Fingers on the Strings - PHH 009

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. Have you ever had the experience of having your fingers fall off the strings and realizing that you just hadn't done your placing properly?

Placing is one of those things. From the very first moment of studying the harp, we learn about placing and how critical it is to get our fingers on the right strings ahead of time. Let's face it, playing the harp is a gravity defying act. And if we're not in touch with the harp at some point, it's really easy to lose our place, quite literally. So which one of these profiles sounds like you? Are you a last minute leady and you get your fingers to the strings just in the nick of time? Or maybe you're not quite ready yet, Nelly, and you make your music wait until your fingers are all properly placed on the strings. Or maybe you're a fumbling Freddy and your fingers have trouble getting on the right strings at the right time. Or maybe you have a lot of finger buzzing and finger noises. Or maybe you like you're like me and you've been all of them at one time or another. Well, today we'll show you how to cure those things, how to practice your placing. We'll talk about why placing is important and some of the surprising benefits that good placing can have besides just getting you to the right strings at the right time. We will about how to practice it to make it all work. I'll share with you my rule of ones, which is my golden rule of placing. And we'll talk about the magical marking that makes it all work better. But before we get into placing, I have a favor to ask. If you're enjoying this show, would you please share it with a friend? We're all about sharing harp happiness here. And I know that you're a big part of that. So if you would take just a moment when after you finished listening, before you rush off and practice, if you would take just a moment to share this with a friend, either via email or through social media, we would so much appreciate it. I would be very grateful that you are part of spreading our harp happiness here. So without further ado, let's get on to talking about placing. So if real estate is about location, location, location, then harp playing is about placing. Placing, placing. Everything we do comes down to whether or not we have placed it properly. I know you know that because we learned this right from the start, that if we don't place well, it's a lot harder to play well. Placing is our link to the harp. Unlike other instruments, we don't stay connected to it all the time, right? Think about a wind player who always has their instrument under their fingers, right? Or even a pianist or organist. Sure, they let go when they play, but the keyboard is in front of them. Our strings are off to the side, so it's a little bit harder to see. And they've got gravity working for them. They're playing down. Harp is an anti gravity pursuit. It's much more like being a trapeze artist where you actually have to let go in order to get to the next trapeze. Granted, it's not nearly as death defying, but it sure can feel that way at times, can't it? So we need to let go, but we also need to place. And the fact that we need to let go from time to time makes placing all that much more important. It's a beautiful ballet like the trapeze artist when it works and it can be a mess when it doesn't.

So this is also just a little aside here. One of the reasons that it's so valuable for us to practice one hand scales and one hand arpeggios to keep each hand learning where it needs to be and learning the basics of placing all the time. We'll talk about that again when we get to talking about placing. But right now I just want you to understand that placing is about finding the next note, or rather not having to find the next note, but to have it all ready to go. So remember just a moment ago when I gave you those three silly little profiles. Well, let's talk about them and talk about how each one represents one of the particular difficulties in placing. So first there's last minute Letty. This is what happens when you're Getting your fingers on the strings at the last minute. And you might have, if you've been doing, if you've been having one of those Leti moments, you might have heard your teacher say to you, place ahead. Place, place. Remember to place. Remember to place.

This comes up often if we are rolling chords or placing chords or placing arpeggios where you want to get all those fingers that you're going to need on the strings and at the same time. Because if you place them one at a time, you're likely to miss. You're likely not to get them on the string fast enough or be able to play them in time. So this kind of placing, fixing the. The Letty syndrome will help you get all your fingers on the strings at the same time so they're placed and ready to go. And you don't have to worry about playing a wrong note.

You may have found this come up when you, you, you're placing a chord and you get a couple of the notes right and the top notes wrong. Easy to do, but we don't want to have that happen. So we'll talk about how to practice placing those whole groups at once so you're not a last minute leady. Now, on the opposite side, we have that. Not quite ready yet. Nelly. Right. The player who is struggling to be careful and precise and to place those notes properly, but finding that it's slowing down their music, which is an unintended consequence, not one that we wanted. You don't want to have to slow your music down to find the right placement. So the problem with this is that if your placing is slow, then not only is your playing slow, but probably your reading is slow as well. So that if we can work at speeding up the way you see the patterns and see the groups and at the same time work up the accuracy with which you place those groups, then you'll be able to eliminate the hesitations when you're looking for the right placing and you'll be able to speed everything up. It's all about learning how to read and place those groups. I know. Sounds a little bit similar to the Leti syndrome, right? And that's the good news. The same kind of practice will cure both of those little problems. Then we have Fumbling Freddy. Fumbling Freddy is when your fingers are missing the right strings and they're causing a lot of finger noise. And there are ways you can practice making your placing clean so that you can eliminate not just the finger noise, but eliminate the errors as well. And it will help you to learn the spacing for those different intervals and chords so that your fingers learn where they need to go. There's that wonderful word proprioception, which is very basically your understanding of where your body is in space.

But if we want to apply it to harp playing, it's sort of learning about the spacing between your fingers. If you were to hold up your first, your thumb and your fourth finger just in the middle of the air, could you approximate the distance of an octave? Realize this will be an octave on your harp. I mean, we can't just say an octave is this many inches or this many centimeters, because every harp is a little bit different and some harps are more different than others. So it's not a matter of measurement, it's a matter of feel. It's a matter of practice. Which again is all good news. Because we can practice, right? We can practice so that we can read the groups faster, place them more accurately, and be able to depend on our fingers to do what we need them to do. But before we can get to any of the placing practice, I want to be sure that you understand my golden rule of placing. My rule of ones.

Here's my rule of ones. Read it once, place at once and place in one direction only. Okay, so three components to my rule of ones. I'll read it again, read it once.

Place at once and place in one direction only. Alright, let's go through each of those three. Read it once. What is the most mysterious part of placing for many people is the idea that you have to read it before you can place it. So you need to be able to read the group that you want to place. So you need to not just look at the next note, but look a few notes ahead so that you can see that entire group of notes as four notes as a single group. Because the second part of my rule, remember, is to place at once. You can't place at once if you haven't seen all the notes. So we want to read it once. Not. Well, think of it this way. Each hand only has four fingers that you're going to use. So you can't place more than four notes at once. So whether that's reading a four note chord, a vertical chord, or whether it's reading four notes in sequence, whether they're step by step or not four notes in a row, you only need to see four notes at once. But this may be more than you're used to looking for. So when we start talking about practicing, one of the things we're going to be talking about is how to look at four notes at once and how to look at more than just the next note, because you need to see that whole grouping, right? If you can't see the group, meaning all the notes in the chords or all the notes in the sequence, if you can't see that group at once, you can't place it at once. You need to encompass all four of those notes and understand them at once. Now, that's actually much less difficult than you might think because if you've done any harp playing at all, or any kind of other music playing, just about, you're used to looking at a group and assessing it even unconsciously. Oh, those notes are kind of like a scale. Oh, those notes are kind of like a chord. Oh, those notes are kind of like an arpeggio. And maybe you can be more specific about it, maybe you can't. Maybe you can look at it and say, oh, that's a C major seventh chord in first inversion. Well, that's fine, but you don't have to know that much about it. You just need to be able to look at it and say, okay, I know that spacing and place it. This is where that proprioception thing will come in too. But you'll be developing that as you practice. So the first step is going to be reading the entire group, because you want to read the group once. Think about the difference between having a chord and reading it note by note. Here's where my fourth finger goes. Here's where my third finger goes. Here's where my second finger goes. Here's where my thumb goes. And think about how different that is from just reading. Oh yes, four, three, two, one, boom. And placing all four of those notes on the strings at once. So that's why placing starts with reading. And of course you can see instantly, can't you, how the inverse is going to be true, that once you can read well enough to place properly, your reading speed will have increased. Yeah, exactly. It's a win win for sure. All right, so that's step one. Read it once. You want to read the whole group. Step two, place at once.

You're looking at a four note chord, C, E, G, C. And you've seen it and you said, oh, C major chord. I know it's A C, E, G, C. And you're ready to put your fingers on all four fingers should reach the strings at the same time. You don't want to place four and then three and then two and then one. Even if you're going to roll the chord or arpeggiate it. And that's the order you're going to play the notes in your best practice. What's going to work best for you is to place them all at once. For one thing, if you've gone through all the trouble to read at once.

Who wants to spend extra time placing it? Once you know what that chord is, get all your fingers on there. Boom. You don't have to place just one finger at a time. When we've practiced how to place them all, how to learn where your fingers are in space, and to learn those spacings of your fingers, then all of them can get on the strings at the same time.

And that makes your playing faster.

Especially if those notes aren't perhaps in a chord, but if they're in sequence, and if you can get all four fingers on the strings. You've read the group once, placed your fingers at once, and now you are free to read the next group because all your fingers are on the strings, and all you have to do is fire them. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

So placing all the notes at once is essential. You're going to read them and just read the grouping one time. Then you're going to place all your fingers on the strings at once, because then you're free to look at the next group. Once again, you can see how this is affecting not only the tempo at which you can play, but the tempo at which you can read as well. Right, now, let's talk about placing in one direction only. This is the tricky one. And that's because once you start thinking about placing and you've bought into the idea that it's really important to think about placing ahead, you might start placing too far ahead. Let me show you what I mean. So suppose the pattern works like this. You have a 4, 3, a 1, and a 2, 4, 3, 1, 2. You could place all of those fingers, but you'd be doing what I call placing around the corner. Because the first three notes go up, and then the next two notes, the next note, I suppose, goes down, right? The 4, 3, 1 go up and then the 2 goes down. So that would be what I call placing around the corner. And if you place ahead for something like that, it's very easy to have the wrong note. Fire. And so Instead of having 4, 3, 1, 2, you end up with 4, 3, 2, 1, which is not what you meant. So you don't want to place notes out of order. Now, there are a couple of exceptions to that.

But that is the rule of thumb. In fact, those exceptions kind of only Prove the rule. But that's okay. Let's not talk exceptions now. Let's talk the general rule. Place only the notes that go in one direction. Even if it looks like you could place other notes as well. Stick to one direction at a time. So there's our rule of ones. Read it once, place at once, and then place in one direction only.

Now, there's a mysterious, magical marking that can help all of this work. And I know you know what it is, but you might not have understood exactly how powerful it is. And that is the placing bracket. You know what it is? It's just that bracket over the finger numbers, right? And probably when you first started playing the harpoon.

Those brackets and those numbers, all that kind of stuff just seemed like too much clutter on the page. And even now, those placing brackets might feel like too much clutter, but they can serve a very helpful function. That bracket can help draw your eye to the end of the grouping you need to place. Right? The idea of a placing bracket is that every note under that bracket should be placed at once. The placing bracket should not go over notes that turn around, right, that I just talked about. It should only go in one direction, but it helps your eye see the entire group that you want to place. Now, I don't have placing brackets written over every note in my music, but if there's a placing that I need to remember, I need to remember to look this far ahead. Then I put that placing bracket in so that I can be sure that my eye goes as far as it needs to go, that I can see where my thumb or where my fourth finger or whatever finger it is needs to be. I can see as far ahead as I need. So that placing bracket helps me see what I need to read so I can read at once. Everything under that bracket is to be placed at once. And of course, that bracket only goes in one direction. So you see how the placing bracket is meant to help you and what that's supposed to do. I would urge you that when you have a. When you have a placing bracket printed in your music, take a look at it. Take a second to look at it, see what it is trying to tell you, and use it to help you find the group you need to read so that you can place that group.

And likewise, if you have a group that you need to place in your music, use a placing bracket to help you identify the group. You'll find it's very helpful for groups that go over bar lines or over beats, across beats, so that you can see where you need to go or even for a grouping that may go from the end of one line to the beginning of another. If you have that placing bracket extending a little bit, you'll know that you need to keep reading for your placing.

So the visualization of the grouping that the placing bracket shows you is inestimably helpful. Really, don't ignore this. It's a very powerful tool. So you've got your rule of ones, and I hope you understand a little bit more about placing brackets. Let's get practical and let's talk about how to practice placing. There are a couple of ways that I think are very effective. In fact, I'll give you three, and they're helpful for some of the things that hold people back with placing. The first one helps you practice reading the groups and, of course, placing them. But I think this is a hard thing for most people to understand. How are they supposed to learn to read ahead? So here's what I suggest. Take a piece of music. It has to be one that's written or arranged by a harpist, because you want to pick a piece that has placing brackets written in. Okay, remembering our rule of ones, right, you're going to read it once again. Place at once and notes in one direction only. Those are the kinds of brackets we're looking for. And I suggest that you take a piece or two like that and just go through. You're not actually going to play it, but look at every group that's indicated by a placing bracket. Look at it without your fingers on the strings. Look at the group, study those three notes and then try putting your fingers on. On the strings at once, seeing if you can get all those fingers on the strings for that group. So you're going to look at your music and choose a bracketed group of notes. Look at the notes and then put your hand. Put your fingers on those notes at once. It takes some practice. And just go through a line or two or a whole piece or whatever. Be sure to do this with both hands. I mean, you don't have to do it hands together. Do it with each hand alone. But don't ignore one of those hands because we want both hands to be good at this. So you want to look at the bracketed notes, see what they are. You can look at the strings. You don't have to, you know, not look at the strings. Look at the notes and then get your fingers on those strings. See if you can get all your fingers up on the strings at once. That will help you read the group and place the notes. Eventually, what you'd like to be able to do is do that in a slightly steadier, faster pace where you read it, place it, read it, place it, read it, place it. You could even put the metronome on for more. A little bit more power in your drill. But that's what you're going to look for in that first drill. You're going to read the groups under the brackets.

The second thing that I suggest you practice is really.

Devoted to helping you avoid one of the common traps, and that is not placing across the bar lines. If you remember, in a recent podcast I talked about how not making your music flow across the bar lines was.

Going to inhibit your music, right? So we want to be able to create flow. And a lot of times that comes to reading over the bar line and it comes to placing over the bar line. So take a piece of music and you can use any kind of music. It doesn't have to have placing brackets in it, but choose the two measures and make sure that you are placing across the bar line. Now, if it's a series of chords that you're not going to be placing, then that's not the right bar line to choose. But you'll know exactly what kind of bar lines to choose and make sure that you're placing across the bar line. So where that connection needs to happen. Read it and place those fingers at once. Read it, place those fingers at once. And if you can extend it so that it's, you know, three fingers or four fingers, if that's appropriate, remembering you're only going to place in one direction at a time, then go ahead and do that. Then try playing through being sure that when you get to that bar line, you're still placing across the bar line. I think that this exercise, although it's kind of a small one, I think it's very helpful because it will draw your attention to getting across the bar line, which is something we need to be reminded about from time to time.

And the third practice technique is the one that I probably do most often and the one I work with my students on most often. It's my dive bomb technique. And this is for this one, you want to choose an exercise or a passage that's all chords or, or arpeggios, because arpeggios you're going to read as chords, right? We want to read the entire group. So if there are four notes in your chord, then that's a four note vertical sonority. And, you know, it's clear that that's what you need to read at once. But a four note arpeggio with all those notes going in the same direction is the same idea. And you still need to read that group once, even though the notes aren't going to be played simultaneously. So you're going to place it the same way. So. And in fact, I will link in the show notes. I'm going to link to a blog post about arpeggios that will help give you a little bit more information on how to place those arpeggios properly. Good idea. All right, so, but let's go back to this dive bomb placing idea. So take a look at the three or four notes that you want to place. Play as a chord or as an arpeggio.

And put all of those fingers on the strings. Then take your fingers off the strings, but without really moving your hand, just sort of close your fingers into your hand and then open them, putting them just so that you're practicing getting all your fingers on the strings and then back into your hand on the strings and then back into your hand without moving your hand very much. All right, then what we're going to do is we are actually going to dive bomb. So close your fingers into your palm the way you normally would. Then move your hand a few inches away from the strings, open your hand to the shape of the chord that you want to play, and then dive bomb your fingers onto the strings and see if you can get all of those three or four fingers, depending on whether you're playing a three or four note arpeggio or chord, all those fingers on the strings at once. You'll have to do this. Well, you don't have to do this drill. It's easiest to do this drill one hand at a time, but you can do it with both hands. If you have chords in both hands or arpeggios in both hands, even better. But you can start with one hand, so your hand is a few inches away from the string. You're going to open your fingers to the approximate shape that you want and then dive bomb them onto the strings, hoping you hit the right strings. Yeah. Then move your hand a little further away, maybe, you know, eight inches away from the strings, open to the shape and dive bomb in. You'll find it's a little bit more difficult to dive bomb. You get to look, of course, but the idea is you're practicing placing all at once and placing accurately. Right. Then the ultimate test, put your hand down on the side on the soundboard, rather on the side of the board, sort of in Resting position on the side there. Look at the strings that you want to play. So you're going to sort of aim. Look at the strings that you want to place on and then move your hand in one motion from the board to the strings. Can you do that with no finger fumble, boom. From the board to the strings? And you can practice this with any chord or arpeggio passage and you'll be practicing your placing. And if you do it with an entire passage, you'll be practicing the passage too. So also a good thing to do. So three ways to practice here. You're going to read those groupings under the brackets and placing those notes at once. You're going to practice placing over bar lines and making those transitions smooth. And you're going to do the dive bomb. Placing for a chord or arpeggio particularly is good for that. So those are the ways I recommend that you practice placing. You'll find them effective. They're kind of fun to do. And in any instance where you are having trouble getting your fingers to the strings on time, one of these techniques, or all of them will help you solve that problem. So you really want to. You can dive into those if you like. I know.

So, as we wrap up this episode, I want to remind you about that rule of ones. Read it once, right? Read the groupings, place at once all your fingers on the strings at once, and then place in one direction only. No placing around the corners. And that will keep your fingers from getting confused. So that's the rule of ones. We've talked about how to practice your placing, and I hope you enjoy that. I think that you will find that it clears up some so many things about your playing that you've possibly been struggling with. So I hope that that's a big help for you. I want to thank you again for joining me today. Please do share this episode with a friend. Share that harp happiness. You can tag us on social media and we'll spread the love right back to you. So you'll find all the links to everything that we've talked about today, plus that blog post that I mentioned in the show notes for today's episode. So you'll find those and you can get some extra help there. Next time. We'll be talking about beyond dynamics, making your music more expressive in three ways that are very specific to harpists. Things that we really want to watch out for much more than the softs and louds. I mean, we all start with soft and loud, right? And that's a great place to start with making your music musical and expressive, but it shouldn't be where we end. So we're going to talk about three underutilized and certainly under discussed expressive elements particular to harpists. And that way we can make your music as beautiful as you are. So I hope you have a wonderful week until we speak. Again, thanks for listening and I'll see you soon. 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.