Is Your Practice Not Working? Maybe Hard Work Isn’t the Answer - PHH 209

And if we're spending too long working on that one section and we lose that vision of what the musical context is and of what those two measures mean in the context of the piece, then we're really sabotaging our efforts and we're not using our time very wisely.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Anne 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.

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.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Today I want to talk with you about hard work Now, I don't mean how to buckle down and do the hard work. We all know that playing the harp is hard, and we spend a lot of time working out practice techniques, strategies, and routines to help us play the music we want in spite of the difficulties. No, what I want to talk about today is how to get out of the just buckle down and do it mindset. The truth is that when it comes to playing the harp, or even music in general, sometimes trying harder is counterproductive. For instance, the harder we try to get that harmonic to ring, the more it just thuds. The harder we try to play faster, the more our fingers become tense. And so they don't have the flexibility and agility that is required for speed. The more we drill those recalcitrant 2 measures, the more they refuse to flow. All right, but if hard work isn't the answer, what is? Well, now let me be clear. Hard work, or at least work is necessary. But the way we approach a difficulty in our harp playing shouldn't be, cannot be the same way we solve other kinds of problems. The solution to these difficulties usually lies in the music itself, which is something we most often ignore as we try to do what seems impossible. So the approach I want to explore with you today is about looking at challenges and difficulties or frustrations through a musical lens. You truly don't need to hammer away at that thing that isn't working. You can use more creative and much less stressful ways to solve it. With the added benefit of keeping the musical and expressive goals front of mind. I have three very specific suggestions for you, ones that are simple to implement and which will give you the surprisingly quick results. So it's time to stop beating your head against the wall, don't you think? In addition to the three tips I'm going to give you today for how to not beat your head against the wall, I want to offer you one more that I'm not necessarily talking about very much in the podcast, but one that I don't want you to ignore. Because getting support, getting help when you're trying to learn something is the speediest way to. To get results. It's so much easier to have somebody who knows how to do it teach you how to do it. Much easier than trying to figure it out yourself. And so, as we approach summertime and you're thinking about your summer plans, this may be the perfect time to consider growing your heart, playing, learning those skills, getting past some of those things that seem like roadblocks with the help of a Harp Mastery certified coach, Our coaching program is open. You can register anytime you like. Formerly we had had a sort of a trimester system, but we made the whole program much more flexible. So you can choose when you want to start your lessons, the frequency of your lessons and of course you get to work with a certified coach. Our coaches are experts at solving these kinds of problems and getting you past the difficulties and back on the harp happ highway. That sounds good, doesn't it? Harp happiness highway. Anyway, so you can use the link in the show notes to find out more about certified coaching and sign up for a planning call with our dean of harpist success, Caitlin Mertens. Caitlyn is head of our coaching program and she will meet with you and help you figure out exactly how coaching can work best for you and get you started with one of our Heart Mastery coaches. So um, you can do that by using the link in the show notes or you can go to heartmastery.com, go to our programs tab and you'll find coaching there and you can read more about the program and sign up for your planning call with Kaitlyn and get on the road. So support is so vital and I don't want you to think that summertime is a time not to grow. It's a perfect time to grow. Everything in your garden is growing. The grass is growing, so why shouldn't you, right? So take a look and consider coaching as one way to get yourself growing harp wise this summer. Also, quick note for my Harp Mastery members. Just a reminder that we now have new curated for you courses in our website. We only have a couple up right now but more will be coming. But the idea is that I have gone through all those dozens and there are a lot, there are 70 some I think courses in my harp mastery and combined the relevant calls into a syllabus for various topics. So we have a note reading syllabus and this uses calls and PDFs and other things that are on our website, puts them in a syllabus order like a course for you so you can work through those materials in an orderly way and you don't have to do all the script searching through the site to find those materials. I've done it for you. So we have one on note reading and we have one on understanding chord theory. So those are the two that we have up at the moment. You'll find them easily. They're just that new category on our website and you can hop right in and take a look at those. We'll be doing more for you. There will be More coming. But I wanted to remind you that they were there for you. Okay, so without further ado, let's see what we can do to eliminate that bang your head against the wall kind of hard work and make harp playing and learning and practicing just a little bit easier. I think I should say at the outset that there's nothing magical about what we're talking about today. They're very simple things that you can do, but they're important because they're a shift in the way you look and at the challenge, at the particular problem you're trying to solve. I know that when something isn't right, it's tempting to just do it again and again and again. And you're going to do it, and we're going to make it right by doing it correctly this many times. We've got a time frame we want to put on it, we want to get it done in this much time. We want to allot this much practice time to it. There are all kinds of ways in which we put restrictions or requirements on what we're trying to practice and how we're trying to make it better. And I think that's really just a result of the fact that we want to play well. We want our music to be beautiful, we want it to be correct, we want to do things correctly, we want them to be right. My friend Mary Jane d' Arville always says that harpists are type A personalities. We are the ones who are going to get this. Maybe it's a bit of perfectionism for some of us. Oh, maybe for most of us. But we work hard. Playing the harp is hard. Right. The first day when you get that harp or you just look at it and you strum your finger over the strings, you get this beautiful sound, and that's easy. And you think, wow, this is so wonderful. But as I have often said, that's the last easy day you have as a harpist. After that, you find out how difficult the technique is, how challenging the music can be, and that's when the work starts. But I think with our Type A personality strain, we often get caught up in the things we want to do to make it right and the fact that this is something we're trying to conquer. And someplace early on in the journey, maybe later on in the journey, hard to know. We lose track of the idea that we're here to play music, that it's about playing the music. It's not about just getting those notes right. We want to get the notes right. And I'm not an advocate of being sloppy or playing wrong notes or anything like that. I just want to offer you some alternative ways to try to solve the problem that don't involve just going deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole, trying to that measure. Right. This has probably happened to you in your practice. I know it's happened to me and mine. And I've watched my students start to go there and I try to rescue them from the rabbit hole before they get too far down. But you know what? It's like you're going to take those two measures and you're really going to practice them, and then they don't come together. So you practice them harder, and they're still not coming together, and you practice them harder. And someplace along the line, pretty early on in the process, really, you lose track of the context and of what's really important in those measures. And so we start solving the wrong problem. But because we're so invested in fixing the problem that we see we just work harder at it and we don't have the space, the perspective to be able to step back and say, wait a second, is this really what I'm trying to do? So that's my premise for today. I want to give you some footholds here. Some things where you tools that you can use to regain that perspective say, okay, wait a second, this isn't working. So do I do more of what isn't working, or is there something else I can do? For lots of us, we are not only invested in what we're trying to do to fix it, but we don't know what else to do. So here are some of my ideas about what else you can do instead of just trying to fix it the way you've been trying to fix it, which apparently hasn't been working, or you wouldn't need these skills. Right, okay. So that's not to say that you are caught in one of those challenges right now, but you've probably been there, we all have. And so I want you to have these tools to remember the next time you start to go down that slippery slope and over practice something that isn't necessarily the right thing to do. We want to put a stop to that quickly so that you can regain your footing on that. What did I say a moment ago? Harp Happiness Highway. Okay, so let's start with the easiest one and perhaps a little bit of a controversial one. So here's a line of thought that is pretty common in the harp world and possibly in other instrumentalists worlds. I just am not as familiar with those but the idea is that you can use a piece of music to help elevate a particular technical skill. It'll serve like the same purpose as an etude. And sometimes that works. But often the thing that we're trying to use to elevate our skill is enough beyond us that it ends up just not working either as a piece or as an etude. For instance, let's take a piece like the Little Fountain, or any piece that has those kinds of downward arpeggios in it. I know I use that a lot, but it's a great example because that's almost an etude kind of a piece. It's got all those downward arpeggios. There are two ways to look at this. You can say, well, I need to learn how to play my downward arpeggios faster and more evenly, so I'm going to learn them while I learn the little fountain. Or you can say, I'm going to practice my downward arpeggios, and then I'll be ready to learn the little fountain. If you were a young person coming to me for lessons, we would definitely be working on that skill. Before we got to the little fountain. We'd be working on those downward arpeggios in all different kinds of ways, doing exercises and etudes. And then the reward of that work would be to put it in that beautiful context of the little fountain. Or insert your favorite arpeggio piece. But lots of times we as adults want to see if we can just kind of combine the effort. Because it seems logical that if we need to work on our downward arpeggios, the Little Fountain has a lot of downward arpeggios. And we could use that as our etude. And we could learn the Little fountain at the same time we were learning our. Our arpeggios. That sounds totally sensible. It sounds efficient. It sounds logical. But here's the problem. If you really can't play those downward arpeggios, there's only so much that you're going to be able to learn about them while you're trying to practice the notes in the Little fountain. It would be sort of like signing up to play in a tennis tournament, but you don't have the basic skills to play tennis. It's like, ah, O. And you're trying to learn on the job, as it were. Learn during the game. Well, in that game scenario, you can't learn how to play tennis fast enough to manage the game, and the game is going to be too difficult for you. And this kind of a situation is the Same thing. If your skills are so far behind where the piece requires them to be, then it's going to be too hard to try to learn those skills and learn the notes of the piece at the same time. It's going to take forever. Now, you might be a person that has that kind of tenacity that can say, well, I'm in this for the long haul, and if it means I learn those arpeggios and learn all of little fountain at a.

Kind of a pace, and that it's really, really slow and that that's okay, and I can spend five years at this piece, and if you have that kind of tenacity, that's okay. But in the meantime, you could be playing so many more things. And if you just worked at that downward arpeggio skill and got those arpeggios going, then you could bring that skill to the little fountain notes, and learning the piece would go a lot faster.

So, yeah, there's an element of choice here, isn't there? Do I spend a long time learning the skill and the notes of the piece, or do I just learn the skill first and then I learn the piece? Contrary to what you might think, it's a little counterintuitive. It's actually faster to learn the skill and then learn the piece than it is to try to learn them both together. Now, if your downward arpeggio skill is already pretty okay, it just needs a P to get it where you need it to be for the little fountain, then you're probably okay. And the little fountain, that piece might be enough of a push to get that skill going. But if your downward arpeggios are still that basic and in need of that much work, learning through the piece is going to be pretty hard, and it's going to take a long time. And that's the kind of thing that can feel more frustrating just because it's taking so long. So the lesson I want you to get from this is that sometimes you just need to double down on the skill, not double down on the notes. You know, you might be trying to get those four measures of little fountain and get them correct, when if you just had the skill in place, the notes wouldn't be much of a big deal at all. But trying to get them both working at the same time is a little bit too much. So consider, as you are looking at a piece, as you're thinking about the difficulty you're encountering with it, is there a basic skill that you just need to get better at before that piece or that Part of the piece will actually work. And if so, don't worry quite so much about that part in the piece. Make yourself go and practice the skill separately, that skill in isolation, that skill all by itself. And get that finger thing down so that your fingers know how it works. Then ask your fingers to do that next step, which is to do it with the notes of the piece. Does that make sense? I know that it sort of seems like it's more work, but trust me, it's going to work faster, and it's going to be much less frustrating than having a bunch of a piece come together. And you still can't play that one section of the piece because your fingers aren't up to it. Work on your technique. That's what technique work is for, so you can learn your pieces faster. Okay, so that's our skill or our strategy number one. Double down on the skill, not just on the notes.

Strategy number two is pivot. All right, this is a perspective shift. This is also just a complete strategy shift. Instead of doing the same thing, trying to make it work, what if we had a different approach to the challenge? What if we were looking for something else as a result? And while we were worked on that, the other thing happened. I know, seems a little silly, but let me explain. Think about trying to walk. I mean, actually think about it. Think about when you stand up, you're on your feet, and then you have to lift one leg and move it forward, and how do you lift it, and what muscles are involved, what joints are involved. And then you have to put it down on the ground ahead of you, and then you shift your balance on your foot, and then you have to think about moving the other foot. I mean, imagine if you had to think about all those things every time you wanted to take a step. Wow. We'd never get anywhere, would we? Well, now let's compare that to what we end up doing sometimes in our practice. We've got these two measures that are really challenging. And we're trying to think about where we put our fingers and how our position is, how our technique is. And there needs to be a crescendo. These notes need not to buzz. And we need to be able to get these hands together. And, oh, gosh, maybe there are pedals or levers that we have to do. And there's counting and there's rhythm, and the list goes on, doesn't it? There is a lot to think about. And when we try to think about all those things at once, it can be absolutely petrifying. I mean, it can absolutely bring all our efforts to a stop. In the same way that if you tried to think about everything you had to do to take a step, you'd never get anywhere. Well, this is similar. So rather than focusing on all those things that we're trying to get correct, we could just focus on one of them at a time. And this is a pretty good strategy, saying, okay, this time I'm going to think about technique. This time I'm going to think about dynamics. This time I'm going to think about hands together or whatever that is. But sometimes we need a slightly more drastic approach, and that's why I'm recommending the pivot. What we want to do is find a different approach, find a different thing to focus on entirely for that particular section so that instead of drilling it over and over and over and over or wondering why it's not working when we do that, we're going to ask a whole different question. We're going to consider it from an entirely different point of view. So perhaps instead of trying to just drill it and make it correct, what if, for instance, we took a bigger chunk? You know, add a few measures before and a few measures after, so it was part of a larger context, and we just played through it, didn't worry about wrong notes, maybe even. And I love this as a technique, as you're playing through that and you're trying to get it, you know, sort of closer to tempo and with some dynamics and flow. Drop out one hand when you get to those two measures that don't work, you know, just play the right hand and then bring your left hand back in when you're done with those two measures without stopping, just sort of seamless. And you can actually do it the other way, too, right? Drop out the right hand for a couple measures, bring in, and then bring it back in when you're done with that challenge part. But think about what that part is going to be like in context when it's actually the music. Or you could choose a different way to pivot. Instead of continuing to drill those two measures, let's split them up. Let's put one measure on the section before and one measure on the section after. And then we'll just play it that way and we'll have that nice sort of break in between and see if that allows us to not get stuck there. Or maybe try playing it hands separately with all the expression that you want from that piece. And this, again, might take a slightly larger section than just two measures, but maybe two measures is Enough. But try it hand separately at the right tempo. Even if the rest of your piece isn't there yet, do it hand separately at the right tempo. With all that expression, remember that your goal is the music. And if you never got those two measures exactly correct, would the whole piece still sound like music? Would the stumble in those two measures totally ruin the effect of the rest of the piece? Probably not. It's so important to think about your musical perspective and just not the perspective of these few notes. It's so easy to just get caught up in the fact that these two measures aren't right and we even stop practicing the rest of the piece. Be sure that you're stepping back enough so that you can see that little two measure section for what it really is. Two measures in the midst of maybe 200 measures. Let's not, you know, turn this little tiny blip into a big magilla, right? We're just going to keep it in perspective and we're going to find another way to look at it. So pivot your approach, put it back in context, look at it musically, look at it at tempo, change a little bit if you have to. I mean, truthfully, there's nothing to say that you couldn't just eliminate one part of that, you know, a couple notes in the left hand or whatever it is that might be the stumbling block. You could do that. There are very few circumstances in which every single note is, you know, so important that making a little change would be a deal breaker as far as the music is concerned. Yeah, don't leave out a melody note. That's probably not good. But there are some plenty of other ways that you might be able to just adjust it. So you're going to shift your focus, shift the way you think about that passage, and change your approach, remembering that the music of the entire piece is what you're looking for. So don't be afraid to pivot. But when all else fails, and this is my very favorite of these three strategies, just so you know, skip a step. Okay, what do I mean by skip a step? Well, you know, sometimes we get stuck at, oh gosh, I'm stuck at half tempo and I can't get this any further. I keep moving that metronome up and I just can't do it. Well, in that instance, skip a step might mean, okay, we're not going to take that tempo to the next level, we're going to take it to the one beyond that. We're not going to move it a tiny little bit. We're going to Move it a lot. We're going to skip that in between step. There are other ways to skip a step as well. For instance, you're practicing that first page of the three page piece and it's taken a while to come together. There are a couple things that are still challenging. Well, don't let the fact that you haven't perfected page one stop you from starting page two. If page one is going to take some time to come together, you can go on to the next part and give page one practice time, but give it its time to really sort of marinate while you go on to something else. We're still going to work on page one, but it doesn't mean we have to wait until it's good enough to go on to page two. We get to go on to page two whenever we want. So don't let yourself be held back waiting for this one thing to come together before you do the next one. Skip a step. Okay, page one isn't right yet. But you know what? I'm going to skip right on over to page two and I'm going to learn that one. And in fact, go ahead and learn page three. Read through it regularly, even if you don't have time to practice it so that you know what it's like. This is giving yourself a head start, right? It's skipping a step. Here's another example of skipping a step. A lot of people wait until they've got all the notes right to start thinking about dynamics and expression. And it means that they're spending a lot of time practicing the notes in a way that doesn't really relate to the music at all. Wouldn't it be so much better to skip right to the dynamics and learn the dynamics while you're learning the notes so that you're learning about the musical flow while you're working on the notes?

Another thing that points toward the music that a lot of people would consider skipping a step is, all right, I'm working on my hands separately and I'm not ready to put it hands together yet. That's okay. But I'm still, you know, working on my hands separately, and it's still kind of slow. I would say skip a step and let's get the hands separately working at tempo or as close to that goal tempo as we can, knowing that it's still going to be a challenge to put the hands together. And we're going to need to do that more slowly. But there's no reason to keep the hands separately slower than we need to. We can skip right to the end with that and make them go as much like we want them to go eventually as we can right now. You don't have to wait for that. You can just skip right on ahead and get those working. Even if hands together is still very slow going. The point of skip a step is that you don't have to wait until something is right to do the next thing. And this is one of those ways that music is so different from so many other things. We don't have to have step A complete before we go on to step B or even step C, because step A is going to take a long time to settle in, because we do it fresh every time, right? It's not like we can, you know, put that brush stroke on a painting and say it's done, or, you know, put the picture up on the wall and say, okay, I'm done with it. Now I can go on to the next thing. It's always going to take refreshing. Music is a fresh creation every single time we do it. And it's going to take a while for it to really settle into our bones enough that it becomes pretty reliable from time to time. That takes time. So don't wait for that to happen. While that's happening, go on, skip that step. You don't have to wait for everything to be all lined up before you try to get to the next step. And if I had one big overall piece of advice that is behind all of these three really simple strategies, it's that we want to keep the end goal, the music, in front of us. That if we're just trying to slog through notes, that's not getting us to the music. And if we're spending too long working on that one section and we lose that vision of what the musical context is and of what those two measures mean in the context of the piece, then we're really sabotaging our efforts and we're not using our time very wisely. And that's why a pivot or skipping a step can be so helpful, because it puts us back in the music, gives us a way to get keep connected to the end result that we want. And the more we do that, the easier we find our practice and the easier it will be to make those hard things come together because they will have meaning, not just notes. Now, maybe these ideas today weren't new for you. Maybe they were just, I hope, a helpful reminder not to go down that rabbit hole and get stuck working on something that will come together eventually. When you remember to put it in its proper context. So we talked about doubling down on the skill and not the notes. If that's where you're stuck, or pivoting so that you've got a different approach to what it is you're trying to work on or just skipping a step. It's like, okay, time to move on. We're going to move on and know that the thing that we're still trying to work on is going to get better over time and especially when we are able to bring more musical perspective to what we're doing. So try these out. If you've never tried them, they're so freeing. They're so helpful. So give that a shot. And do remember, it never hurts to get some extra support. That's what teachers are for. And of course, that's what our certified coaches are for. So if you think that some more support would help you get through some of those things and speed you on your way, then please do investigate certified coaching. Our coaches love to work through problems with you. Your harp happiness is why they're there. So if you have some time this summer and you want to make some progress, this is a perfect resource for you. So do check that out. Link is in the show notes or on the website. Now, next week we're talking a little bit about how to listen to yourself and your sound and your playing and how to listen to yourself and others without making damaging comparisons. So that is on next week's podcast. I hope to talk to you then. But in the meantime, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning 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.