if you want to develop speed, if you want to develop agility, you're going to have to let go of that technique. Don't stop doing it altogether. But remember that if that is your only method of practice, if that is your go to practice method, you won't develop finger agility. It just doesn't happen that way. As I have often said, whether it makes sense to you or not, if you want to play fast, you have to play fast. So we're going to have to get some speed in your practice. You don't have to abandon the slow, careful practice, but we're going to have to do some practice that is not that slow and is going to incorporate some mistakes. So the slow and careful practice is only going to be part of your practice for now. Okay? We have to stop doing it all the time. Not your only method of practice.

Then I'd like you to tweak your thinking just a little bit. I'd like you to consider that you will be able to to play fast. This is one of the most difficult hurdles to get over. Yeah, your fingers might want to go fast, but if you think that you will never play fast, your fingers will believe that too. Right? If you want to play fast, you're going to have to start understanding that your fingers will do it. They are not too old, they are not too stiff. To learn to play faster, there may be a level of speed that you are physically unable to get to. But with the right kind of plan for developing agility, your fingers can become more agile than they are now. No matter what your physical condition is, we're going to work with your fingers just a little bit and they're going to get faster. So going along with that, I need you to stop avoiding pieces that are fast. It's so tempting, isn't it, that when you know that your fingers aren't good at fast things, we tend to gravitate towards slow pieces. Now, perhaps a lot of the playing you do is therapeutic playing or healing playing, and most of that is not going to be Fast for you. Developing agility may not be so much a repertoire linked goal as it is just a facility goal. Because the more facile and agile your fingers are, the more they will be able to improvise without fumbles. The surer they will be on the strings and the more healing you'll be able to project through what you play, even at slower, relaxed tempos. So it's not only about speed. So if we can get you to stop only practicing slowly, to stop believing that you won't ever be able to do it or that you don't have to do it, then we can start. What you need to do in order to play fast and the three things to start doing now. We need to help you learn to relax while you're playing. We need to help you learn to ignore the mistakes that you're going to make along this process and to have you start playing fast every day. Wow. Okay. That's a lot to do. I know. There are three very daunting things. Learning to relax while you play. We'll talk about how to do that here. Learning to ignore the mistakes you make as you're playing fast. Gosh, that's a hard one to do. We want to play things correctly, but along this journey, there's going to be some slip up and you have to be able to accept that. That's part of what I meant when I said at the beginning of this podcast that you were going to have to persist through discomfort. This is some of the discomfort you're going to have to persist through. We'll talk about that. And then you just have to play fast every day. If you don't play fast, you won't play fast. Easy enough. So I know, easy to talk about, not so easy to do. But I'm also going to give you my pyramid system, which will help you step into some of these things that you need to start doing. But let's talk about each one of these before we get to the pyramid system. So, first of all, you need to learn to relax while you play. That's so important. We need you to be able to avoid injury. The paradox here is that the harder you try to do something on the harp, anything on the harp, the less relaxed you will be. After all, we're putting in a lot of effort. But on the other hand, playing faster requires you to be more relaxed. The more effort you put into it, the more likely your fingers are to lock up or to freeze or just slow down because the tension is keeping them from moving easily and freely. So Fast, fluid playing starts with relaxed playing.

This is something that is so hard for many of us to do, to start playing with less effort. But you can see just from that phraseology, right? This is the path to more agile playing, playing with less effort. So try this experiment. Put something that you know well, a piece or an exercise, anything on your music stand and play it at whatever tempo you like. But play it at the softest dynamic you can play, keeping your fingers as loose and almost floppy as you can. Don't think about being correct, Think about just being relaxed. Now, you will probably play more wrong notes than you are used to. As you do this, I would ask you to not worry about the wrong notes. Don't get all involved and invested in fixing things. Your goal here is to just be relaxed and very soft, pianissimo dynamic. This is difficult for most of us, but this is where your agility will start. When you can let go go of the tension, you can start to learn to go faster. Consider this as a process. If this doesn't work well for you the first time, that's fine. Try 60 seconds of this every day for a week and see if you can start to get more comfortable letting the tension go. Just bear in mind that the more you can learn play without tension, the faster your fingers will be able to play. It's that simple, right? Tension will slow them down. So you don't have to be super duper relaxed in order to play fast, but you do need to learn how to relax and be relaxed while you play. So this is the start, and it will save you from any kind of injury, physical, repetitive motion sort of injury that will come from holding too much tension while you play. So let's start by learning to relax. Second thing, I need you to start learning to ignore the mistakes that happen when you're trying to speed things up. And we can start that right in this very same process, as you are working on your relaxation, you will likely find that your fingers fall off the right strings more often. Practice ignoring that. I know this goes against the grain. We're not used to ignoring mistakes. We want things to be correct. We want to fix them. But for right now, you need to learn to play past them just to realize that they are part of this process. So let's add on to the.

Little practice technique I gave you a moment ago. If you are playing through something very familiar, and you're doing it with your goal to be relaxed, and you're doing it at this super soft dynamic, when you make mistakes, ignore those mistakes. But then when you're done with that exercise for the day, you've done it. Once we're done with this little technique, done trying to be relaxed and playing softly. I want to get back to my regular practice. Before you get back to your regular practice, play that same piece one more time at a nice slow tempo at whatever dynamic you choose, whatever feels comfortable to you, but one where, you know, you can correct the mistakes that you made before so that you're not feeling like, you know, you've gone out of the house and left the bed unmade or something. Right. You know, you've, you've cleaned up the mess that you left. That can be a wonderful psychological technique. And it can refresh your fingers as well so that they're not thinking that, oh, yeah, we can, we can get away with those mistakes. No, it's not. You're getting away with those mistakes. Those mistakes are part of a different process. But then you can remind your fingers that these are the notes I really want you to play. And you can do that at a nice, slow, careful tempo. So go ahead and ignore the mistakes when we're trying to speed things up and then refresh them by cleaning them up a little bit later. But not at the same time, right? These are two different times through that same piece. And then the third one, I just said, you know, play fast every day. What can you do to help yourself? Speed something up, to get used to speed. I don't know if you remember, this was my experience, and maybe it wasn't everybody's, but I remember when I first learned to ride a bicycle or learned to drive a car. And I think probably the first time I went, certainly the first time I went skiing, right, I remember going down that hill and that, you know, and it felt like I was flying. Oh, my goodness, it felt so fast. And as I got better at any of those skills and got more experienced, I realized that, okay, you know, no, this is the normal speed for this. This is not too fast for me. It was too fast the first time. This is the same thing, right? So that when you play fast, that first time is going to seem breathless. It's going to be a mess. Like my first adventure at skiing. You're probably going to fall down. It's not going to be mistake free. It's not going to be the fluid kind of playing you're looking for, but it's the way we learn. We learn by starting fast. And just like skiing, you know, it's downhill. You don't have a whole lot of Control, especially not as a beginning skier. So it's going to feel a little fast, it's going to feel out of control. But if it's something that you get used to by playing something fast every day, it's going to stop being scary. It's going to stop being so mistake filled, you know, you'll stop falling down. It will get easier. So perhaps it's a particular scale drill that you want to play fast every day, or perhaps it's an exercise, or perhaps it's two measures of a piece of music. But whatever it is, play something fast every day. Just a little bit. Doesn't have to take a lot of time, just a minute. But that little bit of time, that minute every day will help accustom you to playing fast. You'll get used to playing fast, and perhaps along the way you'll even start thinking of yourself as a harpist who can play fast. What a radical change that would be, right? Well, now I'd like to share my tempo pyramid system with you. I use this system for myself. I use it with my students when we're trying to speed up a piece of music. But you can use it to just speed up your playing in general. You can use it with an exercise, you can use it with an. You can use it with a piece of music. But it gives you a way to approach playing faster without thinking that you have to do it metronome notch by metronome notch, which I find not only a very slow process, but one that's not really directed at the goal that we want. Remember what I said a moment ago about achieving agility being something that happens by design and by intention? Well, that notch by notch metronome thing is, you know, the toe at a time in the water, it's a very slow process. It's not necessarily going to lead you to overall agility. We have to be a little bit more brave, a little bit bolder about how we're going to do this. So the tempo pyramid system is meant to, to help you get there faster. Gosh. That's our theme for the day, isn't it? Fast. So let me explain this pyramid system to you and then I'll play through it and give you, give you an example. Very simply, the tempo pyramid works like this. You're going to have your nice comfy speed that you can play, you know, well. And let's say it's a piece of music that you want to speed up. You can play it very well at that kind of slow, comfy tempo. And what we're going to do is pyramid the tempo up, and then we'll pyramid it back down. So picture, you know, like a big peak, right? Like a mountain peak. So we're going to go up to a faster tempo and then back down toward our comfy tempo. And that's how the tempo pyramid works. Basically, this pyramid consists of five speeds. One is your very comfy tempo. And this is the tempo where, you know, you can play the piece without mistakes or without very many mistakes, or, you know, usually without very many mistakes, right? So it's going to be nice and comfy. There's no pushing, there's no panic in it. So your nice, comfy tempo. Then we're going to have what we call a medium tempo, which is approximately 25% faster than your comfy tempo. Now, you will probably still be able to play the piece okay, at your medium tempo, whatever that happens to be. Then we've got a fast tempo, which is, oh, 10 to 15% faster than your medium tempo. Take these percentages with a grain of salt. But that's about the way they work out. Now, then there's a sort of an optional tempo here, and that would be your bonus tempo, which pushes that fast tempo to just another few percents, maybe another 5 or 10% faster. It's going to be about one metronome notch. If you have the kind of metronome that. That works in, in notches or in increments like that, it's a little bit faster than you're fast. And you don't have to do that one if you don't want to. But then there's the last tempo, which I call the halfway tempo. And it's halfway between your medium tempo and your comfy tempo. So it's not quite as slow as your comfy tempo. This is the tempo pyramid. So we have a very comfy tempo. We move up to a medium tempo, up to a fast tempo. And if you feel like kicking it up one more notch, emerald style, you can do that. And then to finish out, we're coming back down, but not back down all the way. Just halfway between medium and comfy. So those are your speeds. If you want sort of sample metronome numbers, here's an idea. If your very comfy tempo is 40 on your metronome, then your medium tempo is probably around 50. Your fast tempo is probably around 56. Your bonus tempo might be around 63. And then your halfway tempo is probably about 46. That's one set of numbers. If you want, let's pretend that your very comfy tempo is 60. We'll move it up. Okay, so if you're very comfy tempo is 60, then your medium tempo is going to be around 76. Your fast tempo is going to be around 88, your bonus tempo may be around 92, 96, and your halfway down tempo is going to be around 69.

So just thinking about those metronome numbers for a second, you can see that there's quite a range, right? We're not just moving this up a notch at a time. We're making big steps. That's where the design, the intention comes into this. Speeding stuff up. We're trying to get it to have a lot of progress involved in this. We want it to grow quickly. We don't want it to be growing in these tiny little increments that take us too long to really achieve. The, the bonus that you get for working in these big increments is that you get to begin and end at tempos that you can actually play the comfy tempo and that halfway tempo in between medium and comfy. Phew. Right. There's your relaxation right there. So if you're going to pyramid it this way from your slow tempo up to your fast tempo, you play it once at your comfy tempo. This is just that sort of warm up one, right? So you're going to play it once at your comfy tempo, then play it twice at that medium tempo. Just in case, play it twice at the fast tempo. Remember to ignore your mistakes. This is not about getting everything right. Not today. It's not about getting everything right at that fast tempo. It's about getting fast. So play it twice at your fast tempo. If you're going to use that bonus tempo, play it once at that bonus tempo just to kick it up that last notch, then go back. You can play it twice at your medium tempo on the way back down and then once at that halfway tempo. We're not going all the way back down to very comfy, just a little bit slower than your medium tempo. Why do we not go all the way back down to very comfy? Because sometimes very comfy is too comfy. We want you to be able to move this up because after, say, a week of pyramiding at these tempos, the next week your very comfy tempo is no longer going to be in play. You're going to have a new, very comfy tempo. And that new, very comfy tempo is probably your halfway tempo, the one that was halfway between medium and very comfy. I know you're. You're scrambling to try to write these down. So I will give you this pyramid. We'll work through it again with an example at the harp. But the idea here is that we are moving your tempos up and down quickly in the course of one practice session. And that from week to week, we're actually moving the entire pyramid up, starting from your very comfy tempo in week one, say. And then your very comfy tempo for week two will be your halfway tempo from week one. So we're still moving things up. All right, let me show you how the pyramid system works. For this little demonstration of the pyramid system, I'm going to be using just the first section of a boire written by a harpist named Hans Zingle. And this is just a little demonstration of what happens when you pyramid a piece, an exercise, anything you're working on. Remember, we're going to be increasing the tempo. And as I had mentioned earlier in the show, as you increase the tempo, what I'd like you to do is decrease the volume so that slow can be nice and full sounding. But as you get faster, decrease the volume to keep your risk of injury lower, to learn to stay relaxed, to keep yourself from trying too hard, and to help you go a little bit faster. So for this exercise, I'm going to start my pyramid at 60. This is going to be my comfy tempo. I'll put my metronome on.

There's my 60 on my metronome, and I'm going to play through this, a nice full sound. The idea that for these eight measures that I'm playing for you wants to be nice and correct and comfy. So here we go.

Okay. Once at that nice, comfy tempo. And now we're going to go up to the medium tempo, which is going to be about 76 here.

About 25% faster than I was going before, approximately. So now, as you increase the tempo, as you change tempos, you're going to have to be very careful to feel that new tempo and line it up with the metronome. So that's another good challenge, another good thing to learn. So here's my medium tempo. Those same measures not working quite so hard. Being sure I'm staying relaxed. A medium volume can go along with this, too.

Okay, not bad. Just once for that, you may want to do twice, depending on how that goes for you, but not more than twice, because now we want to move up to the fast tempo. Our fast tempo for this is going to be 88.

Okay. And we'll do it twice at the fast tempo. I'll play it once for you, but twice would be our goal. A little bit softer, a little bit lighter.

If you make mistakes at it, you ignore it. We're just playing through now. We're going to do a bonus tempo for this. Bonus tempo would be about 96 or so. We'll do it again and I'm going to do this one quite softly.

Get that new tempo in my head. Do it just once at this speed. Ah, not a good start.

Okay, now that worked well for me. But even if it doesn't work well for you only once at that bonus tempo, then you would go back and play it twice at your medium tempo and once to finish up at your halfway tempo. So the rule here is that the faster you play, the softer you play and the less you worry about it. The idea is to do it, not necessarily do it correctly at first. If you're setting yourself maybe a week for a particular tempo pyramid, by the end of the week you should notice some improvement. But it doesn't mean that your fast tempo is going to be perfect yet. That's okay. Remember, we're getting used to the speed, not necessarily getting used to perfection at the speed. So that's the tempo pyramid system. The idea that you're moving up quickly, that you're playing fast, that you're staying relaxed and, and that you're starting it right, starting the process of developing and achieving agility. It can happen for you, but it can only happen if you start doing it. Now, before you dash off to your harp and start working on the tempo pyramid, I have a couple things I want to remind you about. First of all, remember that it's still not too late to sign up for our two step chord theory webinar that is happening two days from now, happening on Wednesday, October 6th. And I have a lot of information on applying your theory knowledge to your playing and learning a little bit more about theory through your playing. I have so much information to share with you, so I certainly hope that you register and that you can attend or at least join us for the replay. And then on next week's show, we're going to be talking about something completely different. So much of harp music and our harp lives is involved in doing right. We play, we practice, we try, we learn to play faster. And then the other aspect that we spend a lot of time in looking, we look at our fingers, we look at the strings, we look at the music. And I have lately come to the conclusion that perhaps we are not spending enough time listening as musicians, people who create sound pictures, right? Things that people like to listen to. Maybe we're not spending enough time listening, but we get caught up in some of the other things that are important in our heart playing. And I think that we do that at some point cost. So on next week's podcast, we're going to be talking about how to improve your listening skills, how they can help you in your everyday harp playing, but also how they can bring you much more pleasure, more joy and renew your harp happiness. Right? So that's next time on the podcast, and I certainly hope that you join me then. Have a wonderful week. Until we talk again, 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.