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So these shortcuts aren't just about saving your time and saving you energy and all that sort of stuff. They're about recognizing your growth, owning the level that you have now attained, and moving forward with that so that you can get to the next one faster. Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to emp 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. First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join Us just go to harpmastery.com/join-now. That's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. We all love shortcuts. No one likes to feel like they're wasting time, energy, or money. We're always looking for a better way, a simpler way to do what we need to do. Some shortcuts are questionable, like cutting through a parking lot to avoid waiting at a traffic light. Others are pure genius, like when I learned that you could make hollandaise sauce in 15 seconds in the microwave. Okay. The sauce wouldn't pass muster with a real chef, I'm sure, but, you know, it works. There's a third kind of shortcut, though, and that's what I want us to think about today. It's the kind of shortcut that comes with experience. Here's what I mean. I remember when I was learning to sew and I was following all the directions very carefully so that I wouldn't mess up. I even learned which pattern companies had the clearest directions and which seemed to presume that I knew more than I did. So there were steps missing. Those missing steps weren't shortcuts per se. They were just knowledge that a more experienced sewer would have. But one day, I watched a professional seamstress start to cut out a dress. She was making a concert dress for me, and I was kind of excited to watch her start on it. So what turned out to be an even bigger thrill was to see that instead of painstakingly pinning the pattern onto the cloth, the way I learned in home EC class, she just laid a few weights on the pattern to hold it lightly in place and. And then cut around it. What a shortcut and a time saver. And why had I never thought of that? Well, of course I'd never thought of that because I didn't have the experience and the confidence that comes with that experience to even see that as a possibility. I was still following the directions step by step. That step by step method was an important part of my learning because it showed me what was necessary to get the best result. It wasn't necessary to pin every pattern piece in place. It was necessary to lay out the pieces on the cloth correctly and to cut them carefully. The pins were a helpful tool, especially when I was learning, and particularly when you needed it. Right. But they were not strictly necessary. Harp playing has those kinds of shortcuts, too. There are practice and learning strategies that are crucial at some stages of our harp journey that we can rethink and adapt as we gain more mastery. If we cling to our old learning habits too long, we end up slowing our progress and growth. So today, I want to help you learn about harp shortcuts. Not specific shortcuts, although I'll mention a few, but how to look for and discover the shortcuts that could make a difference for you. Right now, this is about using your experience and your knowledge from all the harp playing you've done to help you learn faster, practice more effectively and play more confidently. It's about making it easier. And who wouldn't want that, right? Okay, so before we get started, I'll remind you about a couple things that are coming up here at Harp Mastery. One is our Christmas in July celebration that is starting tomorrow. As of the day this podcast goes live, it'll be starting July 1st. Then that's a Tuesday. And every week during July, I'm going to be holding a live call or sharing a video, having a little mini workshop. And I'm going to be going live in our Harp Mastery Hub, our YouTube channel, or our Harp Happiness HQ Facebook group. So please come on and join. It's not just about the live calls and the videos. We'll also have special little presents along the way, little discounts and special offers on some things, including a really special new workshop that I'll be offering. And you'll learn more about that toward the end of the month. So there's a bunch of stuff going on at Heart Mastery this month for Christmas in July, and I want you to celebrate with me now. This Tuesday, that's July 1st, I will be doing a little presentation, playing some music from my Christmas CDs and talking about the music and how you can make it accessible for you. Some of it is published and you can get a hold of that. And so we'll be talking about that and just getting you in the Christmas spirit to start off the month of July. So all that is happening and you'll find all the links to join either on YouTube or in the Hub, or in the HARP Happiness HQ Facebook group. And of course, also in The Hub, our 2025 Super Summertime Challenge is in full swing. We've got everyone participating in that. There are some really fun challenge entries and there's a new little kind of mini challenge that we do each week and you can participate just by joining the Hub. So if you're in the Hub, go to the Challenges page and you'll see this week's challenge and you click on join and you can also find the previous week's challenges there. Why would you want to do all the week's challenges? Well, because at the end, end of all of these little mini challenges, we're going to be offering a prize basket or box of Heart Mastery goodies that A lucky winner will get. So from all the people who have entered every week of the challenge and done their challenge step, every week all through the summer, we'll be doing a random drawing, and the lucky winner will get that special little bundle of heart mastery stuff. So. So that's coming up as well. It's a fun time here at Harp Mastery. And in that harp happiness kind of spirit, we're going to be talking about those shortcuts today. So I want you to grab a paper and a pencil because I'm going to start with a little assignment, and I want you to be able to write that down. So go ahead and get those and come right back and we'll get started. All right, if you're ready, here we go. You've got your paper and pencil, and I want you to think, think back to the very first harp books you had when you were starting the harp. It's even better. Of course, if you can get them out and find them. You might not be able to find them. They might be buried so deeply in piles of things. But if you can remember what your very first harp books and harp lessons were like, what was new to you? I want you to make a list, and it's ready. It's probably going to be a long list. I mean, there were a lot of things that were probably new, like, oh, gosh, just finding the strings that went with the notes. Maybe you had never done music reading before. Maybe you were just trying to figure out how to get your fingers on the strings or all the different kinds of hand positions that you needed and what your fingers needed to do and how to connect things. Maybe. There were a lot of things, I'm sure, that were new. So that's a long list. And if you want to take a moment and really dig into that and write that list down now, then you can just push pause on this and you can come back when you're ready to go on. So let's just move right along now, and you can catch up if you need to. But I want you to look at the pieces on your music stand now, or just think about them. What is on that stand now and what do you know now that you didn't know then? Probably a ton of stuff. This is the kind of stuff we never give ourselves credit for. And that's why I wanted you to write this down as a list. Sure. It's one thing to just say, oh, yeah, I know in those old pieces, I was doing this, and in these new pieces, I don't have to do that anymore. I'm doing this. But when you sit and make a list, you get to figure out and really see all the things that you know now that you didn't know then. Even if your harp journey has only been a few months, if it's been a decade, there's probably a lot of stuff you know now that you didn't know then, including that the harp is a lot harder than you thought when you started. We usually find that out. All of us. However, let's think about some specific things and just. I want to give you some ideas to maybe spur you on in your list. If you're not quite sure what to write down, think about what was new to you when you started, right? Those finger patterns, trying to get all your fingers to work together. Maybe you just started playing with your second finger and thumb and then introduced your third finger and later on your fourth finger. To get everything working and playing in the right direction, you had to learn about connecting and placing ahead and the. And fingering, right? The little numbers. That kind of fingering, maybe raising was part of it. What did you do to follow through? You had to learn about hands separately playing and hands together playing, and how two hands is just way harder than one, isn't it? Maybe you had to learn about petals and levers, too. Ooh, that's another. Another big step forward, isn't it? I know that with petal for petal harpists, and if you're not a petal harpist, you're a lever harpist. This is something you maybe hadn't thought of, but it's a. Definitely a. A growth marker for petal harpists is when we learn to push two petals on this at the same time, one on each side of the harp, right? A right foot pedal on the left foot pedal, push them exactly at the same time and maybe in the same direction, maybe in opposite directions. That's a whole coordination level that really is a growth marker. So maybe that's something you can do now that you certainly couldn't do when you started. Maybe your music reading skills have changed, right? Maybe you were a great music reader when you came to the harp, and all you had to learn was how to get those notes to match with those strings and then to get the right fingers there at the right time and to get them to play properly. That's another thing. But maybe music reading was brand new to you, and that's something that you're getting better at and that you've improved at over the time that you've been playing. Maybe your rhythm skills, maybe counting was difficult for you. Maybe you'd never played with the metronome before. Maybe you still haven't done that, and that's okay. But think about all the things that you have done in that area. And then there's your musical understanding, right? The harp has a musical language all its own. We learn about playing near the soundboard. We learn about all kinds of different effects that the harp can do. We learn about glissandos. We learn about harmonics. We learn about these things that are more particular to the harp and what we do. So there's a lot of that that you probably know now that you didn't know then. Maybe even musical terms that you hadn't learned before, but are common to all kinds of instruments. You know, like tempo terms like andante or allegretto, or expressive terms like crescendo or dolce or, you know, all those kinds of things. Maybe those are things that you have learned along the way. They're all important. So why am I asking you to think about these things and to write them down? Because I need you to see what you know. That's where the shortcuts are. You probably take all those things that you have learned for granted. You probably don't remember how hard it was to get your fingers on those strings and to get them playing properly the first time, to be able to connect, to cross under when you did a scale. Those are things that were hard for you and new. And if they're no longer hard and new for you, this is knowledge and skill that you have. And that's what I need you to understand. You have come a long way. Wasn't there an old cigarette commercial? That was. You've come a long way, baby. And I know I'm dating myself, but this is the thing. You have come a long way. And you need to. Not just to take credit for it. This isn't just a pat yourself on the back moment. This is recognizing your growth so that you can use it. I see so many students who are learning music now the same way they were learning music three years ago. When they've got three years more experience and knowledge and time playing the harp. That's a lot of time, and it's a lot of skill, a lot of understanding that they've gathered in that time, and they're not using it to help them move forward. That's the kind of shortcut that I'm talking about. You don't have to do things the same way you did when you started. Let's take a breather for a moment and let's talk about some learning theory. This is Bloom's Taxonomy. I know you may know more about this than I do, or maybe you've never heard about it, but it's pretty interesting to me. So in 1956, Benjamin Bloom published a book along with a team of collaborators called Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. And in this book, they set out a framework of learning that became known as Bloom's Taxonomy. And it's just a way of listing and categorizing educational goals. And this is something that if you're a teacher or instructor and you had, you know, education about this, you probably learned Bloom's Taxonomy. And it sets out six levels of learning, these six major categories that could help you develop a curriculum, for instance, or a course or lesson plans, learning activities. So the categories of thinking and learning that Bloom and his team identified are these knowledge. This is the first level, like the lowest level, and it's recalling basic facts or processes. It's foundational methods. The second level is comprehension. And in this level, the learners sort of demonstrate their understanding of the ideas and materials that they've learned. At the first level, they don't necessarily have the full implication of everything that they've learned. They may not be able to play with what they've learned, for instance, but they've, you know, they've got some understanding of it. The third level is application. And at this level, learners are able to use their knowledge and their understanding in certain situations. Then fourth level is analysis. And this is where a learner would be able to take different ideas and explore relationships, similarities and differences between these things and be able to start to sort of dissect and understand the material at a deeper level. And then we get synthesis, which is once again combining different ideas or elements, but this time creating new structures or ideas from, from that. So once you totally understand the material, what new can you make from it? And then his sixth level, the highest level, was evaluation. And this was the idea that this would require really complex mental processes to make judgments about what you were doing and about the methods and the materials and all these things. It was very, a very high level thing. Now, his taxonomy was reassessed in 2001, and the group that reassessed it wanted to make it clearer for learners to understand what was really being asked of them at every level. So it sounds a little bit less scholarly and a little bit more action oriented, which is really helpful. And so the first level is, remember, that's that foundational level. Second is understand, then apply, then analyze, then evaluate, and then finally create. So it's just a little bit different than Bloom's original taxonomy, but it really sort of, I think, shows us how we learn and what we're able to do with the material that we learn. And as far as what we're talking about today, I think it is really applicable, and I think it really demonstrates the fact that our learning isn't static. Our learning moves forward. We progress through these stages of learning unless we don't let ourselves. Now, I think that if, you know, we can look at, remember, as learning the fundamentals about playing the harp and then being able to understand what it is we're doing. Okay, putting my finger on the string, closing my finger. Got it. The level I want to start talking about is apply, where we start actually applying our skills rather than just repeating old processes. This also moves us forward into the analysis, sort of portion of this, looking at the why of what we're doing rather than just the what. Now, take fingering, for instance. So when we're starting the harp, every finger number is written over every note. Put your fourth finger here, put your third finger here. And we almost play by the numbers at that beginning stage. And that's important because it teaches a student how our fingers work. It's sort of developing the finger language of the harp. This is how we put our fingers on. This is the order in which they play, this is how they work, and this is how they form those basic patterns of things we play. Scales, intervals, chords. This is how it works. And that's so critical for developing the finger comfort, I'm going to say, right, that innate, almost automatic response that your fingers know how to do this, and those finger numbers help us learn those patterns. That's important. But here's the thing. As we get more experienced and our fingers know what to do, we don't need to read by the numbers anymore. We know that if we've got notes that go up in a row, it's probably going to be fingered like a scale. And we move closer and closer to the point where we only need to write in a very few fingers or fingering in very limited situations where we absolutely know that, oh, gosh, if I don't put my third finger here, nothing's going to work. But we don't need to write in every number anymore because our fingers have learned the patterns and we want them to know, without having to read the numbers, that, oh, okay, there's an E and a G. Well, we're going to use A two and a one to play that. Okay? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. The tools, the information that we needed at that foundational level, we don't need anymore because we've grown beyond that. So when we think about why we're doing this, are we writing in all the numbers because we need them? If we don't need them, why are we writing them in? Once we start looking at the why of these processes, it's possible to evaluate what we're actually doing in virtually every area of our harp playing. This is where the shortcut is. If you don't need to do a step, you can eliminate it and move forward faster. If you don't have to have all the fingering written in, then think of the time it's going to save you not to write it in. Think also with that particular skill, if you don't have to write all your fingering in, sight reading becomes a whole bunch easier, doesn't it? Because you're not reading the numbers anymore. And if you've been stumbling at your note reading, maybe you've been reading the numbers and we need to free you from that so you can actually read the notes. Voila. This is a shortcut to progress, using knowledge that you've gained to help you eliminate some of the steps that you used to have to do. Think about your technique practice. What actually is your goal right now in your technique practice? Are you trying to develop speed or security? Are you trying to make your playing very clean? Are you working on your tone? Granted, all of those things we want to work on at one time or another, but probably we don't want to work on all of them every day. So think about that goal for your technique practice and then look at what you're actually doing. Is your technique practice? Is that routine moving you toward your goal, or is it just sort of keeping you where you are? If you want to develop speed, for instance, are you playing your exercises faster? If you want to develop more security, are you working specifically on exercises to develop that, or are you just doing the same things you've always done? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. That's where that evaluation is so important. Looking at what it is you're trying to do and realizing that what you've been doing isn't necessarily what you need to do now. It got you here, but we want to get you there. Thinking about your practice. If you had to be more time efficient with your practice, how could you do it? Would you decide to do fewer but more targeted repetitions of a passage, maybe you don't need to do 10 repetitions. Maybe you really only need to do five. And actually, if there's part of your piece that is going pretty well, maybe you don't need to do as many repetitions on that as you do on a part that's not so easy for you. Maybe you just need to put a little bit more trust in the long haul and the growth that comes over time. Rather than trying to get it exactly right today, work on it to make progress on it. But know you're going to have to come back and do that same work tomorrow. So let time help you through that. That might make your practice more efficient. Maybe working to tempo sooner or putting your hands together sooner would help you be more time efficient in terms of learning a piece. I mean, think how, how did you learn to practice at first? What worked well for you to get you here? Was it doing 10 repetitions, starting hands separately, blah, blah, blah. Well, if you were to write down those steps, this is what I did, and I'll bet that you have them written down someplace. Your harp teacher probably told you exactly what to do and wrote those down for you. Or you wrote them down in a journal and you wrote down I, I'm supposed to do this, this and this, this many times in this particular way. Well, look at those steps and see. Maybe you're already combining those steps today. Maybe there are steps that you've eliminated. For instance, you may not need the hands separately work now that you did when you were starting. When you were starting, the harp was so new, the coordination was so new, you had to do some hands separately stuff just to get your hands moving. But your hands know a lot more now than they did then. So you could start something hands together and use hands separately as a tool to correct and to refine, rather than having to start from hands separately. There are different ways to look at your practice and your learning. You could start, for instance, with more big picture work. I'm going to play the whole piece through and I'm going to play these big sections through. I'm not going to start looking just one measure at a time and making, you know, this line correct before I move on to the next line. Let it all smooth itself out. It's a different way to learn, but it's using skills you already have. Yeah, it's going to feel scary the first time, I guarantee that. But this is the kind of thing that's going to help you move forward. So these Shortcuts aren't just about saving your time and saving you energy and all that sort of stuff. They're about recognizing your growth, owning the level that you have now attained, and moving forward with that so that you can get to the next one faster. Realize that this is using the work you've done, the skills you've acquired, playing at your level, not below it. I mean, we don't need to make things more complicated than they are because it's not the process that counts. It's not you have to do step A, step B, step C. It's the result. And you may be able to get there faster if you trust yourself and trust what you've already accomplished. I know that sounds radical. I know it sounds a little scary, but I hope that it sounds energizing and motivating and that you're ready to see where you can implement some shortcuts in your playing now. Now, if you are a My Heart Mastery member, we're coming up to a whole month of calls dedicated to specific shortcuts in your practice, in your playing, in your technique, all those kinds of things. Going to be looking at this in more detail. And if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, I would invite you to join us because this is the kind of thing that we do every week on our live calls. We talk about these kinds of important topics and things that will help you and your playing. But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, take what we've talked about today and put that into practice right away. You'll be amazed at the difference it will make, I promise. Phew. I know I get a little bit intense about this. I get a little bit excited. I think that this is so important and this is such a common place for people to get stuck, especially when you're trying to do everything right. You don't need to do everything right. You just need to play the harp. Honestly, that's where. That's where it is. That's what it's all about, and that's what I want you to be able to do. So with that in mind, next week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about some pieces that you might enjoy playing this summer. So I'll have some pieces to suggest to you. I'll play through some, and it'll be a very lightweight episode, I promise. Nothing quite as heavy and intense as today. So that I hope will put you in a relaxing mood. It's making me relax just thinking about it. Don't forget we have our big Christmas in July celebration. Starting tomorrow, Tuesday, July 1st at noon Eastern, I'll be doing a live call, a little bit of a presentation and and mini workshop on some Christmas pieces that are on my Christmas cd. So we'll be talking about that. And of course, we have the Summer challenge going on in the Hub, so don't forget to join us for that either. With all that going on, I have one more directive for you, one more thing to remind you about and that is for you to remember that 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 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.