Finger Fumbles: Is the Problem with Your Technique or Your Reading? - PHH 122

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about, showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. How can you correct a problem, any problem, from a water leak to a paper jam in the printer, if you don't know where the problem really is? Harp playing is no different. Our practice is supposed to help us fix mistakes and even prevent them from recurring well, at least to a degree. But if we don't know where the underlying issue is, it's nearly impossible to find a fix for it. The obvious solution to this dilemma is to ask your teacher. Unfortunately, though, even if you have access to a teacher or another harp expert, the things we want to fix usually reveal themselves in a practice session when we're working by ourselves. So we rely on our own experience to find the fix for whatever challenge we're facing, whether or not we have the experience we need to do it. Of course, teachers don't always have an instant solution either. Often we arrive at the solution through a process of trial and error. The student tries our suggestion and we discover we were in error. So we go on to plan B or C or D or whatever it takes. Now, in the spirit of trying to help you become a more expert instructor in your own practice, I have chosen a few common scenarios that require a fix and the most frequently successful fixes for each. What jumped out at me as I started putting this information together for you was that the fixes sorted themselves neatly into two categories for each of the problems. The fixes could either be technique related or reading related. In other words, the underlying problem could be with your fingers, your technical skills, or it could be with your music reading skills. The surprise with that second one is that even if you're an experienced and fluent music reader, the issue still could be a reading one. What I want you to be able to take away from today's show is an arsenal of ideas that can help you keep moving forward and making progress on the pieces you're learning. You'll find, however, that these potential solutions may help you address some challenges that are more broad based in your playing, or they might just be things you haven't even considered before, in which case you're in for a big growth spurt. So grab the music you've been practicing lately, identify some issues you've been trying to find a fix for, and see if one of the solutions we discussed today might be exactly what you need. Speaking of exactly what you need, I have another idea for you now here in September, we've got a great burst of energy at the beginning of a new season and a new school year year, etc. But I want you to think ahead to those doldrums of winter and when you might need a little bit more energy for your harp playing. And with that in mind, I'd like to invite you to join us at our February Getaway retreat in Kissimmee, Florida. Early bird registration is now open, which means you get to save $300 on the cost of your registration. Actually, the retreat is more than half filled already as the day of the date of this recording, so I don't want you to waste a moment if you think that February might be just the time. You're going to need a refresher and that's what you need for your heart playing. I'd love to have you come and join us at our getaway retreat where you'll be able to work with me and with our certified coach, Mary Jane d', Arville, who will be joining me at the retreat and as a co teacher and workshop leader and all that great stuff. So it will be a wonderful time. It always is at our getaway retreat. And as I said, now is the time to think ahead and do that from now until the end of the month, assuming we still have spots open, you can save $300 on the cost of your registration and you get to join us in February. So thinking ahead to what you might need then. But let's talk a little bit about what you might need right now before we can go about digging into the fixes for these problems. I need you to be ready to assume a new role in your practice. Okay? Don't worry about it. It's a little creativity A little imagination here. That's called for when we practice. We do, we're in there, we're playing, we're, you know, working on fingering and technique and notes and rhythms and expression and all those things that go into playing. And we're doing it keeps us very busy. We trying to figure out all those pieces and put them together. But then when something doesn't work, doing is often the wrong fix. Just doing it over isn't what we want. We need to go into teacher mode, we need to go into diagnostician mode. We need to figure out not just that something is wrong, but exactly what is wrong. We need to become a fairly objective observer. This is where you need to put aside the self criticism, the self judgment. It's not that you got it wrong, it's about what's wrong and how we're going to fix it. So you need to start realizing that your best solution begins with you being an expert diagnostician and one that is removed from the difficulty of playing. Once you can do that, it's much easier to see a solution and much less frustrating. It becomes an experiment, it becomes just a problem to sort out rather than a difficulty. A mountain, an obstacle that's in front of you. Often just switching your mindset this way will help you discover a particular strategy for fixing the problem. But it all starts with identification. So once you have identified what the problem is, then we can start finding the strategy. And actually that's when you come to sort of a fork in the road, because you're going to see a number of different strategies and you may choose the strategy for fixing the problem that's going to be the better of any number of strategies that's facing you, meaning the one that's more likely to lead to a fix. Or you might not choose the the optimal road to fixing the particular issue, but either one may get you the fix you need. You may need to try a number of different strategies and that fix may end up being a little bit of both. And that's why I've sort of gotten our choice, our fork in the road, down to just two choices, two options. A technique related option or a reading related option. Because that's where most of these fixes are going to happen. But before you can fix that problem or even decide which fork in the road you're going to take, you need the answers to two questions. What is actually wrong and when is it right?

Because there's going to be a place where you can make it right. So let's dig into some of These common problems. And I'll walk you through these steps. We're going to start by identifying what could be wrong, when it might be right, and then a fix for either a reading issue or for a technique related issue. So that's our approach today, and I'm guessing that it's going to be a little bit different from what you usually do. It is going to give you a framework though, for being able to look at a problem, at a challenge, at something that's not working in your music and figure out how to address it, rather than just putting your head down and trying it over and over and over. So if you're ready, we're going to dig in and we're going to start with chords. Playing chords can be a challenge for us harpists. And the more notes in the chord, the more difficult they are for us to play. So, you know, if you've got a three note chord in one hand that's at one level of difficulty, but a four note chord in both hands. So both hands playing four notes and playing together is an entirely different level of difficulty. So playing chords can often slow us down. Now, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about smaller chords that slow you down or bigger chords that slow you down, the issues could be the same. So let's start by looking at if you've got a chord passage that's slowing you down, what is actually wrong? Can you identify that it's one note in a chord that you're playing wrong? Or one hand of two hands that is always going for the wrong notes? Or is it a lever or a pedal that you're not getting on time? Is it a leap? Is it a placing? What is exactly wrong? Try to focus and narrow down as much as you can to see what's going on. Now could be the entire passage, in which case maybe you're just not getting to things on time and that could be the issue as well. But having looked at those, maybe you're still not exactly sure of what is exactly wrong. So let's find out when it's right. How do we do this? Well, we'll go more slowly. Can you make it correct just by going more slowly, even if it's super slow? Or can you make it correct if you do just one hand at a time? Or can you make it correct if you leave out one note? Now, I'm not suggesting that you make those edits, although that could be a solution for another time. But for right now, what we're looking for is what when can we make it right. How can we get it to right? Because that's usually where you'll find the exact cause of the problem. Now, when it comes to chords, usually it's a reading challenge. But let's look at technique. What could be a technical challenge for playing chords? It's usually placing, getting all those fingers on the strings and at the same time and at the right time. So the best fix for that is going to be counted placing drills where you're just taking the chord and placing the fingers on the strings. You don't even have to play them, but you're going to count it. So we're going to take each chord in that passage, play the chord, then give yourself two beats or three beats, whatever it takes to make it right. And place that same chord. Place that same chord, and then when you've gotten that one, you can go on to the next one. You can do this hand separately, hands together, whatever is working, whatever's appropriate for the passage that you need to learn. But you're going to go play and place, play and place. Or maybe you'll do play 1, 2, 3, place to give yourself more time, or maybe you'll take less time. Play and play and play and place and play that way. But a counted drill like that will help you get that placing in order. But often, especially with chords with more notes in them, the chords themselves could present a reading challenge. And the nice thing here is that whether or not it's a reading challenge or a technical challenge, working on the reading of the chords will probably help you address any kind of technical placing issue you have here, too. So I might look here first, but you're going to play that chord passage. Say you've got a measure or two, that's all chords, and do this hand separately.

Play the entire passage, but only playing the top note. Say the name of the top note while you play it, just to make sure that you really know what it is. Then, using the correct finger for this passage, play the bottom note of each chord once again, saying the name of the note as you play it. Then play the top and the bottom notes together, saying one note of each pair. As you play, you can decide whether you're going to say the top or the bottom. Then try the top two notes together, then the bottom two notes together, then the middle two notes together, just so that you're working in all those combinations, always saying one note of each pair as you play, and keeping a steady beat, even if it's very slow. We want all these pieces to sort of fit together. So that steady beat is very important because it's going to be giving you the timing, the coordination that you need as you move to a faster tempo. So there's a technical idea practicing your placing and a reading idea, practicing reading all the different notes in the chord as you play them.

Two ideas for practicing chords if they're slowing you down. Let's look at another one of those pesky situations. This is a very common complaint too. Your left hand is just slow. Your left hand is slowing everything down. Your right hand's ready. Your right hand goes fine. Your left hand often even goes fine by itself. So it could be a hands together issue, which we're going to look at in just a moment. But what if it's really a left hand issue? Well, your first task is to find out exactly what is wrong. And how will you figure this out? Well, play the left hand by itself. Does it work by itself? If it works fine by itself, then and at the right tempo, then probably it's a hands together issue. And we'll look at that in a second. But if the left hand has difficulty getting where it needs to go, then we need to look at the left hand.

So that's our issue here. Now we're going to look for when is it right? How slowly do you need to go? Is it a fingering issue? This is when you're going to find it right. When is it right? If you slow it down enough, can you get to a chord on time? That might be the issue. When you slow it down, can you get to all the fingering you want? Is it correct? If you do a different fingering, in which case we need to look at your fingering here. Right. Look for when it can be right. Is it just. If you leave out this one chord, everything else is right with the left hand, then we know we need to fix that chord. But let's look at the left hand in general and see what could be the issue there. It could be a technical problem. Often we spend a lot of time practicing the right hand because it's the melody and it seems more complicated and we don't give our left hand the same kind of attention. So try practicing your left hand alone and practicing your left hand alone faster than you normally play the right hand. You can do some left hand technical work. Be sure you're doing some extra exercises or use that passage as an exercise.

What can be very beneficial. If it's really a left hand technique thing and we're just not getting to, we're just not able to play the notes. Maybe it's an arpeggiated pattern or something. Then have your left hand do not only some technique work on its own, but when your right hand does its exercises, have the left hand do exactly the same thing. Have your left hand play everything your right hand does just to develop its skill level. And that's how to get your left hand technique working a little bit better. But maybe this passage is really a reading issue after all. So many people start by learning treble clef and then they get into the harp playing and forget that they really need to learn bass clef with the same level of attention. And so bass clef is always sort of a weak point in their reading. The obvious solution here would be to practice your note reading. For bass clef. Easiest thing to do is to just say the notes of left hand line, most likely the one you're having difficulty with. Say those notes, say them before you play, say them while you play.

And if you were to do this for some left hand line in a piece every day, your bass clef reading would get much better pretty quickly. And here's an extra bonus tip for you. You want some more bass clef practice? Take one of those right hand lines that has more notes in it. Right left hand lines are sometimes pretty, pretty sparse. Take one of those right hand melody lines that has more notes in it. Pretend that's in bass clef. Just put your thumb over the treble clef marking. Pretend it's in bass clef and read those notes. I wouldn't play them, but just read them and say, oh, okay, look. So for example, that middle line in treble clef would be a B. In bass clef it would be a D. So we're just going to read those notes as if they were bass clef. That's usually going to give you a little bit more practice. So there are some ways to get your left hand up to speed. But as I mentioned a second ago, maybe the problem is really putting the hands together. Hands together is a particularly difficult situation for us harpists because it's really hard to separate out what is a situational problem. Meaning hands together in this piece at this moment is tricky, or whether it's an overall coordination moment. And that often comes from doing a lot of hands separately playing and not quite enough hands together playing. But if you can figure out what exactly in the particular spot you're looking at is so challenging about hands together, that's a good way to figure out what is wrong. If you can't Decide whether exactly where that problem is. Then let's look at when it's right. How slowly do you have to go to get both hands lined up? Maybe it doesn't really work. You can't find a slow enough tempo. So try doing the right hand and just the first note in each measure of the left hand. Does that work if you leave out some of the. The left hand, or you could do it with leaving out some of the right hand. If you pare it down, does that work? Can you make it simple enough for it to work? Maybe you can, maybe you can't. So let's dig into this one a little bit and let's work out the coordination. This would be a technical fix, right? So we're just going to try to coordinate two beats, and you might start from the beginning of this passage. That's not working for you. Start with just the first two beats and get those working hands together. Remember that a steady tempo is critical here because you're trying to coordinate a lot of stuff. You're trying to coordinate your reading, your hands, perhaps your feet. If you're playing a pedal harp and there are pedals here, right, you're coordinating all of these skills. So keep that beat steady, even if it's quite slow. But let's get the first two beats working, then get the next two beats working. So maybe this is just one measure. Start with beats one and two, get those happening. Get beats three and four so that they can work. Then work at that transition so that you can put those two things together all of the time, keeping this slow, keeping it steady, and you can work through a passage that way. Obviously, this would be rather laborious for an entire piece, but this will work well for a passage. I also would start at the end of the passage and work backwards. Take the last two beats of the passage, get those hands together, and then work backwards to the beginning of that measure. And, you know, start from the beginning of the last measure of the passage and work through that measure and then go back measure by measure, to try that. So coordinating two beats at a time, three beats at a time, if that's what works, a measure at a time, if you can manage that, that's great. Don't do more detailed work than you need, but work at that physical coordination, just making it happen.

That may solve the issue entirely. But if not, then we need to check your reading. Do you actually know the notes, particularly, as we mentioned a moment before, the bass clef notes? If there are jumps that you need to make in this passage, do you know the notes you have to jump to? Do you know what those ledger line notes are, perhaps? Or do you know all the notes in the chord, particularly those middle notes, those notes that your fingers, like your second and third finger, may play in the middle of the notes? Say them. Say the names of the notes. Say them while you're playing them. And then, of course, my ultimate reading drill that I call this the missing link drill. And some of you have heard me talk about this many times, but this is the missing link between hands separately and hands together playing. Right. Just playing hands separately does not get you hands together. This is one of those anti mathematical things. One plus one does not equal two when it comes to right hand, left hand, and hands together. You need more than that to do hands together. So this is my missing link. If the hands separately are working and hands together still is not, try saying the notes of one line, like say, the notes of the right hand line while you're playing the other. For instance, while you're playing the left hand line. So you're playing the left hand line saying the names. You could sing them too. But saying the names of the notes in the right hand line and then switch, play the right hand and say the notes of the left hand. That will make sure that you really know what those notes are, and it will make it much easier to play hands together. Believe me, after you've done this drill, playing hands together seems like a piece of cake. Very, very easy.

So there are two ideas there for hands together. There's one more issue I would like to address today, and that's hesitations. You know, those places that you wait, those gaps in your music, those things that prevent your music from flowing from sounding polished and keep you feeling like you really can't play as musically or expressively as you would like. Once again, we need to start by looking at what is wrong. Where are those hesitations happening? Perhaps there's one particular spot in a piece that has a hesitation. What is wrong there? Are you not looking ahead? Is there a pedal or a lever change that's slowing you down? Can you not figure out where your hands go? Are you just not even aware that you're hesitating? Maybe somebody else, like your teacher, pointed that out to you and now you have to go home and fix it. So what exactly is wrong?

Well, do the best you can to figure that one out. And then look at when is it right? Can you make it right if you just read ahead a little faster? I know that can be really hard to do. Could you make it right if you look at your hands less for this passage, or what would happen if you just for experiment's sake, if you left out that pedal or lever change, if you suspect that's what's slowing you down, if you left that out, would it work without a hesitation?

That's the kind of diagnosis that's kind of interesting, right? Because if you leave that out and it works, then we know exactly where to get in and fix it. Or if there's one cord in there that's slowing you down and we left out that cord, then we know what to fix, too. And you can go back to the fixes that we talked about for cords and put that in. So the hesitation may be due to a. A particular issue that isn't the hesitation itself.

But if you want to fix a hesitation and you're not sure if there's a different issue that it relates to. Well, let's start with the technical fix. Let's look at the physical coordination that's involved in this particular moment in the piece and check hands separately, by the way. That's what hands separately practice is for. It's for checking what works and what doesn't. Do. Does each one of your hands know where it needs to go? So check it hands separately. You can check it hands together as well and see if that's an issue. How slowly do you have to go to make it right? If it works hands together, but at a very slow tempo, then we know where we need to fix that, too. You're going to check your fingering, your placing, you're counting. But work at that steady beat. You just might be going too fast for your fingers. And if it's just the speed that's the issue, if you can get it to work slowly enough, then you can use, you know, something like the tempo pyramid to help you speed up that moment in the piece so that you don't have a hesitation. Let yourself play through it smoothly at that slow tempo, and then pick up the tempo to those places where those tempos, those speeds where it doesn't work, then bring it back down to where it does work, and you'll eventually get that moving a little bit faster.

But often this is a reading issue, not necessarily that you don't know what the notes are, but that bar line is so often a visual barrier. Our eyes get to that line and they stop.

So this is where you want to practice the transition across the bar line. And you can practice it beat by beat with the last beat in one measure, and then the first beat in the next. So you might be playing the fourth beat and then the next first beat, say those notes across the bar line to help you. Maybe just the right hand top note, maybe the left hand bottom note, whatever it is to help you get across the bar line, make sure you really know what those notes are, that you're aware of what they are, and that you know where you need to go.

Then what you can do is do that same thing. Play the last beat of the first bar, the first beat of the next bar, of wherever it is you're trying to work. And be sure that you're looking ahead. Be sure that your eyes have moved across the bar line. Remember this, when we play the harp, we've got our fingers on the strings. When your fingers are on the strings, they'll play by themselves. Your eyes need to be on the next thing. So if reading ahead is something that you know you need to work on, this is a great way to practice reading ahead. You're going to do just those two beats, beat four, say, and beat one of the next measure. And you're going to make sure that you place beat four. And as you're playing beat four, you're looking at beat one, that's reading ahead. Then you can try beats three and four and one. And make sure that as you're playing beat three, you're looking at beat four, looking across the bar line to get to beat one. Now this, the hesitation may not be across the bar line, it may be anywhere. And you can use these same techniques to do that.

So this will help you put a pedal or a lever change in, if that's what you're trying to work on. It will help you find that moment when you need to do that, just by isolating the two beats where it happens, the beat before and the beat where you push or flip. So that isolation technique is what's going to help you work here. And that will help you smooth out those hesitations a little bit at a time. So those are some strategies to help you find and fix some common problems. And perhaps you've noticed that the strategies themselves are nothing particularly new. Perhaps you've used these same strategies. The trick, the real key to success with this is being able to look at what's wrong and figure out how to make it right. That diagnosis piece, that's where the trick is. And I hope I've given you some ideas for that. Remember, our two questions really get as detailed as you can be about finding out what is wrong.

But let me give you One piece of advice here. Don't spend so much time looking for what is wrong that you don't get around to the fix. And to go along with that, if you can't figure out exactly what's wrong, that's okay. Move right along to when it is right. What do you have to do to make it right? What do you have to leave out? How slow do slowly do you have to play? What would make it correct?

In other words, would this passage be perfect if you didn't have any levers or pedals in it? We'll try it and see. Because if that happens, if it's like, oh, my fingers are fine, as long as I don't have to flip levers and push the petals in this passage, everything is fine. It's at the right tempo, my fingers know where to go. It sounds kind of terrible, but it works just fine. Then you know what you need to fix. And I would use some of the techniques I just described in fixing hesitations to go back and see if you can get those, those pedals or levers fit in place and get that coordination going.

Another hint with pedal or lever flips is as you do them, say the name of the pedal or leverage that you are pushing. If it's an A, call it an A. You don't have to use a sharp or a flat or a natural. Just let yourself verbalize the letter that you're trying to fix because it's going to help embed that in your mind just a little bit more and it will help you from getting confused. It'll just keep you a little bit straight as far as what's going on. So try that and see if that helps. But when you can find when it's right, then you can more easily figure out how to fix it when it's wrong. Next week on the podcast, our theme is going to be if I were starting over, if I were starting my harp journey over, knowing what I know now from my decades long harp journey, at least so far, the experience that I have garnered over those years, how would I bring that to my harp journey? What would I do the same? What would I do differently? And hopefully we'll be garnering some nuggets of wisdom that will help you wherever you are in your harp journey. So we're gonna be looking at if I were starting over on the podcast next week. Once again, let me remind you that our getaway retreat registration for our February Getaway ret is open. And from now until the end of September, we are still offering early bird registration, save $300 off the price of the retreat. As I said though, we're more than half filled, so don't delay because I can only offer the special early bird deal as long as I've got spots to offer. So so use the link in the show notes or look at upcoming events on heartmastery.com and you'll find out how to register there. So I look forward to talking to you again next week. In the meantime, remember, every day is a day you can add more Harp Happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning 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.