How to Play Without Looking - PHH 275

Welcome to the show. Today, as I have been doing all this month, I am revisiting one of the podcast episodes that I think we need to hear again, and today's topic is one on which we can all use a refresher course. It's about playing without looking at the strings. Yes, I know we need to look at the strings to be sure we're going to play the right ones, and I'm not forgetting that the strings are off to one side and they aren't easy to catch in our peripheral vision all the time, particularly for aging eyes. But nevertheless, we can and we absolutely must learn to play without being dependent on looking at the strings. Even better, I know that you would be able right now to play more than you think you can without looking. It's not a miracle. It comes from experience and practice. So I want you to listen to this episode. It's episode 101, and it aired originally in April of 2023. Now you'll hear why this is such an important skill and how to practice it. And then after the episode is done, I'll be back with another thought or two for you.

I've also put some links that I want you to check out in the show notes.

Remember, if the show notes don't appear in your podcast app, you can just go over to the episode on our website. So go over to the podcast right at heartmastery.com, look for the podcast, and then you'll see the entire episode. And And the the links to the show in the show notes, the ones I'm talking about right now. So one of those is I've included a link from a blog post I did quite a while ago called Four Smart Finger Patterns You Must Know, and this will give you sort of another little tweak to to learning to play without looking. And then I've also included the link to register for the Chrysalis Chamber Music Workshop. This is the workshop that I'm doing with my flutist friend Joan. Marsh and my composer friend Louis Anthony Delese. We're doing this.

It's looking like it's going to be a really great event, and I really want you to consider taking the plunge and joining us.

So if you're worried at all about, you know, what you would play, rest assured we are talking to each participant and making sure that we understand what you want to play. And you can work on your music, and we'll pair you up with somebody who wants to work on that too. So, you know, that's what we're looking for. We're looking for every harpist and flutist and composer to have the best experience they can. And so I want that for you. If you've ever wanted to play with a flutist and, you know, you've thought, well, I don't know, I don't know how to get started, This is a great way to get started. So check out Chrysalis, and I would love to see you there. Now let's get over to episode 101, and let's start talking about playing the harp without looking at your fingers. Whoa! Okay, here we go.

What would you do if you were playing the harp in a concert and the lights went out? Now I'm sure many of you have stories about playing the harp when there was a sudden power outage or something similar, and I have several myself. For instance, I remember one wedding when a neighborhood-wide blackout occurred just as the newly married couple kissed. Now, the priest didn't miss a beat, directing the acolytes to lead the bride and groom in a candlelight recessional to the back of the church. My fellow musicians and I were missing lots of beats, however, as we struggled to keep playing the recessional music in the dark. Fortunately, that was a familiar tune we were playing, but even so, the other musicians finally gave up, leaving me to carry on by myself. Because I knew the piece, the notes weren't really the problem. Obviously, the real difficulty was not being able to see the strings. It's one of those harpist dilemmas, isn't it? Well, today's Quick Fix podcast episode isn't about memorizing your music or carrying a spare stand light with you. It's about something much more important— a skill you should use even when the lights are on. It's about trusting your fingers to know where the strings are. Just in case you're thinking that this doesn't apply to you, here are some questions for you to ask yourself. Do you sometimes lose your place on the page when you look away from the music to see the strings? Do you have to memorize parts of your pieces so you can make sure your fingers get to the right strings? Do you find music learning slow because you have to look back and forth between your hands and the music? Are you a poor sight reader? All of these things might be the telltale signs that you haven't taught your fingers to play without you looking at them. And that's exactly what I will show you how to fix. On today's show, maybe you never considered that it was important to play without looking at the strings, or maybe you never thought you'd actually be able to do it. After all, most instrumentalists don't have to look at their hands while they play, right? The and think about a violinist or a flutist; they're not looking at their fingers to. They don't have to find where the strings are or where the keys are to push. They're right there under their fingers. And that's one of the differences between other instrumentalists and harpists, right? We're always fighting gravity. We have this big acrobatic act that we do when we play. Our hands are in the air and it makes us look really graceful and beautiful while we play. But you and I know that that's where the challenge is because we're leaping in the air like a trapeze artist from one place to another. And we just have to hope that we get there. Now, there's nothing death-defying about our leap, but it is a leap of faith, and we would rather not leap to the wrong strings, obviously. Now, perhaps like me, you had piano lessons as a child, and I remember being taught piano and being told almost from the very first that I shouldn't be looking at the keys while I play. And various piano teachers have different methods of enforcing this that we really don't use so much as harp teachers with our harp students. But the nice thing, of course, about piano is that at least you're sitting sort of straight on and both hands are equally under your peripheral vision, at least, right? You can glance down and see both hands. And For some of us, when we're playing in the stratosphere on the harp, that right hand is actually behind our head and we really truly can't see it without turning our head to look. But for the piano student, teachers will do interesting things to try to keep them from being able to look at their fingers, like holding a music book under their nose or under their chin so that they can't Look down to see anything that's not on the music rack. Or I knew one teacher who would gently and delicately hold the lid to the piano keys just over the student's hand. They had plenty of mobility, but when they looked down, all they saw was the lid. They couldn't see their fingers. We don't have something that's quite that easy. And, you know, imagine trying to hold something between you and the strings. That would be really tough, wouldn't it? So we really have to train ourselves to do that. And before we get into how we're going to train that, you might, for a very good reason, be asking yourself the question, why? Why would we want to? Why is it so important for us to be able to play without looking at the strings? Well, I'm expecting that if you're not already convinced of the necessity to play without looking at the strings, I'm going to have a little bit of an uphill climb here to help convince you of that. But let me do my best. First of all, when you have to look at the strings in order to play, it's slowing down every musicianship skill that you've worked really hard to develop. And I'll explain that here in just a second. So, but I want to clear this up first. We do have to look at the strings sometimes. I'm not talking about never glancing over to see what's happening with your fingers or to see where that jump is. I'm talking about turning your head specifically to look at the strings instead of looking at the music while you play. Just a moment ago, I was talking about the way a number of students try to tackle learning a difficult passage. They can't find where their fingers are supposed to go, and they figure if they memorize that passage, then they can look at their fingers to play it. That's backwards of what we want to do. We want your fingers to be able to do that, to be able to play that passage without you looking at them. If you have to glance for a leap or a jump or a single placement, that's one thing. But you're going to glance mostly with your peripheral vision and not by turning your head. Even when you have a piece memorized, you're able to look at the strings, and you should be, but it's not because you're telling your fingers where to go. They already know where to go, or they should. That's what you're doing in your practice. You're teaching them how to do the piece, where to go, when to play. That's part of the point of your practice. It's a big part of that. So every time you're actually looking at the strings to try to direct your fingers— and let's realize that this is kind of micromanaging, right? Every time you're looking over there, you're actually undoing some of the practice that you've already done. So if you can play without looking at the strings to find a bunch of notes, you could actually learn your music faster, couldn't you? Because you'd be able to to play the music, looking at the music. And letting your fingers do what they need to do—find the strings on their own. Are they going to make some mistakes? Sure, that's what practice is for. Obviously, this would help you sight read better, wouldn't it? Because you'd be able to track the music with your eyes and let your fingers just sort of do what they're trained to do, what you have trained them to do. And of course, this would let you play more confidently, wouldn't it? Because You know that your fingers are going to get to the right strings while you're doing whatever else it is you need to do to play the music. So playing without looking at the strings is actually using your time really wisely. It's using all your practice time that you've spent drilling a particular passage. Let's get your fingers to know how to play that without you having to put all your concentration right there. I mean, you know what that's like, right?

Right.

You're looking at the music, then you figure you have to look at the strings to play this one part, and then you look back at the music and you're not sure where you are. That's hard to do. That's tricky. We don't want to have to do that. And then in addition, all that time that you spend drilling your technique, all those exercises and etudes you work on, well, part of the point of those is to teach your fingers the patterns, The shapes, the jumps, all that sort of thing that they need to know in order to do this on their own. That's part of what you're training them to do. And if you don't let them do that, then you've just wasted a bunch of time. Don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of time to waste, right? So you'll be able to play more confidently. You'll be able to learn faster. And that's the point. So let's get on with how you're going to do this. So the first thing I'd like you to do is do sort of a trust exercise, and we'll come back to this as well. But take an exercise, a scale, something simple, and just play it with your eyes closed. As you do that, think about how it feels. What do your fingers feel like? Can you— what does it feel like when they cross under, when they cross over? You should be able to feel it. Your fingers know how to do this. They've done it 1,000 times. But if you haven't let them do it, or if you haven't been intentionally separated from the process, should I say, if you think you have to look for all those cross-unders, crossovers, and all that sort of thing, You're not completely training your fingers the way they need. Because they just need to be able to do this on their own without you. This is, by the way, also important if you run into a piece where one hand has one kind of a pattern and while it's playing that the other hand has to play another sort of a thing. This will allow you to let that one hand go on autopilot. While you pay a little bit more attention to what's going on with the other one. So this is part of that, and learning to feel rather than just see what your fingers are doing is really critical. So once you've done that eyes closed drill, you might have had— you might have a couple of revelations. One is that, oh, goes a little bit better than you thought it might go. And the other one which comes immediately after that is, oh yeah, but I'm still making tons of mistakes.

That's okay.

The point here is that you have to learn to teach yourself to stay out of the way. And when you do that, your fingers will learn that they have to step up to the plate, that they have to learn by feel Where some of those things are, what the difference is between a 7th and an octave when you place it on the strings. How big is an octave? You know, if I asked you to stretch your hand out right now and, and put 1 and 4 at the distance that you thought an octave was, and then go over to the harp and check it, how accurate do you think you'd be? You might be more accurate than you thought. Sort of interesting. But this is exactly the kind of training that your fingers are getting when you do those technique drills and exercises that you do all the time. And if you always look at your fingers, then you're not taking full advantage of this time. Now, yes, we do want to look at our fingers while we're doing those drills because we want to check and see You know, watch our technique, see what's happening. But then equally, we want to feel what's happening, to look away and still know that our fingers are doing what we want them to do. The trust thing is hard, right? This trust thing, this idea that your fingers can do this without you watching them is really tricky until you discover that, you know what, they can. They're probably doing more of their work without your attention than you realize right now. And letting them do the work on their own is going to free you up to do a lot of the other things that you want, like read ahead, like sight read, like find the pedals, keep your place on the page. Everything starts with freeing your fingers. Now that, my friends, right there, that's a note you could put that on a Post-it, stick it on your music stand, because it applies to just about everything we do. Everything in harp playing and in our making of harp music starts with freeing your fingers, freeing them technically Freeing them from your attention, freeing them from tension period, right? So that they can relax. So just let's keep that as a motto: everything starts with freeing your fingers. Okay, let's get down to some specifics. So how do you train your fingers to play without you looking at them? The first thing I'd like to think, I'd like you to think of is. Think of this a little bit like when you were taking your dog to an expert dog trainer. Some of this is training the dog to obey commands, but part of that training— in fact, a big part of that training, some people would say most of it— is training the owners to handle the dog properly, to teach the dog exactly what it needs to do. And then not to countermand that instruction. This is what we're training your fingers to do. This is how we're going to do it. We're not just going to train them because frankly they've had a lot of training already. We're going to train you to make sure that you don't get in their way so that they do what you've trained them to do. So. If the dog training analogy is helpful for you, then then you'll find this process pretty easy because what we're going to start with right now is we're going to do some extra training drills, or at least I'll tell you about some extra training drills to do things you're already doing that can help you start this process. So I call these training drills because you're actually going to look at your fingers for these drills, but we're going to. Do them with the idea that you're training your fingers to be accurate. You're training them to be precise. You're training them to know where things are. So you're gonna use your standard exercise kinds of things. Those drills that, that work on shapes like shapes of intervals and chords, patterns, scale patterns, arpeggio patterns. Stretches, like a stretch of an octave or, you know, anything like that, and then jumps from octave to octave. How accurate can you be if you put your fingers on C and E and then you close your eyes and you jump an octave up to that next C and E? How do you— how accurate do you think you are? Kind of fun to test and to try. But you're going to do these standard exercise drills regularly because we need your fingers to be trained to find those shapes, find those patterns, and to start to find those jumps accurately. And this will require some looking. But at the same time, remember that you're looking at your fingers to train them, and you're training them so that you are not going to look at them. So you get to look for these drills, but bear in mind that this isn't because you're always going to be looking at them. So as you play them, think about how they feel. You can take a moment even and close your eyes during some of that practice just to see what it feels like, because that's what you're training. Then the second kind of training drill to do is Any kind of— you can use this with an exercise, but any kind of passage in any piece, do some very slow practice to watch your fingers for their placing accuracy. You can also listen for buzzing and try to eliminate that here. So let's say you've got a difficult passage in your piece. We're not going to memorize it as a cure for wrong notes because you're going to have to look at your fingers. I mean, if the passage gets memorized, that's great. And if you want to memorize it, that's terrific. But we're not memorizing it because you are unable to look at your fingers and this and the music at the same time. We're going to train your fingers to do this on their own. So do some slow practice With that same section and watch your fingers. Yes, you can do it hands separately and hands together. Do it slowly enough that you can place everything accurately because that accuracy developed as you are looking very deliberately and with a lot of focus at your fingers is what's going to help them find it when you are not. And that's the point of this practice right here. Not to memorize it, not to let your fingers know that you're, you're going to be watching them so they will be able to find those notes. Your goal is to be able to get your fingers to the right strings by themselves. So as you're doing this slow practice and as you're watching your fingers, do pay some more attention to how that feels. Can you feel where they need to go? What does it feel like when they place accurately on the strings as opposed to when they don't? So those 2 things, your standard exercise drills and then some of this slow practice, they're your training drills. Training not just for your fingers— going back to that dog training analogy again— not just training for your fingers, but training for you as well. This will give you the, the confidence that your fingers can do these things. And it will remind your fingers exactly what it is you want them to do in a particular situation like that slow practice thing, or in general like those exercises. But those are your basic training drills, and the nice thing is you probably already do those. But I want you to think about them just a little bit differently. Now, the next stage of this is the testing stage where we have to allow your fingers to do this without your eyes glued to them. Having trained your fingers to do this, we have to let them do it. We have to get out of their way. This is the scary part because we want to get it right, so we want to watch everything. But this is exactly when you need to step back. It's exactly when you need to let go. And so these testing drills will do 2 things. They're going to teach your fingers to work alone. In other words, to work without the safety net of your eyes. And it's— these drills are going to teach you to trust your fingers. One word of caution here: remember, this is a testing process and there are going to be mistakes. You need to notice when you start to get so flustered by the mistakes, or at least so annoyed by them, that you start looking at your fingers too much again. Remember, we're training your fingers, yes, but we're also training you, and you will have to endure a few mistakes along the way. That's okay. We're training your fingers and we're training you, so be a little bit patient and a little bit forgiving in this process. This— these are drills, these are exercises, and these are tests, and there are going to be some bumps along the way. Alright, so I have 3 that I want to share with you here. The first one is I would like you to practice octave jumps. Now just a moment ago I suggested, okay, say you take middle C and the E above that. It's a 3rd. You're going to play that with your right hand. Get your fingers on the strings, close your eyes, play those notes, and then try to jump to the C and the E an octave ahead. An octave above that.

How close did you come?

Were you close? Did you hit one of the notes correctly and one of them not, or were both fingers off? Well, give that a try. Try it with an octave too, right? You can do these drills with your eyes open and with your eyes closed. Octave jumps are terrific training for that. Acrobatic kind of stuff that our hands need to do all the time. And learning to do them without really looking at your fingers, even with your eyes closed, is great training. It's going to help you learn what those jumps feel like, because that's how you're going to replicate it. That's how you're going to control it without looking. That's how you're going to check what you think it's going to be. Realize I'm not suggesting that you are never going to be able to look to make a jump like that while you're actually playing, but we're trying to make those jumps as accurate as possible with as little of your attention as possible. And so that's the purpose of this drill, to train that. So have some fun with this. Jump your hands around with an interval of a 3rd, with an interval of a 5th, with a 3 or 4 note chord even. Jump around and don't look. You probably have exercises in some of your exercise books that do something similar. Practice following the music with your eyes and not looking at your hands while you do it. Do it both ways. Look at your hand As a, as a training drill, watch for accuracy, then just close your eyes and see how close you come. Know that the more you practice without looking, the more accurate your placing will get. So, you know, there you go. Now, as you do these jumps, before you— you know, if you jump and you, you hear that, oops, did not land in the right place, before you open your eyes, before you look to see where it was you landed, listen to what you did. Did you miss one note? Did you miss 2? Were you too high, too low, too wide, too skinny? Analyze what you heard before you fix. So that's another important part of your training. Listen to what happened See if you can identify what happened before you look, so that you're going to be training your ears as well. This is incredibly valuable if there's a time when you have to look at the music and you've heard yourself play a wrong note. If you know which direction that wrong note was, you can actually fix that error on the fly and get back on track. Hmm, there's a thought for you, right? Okay, that's one testing drill. Now here's a slightly easier one. Go to your favorite exercises, those ones you do every day, or your favorite book that you're working through, or the exercises that you've worked on for the first 3 days this week and you now know them pretty well. Do those exercises with your eyes closed. Absolutely with your eyes closed. See what it feels like. See how accurate your fingers are. And if you're making a lot of mistakes and they bug you, well, go through the exercise with your eyes closed. Let yourself make the mistakes. Then go back through the exercise with your eyes open. Watch your fingers carefully. Make sure that their placing is accurate. Then do it again with your eyes closed. It's amazing. It's such a wonderful feeling to be able to play with your eyes closed. It's very, very interesting. You will discover something new about your playing, I guarantee it. And the 3rd testing drill, which is kind of the most fun, I think, I call the magazine test. Now, I have spoken against this kind of a test often. Not in terms of a test. I know a lot of musicians who— harpists and non— who will do their daily exercises with a magazine on the music rack in front of them. Because their exercises are boring, uninteresting, and maybe it's not a magazine. I've seen people use videos and stuff for the same thing. And so they're not really interested in their exercises, so they put that magazine or whatever on their stand and they play their exercises. And, you know, so much for that. They've done all their technical work. I don't advocate that as an idea because I think that when That those exercises serve a point and that if you're taking your focus away from the exercise, you're missing the point. However, for this purpose, as a testing drill to trust your fingers, the magazine idea is a great one. So put that magazine on the stand and then play an exercise, play a piece you know well, even if it's a really easy one. While you are reading the magazine, or at least looking at the magazine on your stand, so that you're looking at that and not at your fingers. This is a terrific test because we're keeping your eyes in one place and letting your fingers do something that they have been trained well to do. So those are a couple of training drills and a couple of testing drills. Here are some things to be alert for as you do those. One of them is what I call harpist swivel head. We don't want you to be a swivel head harpist. And you've seen people do this. We all do this on occasion, and I know that I do it when I am in sort of a panic situation. It's like, argh, wait, what's going on here? But some people do it on a regular basis, and we don't want We don't want that. So that's when your head is focused on the music. We turn it sideways to look at the strings, back to the music, over to the strings. And of course this is a big problem, isn't it? Because it's so easy to lose your place. In general, you want that music stand as close to the harp, as straight ahead of you as possible. You know, still in a place where you can turn pages, but not way over to your left. We don't want the music that far away. Because if the music is as close to the strings as we can manage, it, then we can really use our peripheral vision quite a bit to help us with finding the strings without really turning our head to look at them. Now, um, I have noticed, and many of you will have had the same experience, that as I age, my peripheral vision, um, the accuracy of it is changing a little bit. But you know what? It's still enough to find what I need. The idea is that We want to try to keep your nose pointed to the page. Don't turn your head. You can see the advantage of this easily, correct? Because if, if you turn your head, then you have to turn back to the music, and that's when you're going to lose your place. So try to keep your nose pointed toward the music and just use your eyes so that you're using your eyes, not swiveling your head. Got it? Okay, no swivel head. Watch out for that as you play. The second thing you want to watch out for is what I've already referred to. It's that memorization trap. You don't have to memorize in order to play correctly. I mean, memorization is a great thing. We love to memorize. That's not what I'm talking about. But in order to play a particular passage, you shouldn't have to memorize it. Having to do that makes your music learning slower, and it's going to keep your reading skills from developing. So don't start a piece and figure that you have to memorize it in order to be able to play it. Your music learning, your sight reading, all that will be better if you let yourself read. So trust your fingers. And read. Okay, then this is the other thing that I would like you to do. I would like you to try to learn with less looking. Not never looking at the strings, but learn your music without looking so much. Yes, we're always going to need to look, to check, all that sort of stuff, because, you know, the strings are Off to our side, right? So we're always going to need to check them, but we don't want you to watch your fingers. That's the difference. And you know, think about the words that that we want to use. You don't want to watch your fingers. You don't want to focus on your fingers. You could look or check or glance or peek, but we don't want your eyes glued to the strings. Remember, when you're playing from memory, it's a little bit different. But once again, you're looking at your fingers and the strings when you're playing from memory. Not so that your fingers can find the right strings, but because that's where your attention would naturally be. Doesn't work that way for music learning. So I hope we've covered some things here that are helpful for you. Why you would want to play without looking at the strings because you can learn faster. You'll be able to improve your reading, and you're trusting your fingers to do what you've trained them to do. So it's extremely time efficient. Um, we've talked about a couple of training drills. We've talked about some testing drills, and we've talked about the dreaded swivel head that we don't want. Yes. No turning your head side to side. So I urge you to try this, to try it with a spirit of fun, a spirit of experimentation. Don't be afraid of this. Your fingers need you less than you think, or they need your eyes. Less than you think. Let them do what you've trained them to do.

So that was episode 101 on learning how to play without looking. There's a lot of really good practical information in there, and I hope that you try some of those experiments, those little drills, those exercises that I gave you. But I want to offer you one more thing. I want you to remember that this is truly about trust. It's about trusting the work that you do and that it's going to give you results, and trusting that just because you played a wrong note this time, because maybe you weren't looking at the string at that moment, Doesn't mean that that's a bad thing. You're learning to find the right strings. Mistakes are how we learn. So I want you to trust the process. Trust the process, trust your fingers, and trust me. It's going to work. I promise it's going to be good for you. Now, next week here on the podcast, I'm going to be doing another revisit episode, and we're going to be talking about some good habits That aren't really maybe so good for you, and that maybe they started out being good habits, but now they're just costing you time and costing you effort and keeping your progress slow. So we're going to be talking about good habits that you might want to consider breaking on the podcast next week. Remember, there's, uh, some resource in the show notes for you. There's the blog post that will give you some other little tips on FingerSmarts. And there is the link to register for Chrysalis. I certainly hope you check that out. It's going to be a fun thing and a little bit of a stretch maybe for you, just the way this episode was reminding you to sort of take a little step into the, into the wild and woolly lands of, you know, oh, I could maybe try this, right? So same kind of thing but way more fun.

All right, so So take a look at those.

We'll be here next week for some good habits that we're going to want to change. And 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. Enjoyed today's episode?

Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly harp happiness boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.