Going Mental: How to Practice Without Your Harp - PHH 119

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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.

What if I told you it's all in your mind? No, I don't mean you're going crazy. I'm sure you've come across that well worn statement that 90% of performance, whether in sports or music or any similar pursuit mental the idea, of course, is that your mental preparation, your mindset, and your focus all are major factors in the success of your performance. Now, even if the actual percentage may be hard to pin down, the idea is undoubtedly true. Our minds are powerful contributors to our success or our failure. I mean, just look at the number of books and blogs devoted to this concept, from the iconic book the Inner Game of Tennis to Noah Kageyama's insightful blog the Bulletproof Musician. By the way, I've linked to both of those resources in the show Notes for you today. However, I don't want to dive into performance psychology. I want to deal with something much more practical, something you've probably heard about and wondered how to implement. And that's mental practice. So what is mental practice? Basically, it's practice you do away from the harp. It's very practical if you're on vacation or even just away for a weekend and you don't want to lose ground while you're away. It's terrific for testing your memorization of a piece or for focusing your mind before a performance. It's also great for helping you learn your music without the distraction of actually playing. Maybe that's a new concept to you, thinking of your playing as a distraction from your music making, but I invite you to consider it. How much More could you learn about what is on the page about the meaning of the notes or the expression of a piece if you didn't have to worry about which finger goes where?

So maybe you've heard about mental practice but have no idea how to get started. I hope to change that for you today. If you've been trying mental practice but you're not sure you're doing it right or getting the most from your practice away from the harp, you're going to discover some very practical ways to do this kind of work. And I can promise you, you're going to find out just how big an impact mental practice can have on your speed of learning and on your retention. That's two huge wins right there.

Now, I want to remind you before we get started on this very cool topic that we still have coaching registration open. It will be open for a few more days yet. So coaching registration is open until this September 1st and we still do have openings. If you have thought about working with a Heart Mastery certified coach, this is your your last chance to do that this year. How's that for a way to look at it? I know it's still August, but this is the last coaching session that we will be having this year. So this is your time to do that for sure. You will find the link to register for for coaching in the Show Notes and that link in the show notes takes you right to the webpage that tells you everything that's included in the coaching program. And there is a lot. Not only is it amazing coaching with our certified coaches, but we've got workshop included. We've got social calls for the coaching program participants to get on there. We've got the soirees where the coaching students get to play for each other. We've. There's so much in this program. So even if you think you're not interested or you're on the fence, head over to that coaching webpage and see everything that's included. As I said, I've put the link for you in the show notes, but if you can't find that, go over to heartmastery.com look under our programs and go to the coaching page and you'll see it all there for you. Also in the Show Notes, I have linked to a blog post that I wrote called three times when not practicing is not an Option. So that's a nice way to balance what we're talking about today. Because mental practice is practice. It's not at the Harp, but it is practice and it counts as practice. I. I promise you, but so don't look at this as an escape, that's for sure. So you might be interested in this blog post for another look at the practice topic. So we are going to get on with talking about mental practice, how to practice without a harp. I must admit, practicing without a harp sounds kind of fun, and it sounds like it would just make life so much easier sometimes. But what I think is really interesting about the whole mental practice concept is that we know how important it is to use our mind to practice. But we spend so much time working on technique and you think, well, are we getting in our own way? This calls to mind one of Yogi Berra's famous quotes. You know, Yogi Berra, he was the baseball hall of Famer best known for being an all star catcher and a manager of the New York Yankees. And he had some very quotable quotes. But this one, which of course he applied to baseball, could just as easily apply to music making as well. He said baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical. It's a great quote, right? But it works for us too. If music, if playing the harp is 90% mental and the other half is physical, we spend most of our time on the physical half, don't we, and not really thinking about what we're trying to do. And the fact is, as I mentioned just a moment ago, that physical stuff, the act of actually playing the notes, can sometimes even get in our way and prevent us from really learning the music in a way that might be really helpful to us. So there's a very good case to be made for doing mental practice, whether you've got that harp sitting right next to you or not. Because sometimes if playing the notes can be a distraction, we need to take that away and then look at what's on the page. What is the music really telling us beyond what finger to play, at what time on what string?

So what mental practice will do is give you a way to see things in the music that you perhaps wouldn't have seen if you were so busy playing the notes. But this brings to mind the obvious question.

We understand practice, where we have to play the notes. We know what we're supposed to do, we know how to do that. We sit there, we play, we've got our sections, we've got all this stuff that we do. We look at our technique, we know what regular old practice looks like and how it goes. But how does mental practice go? Do you just sit there and think about your music? What would you do?

So just sitting there and thinking about your music is fine, but I don't think it goes far enough, and it's not really what mental practice is. So I'm trying in this podcast to give you some really specific ways to understand mental practice and specific things to do. And there are some really basic techniques that you're going to use for your mental practice. One of those techniques is what I call airplay, where you've got the music in front of you, unless you're testing out your memorization this way, in which case you don't need the music, but you sit up and you've got an imaginary harp in front of you, the air harp. Like other people have air guitar. We've got an air harp now. And sort of just envision what your hands would be like on the strings. And as you're playing, putting that word in quotations, your piece, you're looking at the music and you're starting, and you're going to move your fingers in some kind of weird approximation of what they would really be doing. You know, kind of moving them up or down and doing the leaps and doing the, you know, sort of wiggling them the way they would play. It's not going to be an exact replica of what your fingers would be doing if the strings were in front of them. And it's going to look a little bit like somebody's bad imitation of what a harp player does. But that's okay. You're going to be sort of putting motion with the music. The nice thing is that when you're playing the air harp, you will not play any wrong notes, guaranteed. It won't happen. So it's getting your. Your. The sort of. The physical thing kind of to line up with the music. What you will notice if you've never done this before, well, you'll notice two things. The first thing you're going to notice is that it just kind of feels really weird. So close the door so that nobody's looking at you when you're doing it, because it's a little bit like singing into your hairbrush or something, right? You know, so little bit weird, but that's what you're going to do. But what you will notice is that the notes on the page assume a different meaning for you. You're clinging to those notes in a different way. You're hearing them in your head in a way that you don't even notice when you're playing them on the harp. And you can hear the harp strings, your head, your inner ear is responsible for making those notes on the page sound like something, because your fingers aren't. And you're going to notice that you have to pay much more attention to what the music is really telling you because you don't have any cues you can hear. You don't have any audio cues from your playing. There's nothing there to tell you if you've played the wrong note.

And your fingers haven't. But your eyes need to be tracking those notes. It's a very different way of looking at the music. And the first time you do it, it's going to feel very strange.

But that's exactly what mental practice will do. Put you in a different experience.

Give you a different way to.

A whole different sensory experience of the music. You're going to be listening in a different place. You're not listening with your real ears. You're listening with your. With your inside ears. You're going to be sort of moving around fake strings, but you're not actually going to be feeling the strings. What you are going to be doing is creating music in your head from what you see on the page. And that is very different. So that's the first technique that is part of mental practice. I'm going to give you ways to use all these techniques in a moment. The second technique is just to read your music. You could just have that music in front of you and you don't have to airplay it. You can just read the music, but you can't let your eyes skim over the dots. That's not practicing. You have to. When.

This is so hard to explain.

When you look at those notes on the page, you need to hear them in your head. Now, you've practiced the piece enough. You know how it goes. So what you're doing is now putting sound in your head. You're creating the sound to match the notes that you see on the page. You're making that point on the page sound like something to you.

It's once again an odd sensation. And it's not easy. It's kind of hard work.

And as I mentioned, it's kind of hard to explain. But when you try it, you'll see exactly what I mean and how it works. And think about this. This is the skill you need to help you do some very important things that we want to be able to do. On the harp, for instance, being able to look at that piece and look at that part on that page, that measure whatever it is and know what it sounds like is going to help prevent you from getting lost or from being able to find yourself. If you do get lost on the page. It's going to enable you to start from anywhere on that page, because when you look at it, you'll know what it sounds like without having to play it first. It's going to help you sight read, because your ear will expect something from what your eyes see, whether or not your hands are doing that.

So these are just some of the benefits from doing this. It's an extremely powerful technique, but it's not easy.

Now you can read the music while you're listening to a recording. That's just about the easiest one to do, so that you're hearing the recording and you're following along with your music. This can be useful if your mental recording of the piece still has some holes in it. If you're not sure how everything on the page sounds, then reading your music while you're listening to the recording can help you fill in some of those mental recording holes. Right? Those parts where you aren't quite sure how it goes. Now you can combine all three of those techniques so that while you're reading the music and listening to the recording, you're also airplaying. That works too.

And there's one more technique. This one's just a little bit harder, but while you're reading the music. And you can airplay with this too. But you say or sing the names of the notes, probably in the melody.

So that you are also. You're not just hearing the notes in your head, you're creating them with your voice. If you're singing and you're giving them their names, this is incredibly useful practice if you're trying to memorize something because you'll know what those notes are. It's also very helpful for fixing persistent mistakes in your music. You'll find out what you don't know when you try to do this.

So there are the four techniques. Airplay, read and play, or listen or listen, read and airplay, or say or sing the notes while you're airplaying and reading. And of course, the reading is always optional. If you're trying to do this from memory, that's fine.

None of these techniques is super simple. They're all going to require some concentration and some focus. That's why we call this mental practice. You're going to have to use your mind. This is not an abdication. Right? That's why this counts as practice, because it's a little bit tough, but it's so good.

What I'd like to talk about now are three particular opportunities in the learning music process where mental practice can be really helpful. So this isn't just, you know, I'm away and I don't have my harp with me. These are opportunities when mental practice would help you make that piece better, help you learn the piece better or faster or get to that finished stage just a little bit faster. So the first one of those opportunities, as I'm calling them, is observing detail when you want to get away from the distraction of doing and really see what's on the page. Now you might want to use this kind of mental practice when you want to be sure that you're looking at everything that's on the page, that you understand what's there, that you can see the patterns, that you can, you know, really understand what's there. So that's sort of what this is about. Now you might want to use this particular technique when you're just starting a piece even before you begin playing it at the harp. Maybe taking the piece of music and digging into those, you know, to the, to the nitty gritty of the piece before you start the notes. This could give you that big picture perspective so you learn from, you know, few steps forward into the process. So picture this for a moment. You get a new piece and instead of taking it right to the harp and starting to practice it right away, the first thing you do is to open the piece of music.

Try to airplay it, see if you can hear it in your head.

See if you can sort of play along with it. Obviously you're not going to be playing any wrong notes even when you're sight reading, because you're airplaying, right? That's the beauty of the air harp. So that's where you're going to start. Think about what this might do. First of all, it's going to give you some really good practice at figuring out what something sounds like, which will be useful for you. Anytime you are going to buy a new piece of music and you can't try it out first, could be useful, right? But it's going to give you a chance to see what's on the page. Now, maybe airplay isn't the easiest option for you. Maybe the easiest option is to have that music in front of you and listen to the recording while you're following along with the music so that you can see what those notes sound like. And maybe something that you'd find very helpful is to listen and read, then listen again and airplay while you read. And then try reading an airplane without listening. How much did you retain.

If you've done that, and then you start practicing the piece, you, you're already practicing from, you know, at least a week ahead of where you would have been if you just started with the harp without this technique first. But maybe you're sort of at the messy middle stage. This technique would be great to help you sort of get away from the notes, especially the ones that are just making you gnash your teeth. So to get away from those notes for a minute and refresh your connection to the piece. All right, let me. Let me listen to the whole piece through, read it and airplay it while we're doing that, and let me remind myself why I love this piece and what it's really going to sound like when it grows up. Or maybe this would be a great way to take a moment to observe some of those smaller details, details of expression or pattern, maybe notice some of the chords, things that escape you when you're so busy playing the notes that you. You can't see what they mean. This could be a great way to get unstuck if you're in the messy middle or if you're working at finishing a piece, you could get some more insight into those finer points of the piece. Once again, things that you maybe wouldn't have noticed if you were just so busy playing. You could even listen and read, or listen, read and play along with a couple different videos or recordings of the same piece so that you could sort of compare different interpretations. Listening to different interpretations is one thing, but when you are following along with the music, and especially when you're airplaying, you can hear, oh, look, that person did more of a retard. That person didn't do much of a retard at all. This person slowed that passage down. You'll feel it with your fingers as you're playing along with them, more than you would have if you had just been listening.

So great for observing those details, for sure. And it's that listen, read along and play along will really be extremely helpful. And by playing along, I'm talking about airplay here, because we all know this is away from the harp practice. The second opportunity for mental practice would be when you're actually learning a piece. And we'll do this as sort of actual practice, but with no strings attached. So imagine that you're in those first stages of working on a piece and you're so busy, of course, trying to figure out notes, you're, you know, all engaged in trying to get the right fingering down and working at that. So taking a day to just do mental practice can help you find the patterns in the notes. Oh, look, those Are the same chords, Those are the same arpeggios. Oh, look, that material comes back here again. When you're not involved in all the fingerwork, you have the capacity to see some of those patterns. This can also help you coordinate hands together by getting your hands sort of moving as you're playing, you know, doing some airplay. Get your hands sort of moving in the right, in the right way. And if you're just reading it, and as opposed to listening to a recording of it, if you're just reading it and airplane, you can go very slowly through the fingering and through those approximations of the notes with your hands. You can to help you coordinate what's going to happen. Hands together, away from the harp. And it will help you. When you actually get to the harp, this can help you integrate lever or pedal changes, can help you figure out a rhythm or work on counter rhythms and make those smoother. It can also help you just sort out your counting. Doing that mental practice, you can read, put on your metronome count and airplay. It's great. And once again, you're not worried about the wrong strings. So it's going to make life so much easier. But maybe you're further along in your learning process. Well, this mental practice will help you get away from those notes, refresh your understanding of the piece, give you that beginning to end perspective that maybe you're not quite ready to play yet, but it'll let you sort of try it on and say, okay, I'm going to listen to the whole thing. I'm going to read it, I'm going to airplay it, and I'm going to see what that whole piece is like, what it's like to string all those sections together and really play the piece. It can help you see some of those things, like the bigger ideas about expression in the piece, or how the portions of the piece, the different sections of the form of it, relate to each other and how you're going to communicate the idea of the piece from the beginning to the end. So it's a great way to sort of give yourself a head start on that real finish process, even if you're not quite ready for it yet.

But when you're thinking about polishing a piece for performance or just polishing it to have it finished, this is a wonderful time for mental practice, too. It's going to give you the opportunity to make your piece more expressive, more flowing, and really ready to perform. So I would try this mental practice at this stage, when you've gotten to the finished stage of Any piece, regardless of if you're going to be performing it or not, or when you are preparing to play a piece for someone else. This is a great way to make sure that you are really on top of this piece and.

Adding all the musicality that you want. It also can help you secure your memorization. And yes, this would be doing it with the music or without, because once you've taken those oral cues of the notes away, you really realize that, oof, gosh, I have to create the music in my head and I have to know what it sounds like. I find this extremely helpful when I'm memorizing. And by very helpful, I mean it helps me find so many places that I just don't really know. It can be a little bit frustrating because it's like, well, how come I don't know what comes next? But once I've practiced this way, I know so much more about the piece.

Practicing for this can also help you eliminate hesitations or potholes or maybe just find that next level for the piece. So here's what I suggest. If you want to really secure the memorization of a piece that you want to have polished enough to play from memory, take those various sections of your piece. Because you've been working in sections, right? So take those various sections in random order and then you know, airplay each section without listening to a recording. And you can have the music in front of you or not, but just like, okay, all right, section four. This is how section four goes. And I'm wiggling my fingers. You can't see me doing that. You could choose to sing along with that so that you can help keep your. Keep your place or even say the names of the notes if you know those. You could practice saying the levers or pedals if it's that kind of a section where you really need to know what it is you need to push and when. But doing the memorization in sections without playing you will find to be an extremely useful technique.

If you're looking to just eliminate those hesitations or the potholes in the music. Airplay it again without listening to the recording, make yourself airplay and play across those potholes. You're going to be playing an imaginary recording in your head, right? Play that recording and let that one go. Don't let your recording stop.

But play along with it, and that will help you get through some of those hesitations. Remember, some of those hesitations are caused by having to get to the right string.

When you don't have the right strings because you're using your Air harp, you'll be able to get over those hesitations and it will help you fix something like that, that in the piece. It's not going to have eliminated the problem, but you will now have a mental recording of the piece without the hesitation in it. And you can play to what you hear rather than play to your old habit of stopping when you get to that moment.

And then if you're looking for that for that next level, well, listen to different recordings of the piece and of course airplay along with them. And as I mentioned before, you'll be able to spot differences in the interpretation from various performers that are differences that are pretty subtle. You'll be able to spot them when you airplay and it will help you make your own expressive decisions.

So those are just a few ways you can use mental practice. Remember that the techniques we're using here, airplay or playing the air harp if you like reading along with the music, or not if you don't want to. But reading along is very helpful because you're going to learn to hear the music that's on the page without just hearing it. After you've played that right or wrong note, you're going to hear it first.

Listening to a recording, or more than one, and of course, singing along while you're playing, sing out loud, sing in your head, say the note names if you can.

This is a really good way that the singing or saying will help keep you focused because you'll find that it's very difficult to stay focused in the music without the actual playing.

And I think that this is perhaps the most important part of mental practice when you do it and make it a more or less regular habit. I mean, you don't have to do it every day, but what if you did it every week or every couple of weeks and made it a habit that way, as you get better at it, what you're doing is you're increasing your focus capacity.

You'll find in the beginning it's very difficult to stay focused on the music and hearing it in your head and keeping that together, you may only be able to make a few measures at a time before you realize you're, you know, thinking about something else.

But as you get better at this, you will be increasing your focus stamina, which is going to serve you very well as you play in different places and play for different people.

So it's a very valuable skill. So can you tell that I love mental practice? It wasn't something that I learned as a young person. It was something that I discovered as I went through the ear training classes at Curtis, and certainly in my years of teaching it, I realized that the work that I did away from the instrument was at least as valuable as the work that I did at the instrument, and doing both kinds is even better. It just multiplies the benefits. And as I said, it's going to be weird the first couple times you try it, but stick with it because you're going to get so much out of it, I promise. So that's enough on mental practice for this time. If you have questions about anything that I talked about today or on any podcast episode, remember you can always email me@podcastarpmastery.com and I will be happy to answer those as I can. So.

Fear not, ask away. Also, remember that coaching registration is still open and we will keep it open until September 1st, which is this coming Friday or whenever the slots are filled, whichever is sooner. So get in there and save your spot, but claim it now. If you are at all interested in coaching, you'll find again the link to the coaching webpage in the show Notes Next week here on the podcast, we're going to be doing what I call a triple threat warmup. I'm going to be doing a warmup that you can play along with. I'm going to be leading you through it, much in the way that I do with our live Monday warmups that I do in our online community, the Heart Mastery Hub, and in our Harp Happiness HQ Facebook group. So I do those warm ups live every Monday, and this will be another kind of a Monday warmup, and you'll be welcome to play along with me or just listen. I'm calling this a triple threat warmup. We're going to be talking about how working this way from oral directions, spoken directions can help you really think about your playing in a different way. So we're going to be working on our triple threat warm up next week on the podcast. But until then, 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. Not airplay for this one, just play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.