Make Your Warm-up the Prelude to Your Practice - PHH 175

But that's where the temptation is for.

Me because I can get so involved in the music I'm using for a warmup that it takes, or can take a significant portion of my practice time. And every once in a while I will give in to that temptation because it's just too strong. I love this music, but that's what makes it really not an ideal warm up.

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 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.

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Welcome to the show. If I had to give the shortest possible explanation of what a daily harp warmup is, it would be this. Your warm up is the prelude to your practice. Why a prelude? Well, a prelude is most often defined as a short piece of music intended to be an introduction to a longer one. It sometimes uses musical themes or ideas which appear in the larger work. But the prelude's most important function is is to set the scene to set the mood or the tone for the piece that follows. That's how I like to think about a warmup. It sets the scene for your practice. It allows for a transition from your quite likely hectic daily non harp life to a more calm and focused musical space. My warm up, which I will tell you about later in the podcast, is a moment I truly treasure in my practice. It's also a temptation moment, which I will explain later too. I've talked about warm ups on the podcast before. Episode 98 was a mini masterclass on warm ups. Episode 120 was about three important skills that your warm up could help you strengthen, and I've linked to those episodes in the show notes so that you can find them easily. I've also also linked to a blog post from the archives that's on not your warm up, but your cool down so you can decide on some strategies for leaving your practice with intention and focus. But today I want to talk about the warmups I recommend most often to my students and why I think they're so good. These may be warmups that you already use and and if that's the case, I'll give you some tips on how I think you can use them to your best advantage. If you have another warmup that you like. These tips will help you get more out of that warm up too. And as I mentioned, I will also tell you what I do to warm up. I'll admit it doesn't fit the conventional mold of warmups, but it does fit the main purposes that I believe are most important for any warmup. And that's really the point of this episode today. To show you a different way to look at your warm up so that your prelude to your practice can save you time, build your skills, and be one of your favorite parts of your practice too. We've got all kinds of links in the show notes today for me to tell you about. I did mention we've got those related podcast episodes on Warm ups with a Focus and make youe Warm Up a Triple and the archived blog post called Cool Down. Best five Minutes of Practice. So those are there for you. This is also just about your last chance to register for our webinar that's coming up on Wednesday. That's two days from the day when this podcast episode goes live. It's a Learn It Tonight webinar. We're going to be working on the arrangement, my arrangement of the Flower Duet from the opera by Leo delibe, the opera Lakme. It's a very familiar piece. If you haven't heard it and you're not sure what this piece sounds like, go head over to our YouTube channel and take a listen. It's just a beautiful piece of music. You're going to be looking for the Flower Duet video. So that's posted over there.

The webinar. We're going to be learning that piece together. So we've got the copy of the arrangement that you'll need. And you can either purchase that at half price, so it's $4, or if you're a My Heart Mastery member, it's already in your library so you can look for that. And there's also a free practice guide that comes with the webinar, talking about the whole system that we are going to be using to try to learn this piece in just one night. So it's also a system, by the way, that you can apply to any piece that you want to learn more quickly. And I think you'll find it really helpful, perhaps even revolutionary for you. So that's coming up and you need to register quickly because that webinar is coming up on Wednesday, just in two days from now. We have one more new thing happening at Harp Mastery that I simply must tell you about. Our Harp Mastery app has finally gone live. Now at the moment, it's only available for iPhone and iPad users, Android users, and I am an Android user myself, if you are an Android user, we're working on it. Google is making us jump through a couple extra hoops just for security's sake. And you know, we're all, all about security. So it'll just be a few more weeks before we can get that Android app to you. But in the meantime, if you are an iPhone or iPad user, you can go right over to the Apple App Store and search for Harp Mastery and you will find the app. It's so exciting. It's still kind of basic. We're working on it, but you'll be able to see what's going on at Heart Mastery because we'll post all the happenings there for you. We're still, still busy uploading and getting those things on the app because as I said, this is brand new. The app, of course, itself is free. We have some other offerings that you'll be able to take advantage of on the app. And you, if you are a Hub member, a member of the Heart Mastery Hub, you can access the Hub directly from the app. You don't have to go to the separate place. Plus, if you have ever bought courses from Harp Mastery and you have them in your library, you can access your entire library of courses right from the app. So it's really one stop shopping there, One stop library, one stop community, everything right there in the Harp Mastery app. So I would be so excited if you head over to the App Store and download it. As I said, it is a work in progress, but we've got it up there and I want you to be able to use it. So go ahead and take care of that. And Android users, I promise we're working on it. Believe me, it's the only time in my life I'd wished that I had an iPhone, because I can't even test the iPhone app because I've got an Android. So it's coming, I promise. So that's the exciting stuff that's happening at Heart Mastery. And now that I've told you all those goodies, I think it's time to get back to the prelude to your practice. Talking about warmups. It's a little bit funny that this is the third podcast episode that I've done on warm ups. And really, I think that I personally didn't even think about warm ups until fairly recently. I was never much of one for warming up. You know, get me to my practice and I'll start practicing. Or when I was a kid, for sure, I didn't, you know, just put me on the, on the Harp bench and then I'll kind of mess around for a while. Which actually was its own version of a warm up. And that, of course, has played into the kind of warm up that I like to do now. Warm ups are important. I think most people understand that a warm up is important as a transition time, as that prelude to your practice that helps you set your mental mood for what you want to do. And I think most of us understand that a warm up is important to get your fingers moving. This was something that was not nearly as important when I was younger as it is now. My fingers just take a little longer to remember what it is they're supposed to do.

But I do think that sometimes we Ask more of our warm up than it really needs to provide for us. Yes, it needs to be that focus, transition moment. But I think moment is one of the words I want to focus on here. A warmup doesn't need to be long. In fact, I think a warmup needs to be short. And I want to clarify some things here. One of them is that if you're a Heart Mastery Hub member, you know that one of the things I do almost every week is a live Monday warmup. And this warmup usually lasts for 45 minutes. But most of that 45 minutes is not truly a warmup. We spend just a few minutes actually warming up. And then the rest of that is an exploratory drill exercise, or something that explores another aspect of technique or musicianship or another aspect of heart playing. Just a few minutes of that warmup is actually a warmup, because we don't need more than that. We want this to be a transition moment, a prelude, not the entire piece. So we really want this to be short. I don't want you to take up your whole practice time warming up and then realizing that you don't have any time left. For instance, I think your warmup doesn't need to be measured in loads of minutes. I mean, if you're only going to do an hour of practice, your warmup needs to be certainly less than five minutes. If you're going to do less than an hour of practice, maybe only a half an hour, no more than three minutes. I don't want you spending more than 10% of your practice time on your warmup. Your warm up is not your technique drill. Right. Your technique practice comes later. Your technique warmup is part of your warmup. Yes, but it can be short. So I just wanted to start with that. That what I mean by warmup is really a moment, just something short. It's easy to get lost in that sort of slow, relaxed kind of thing that we all want to do for our warmups. Because certainly you don't want to just plunge right in. The point of the warmup is to get your fingers moving gently and calmly and correctly. So this brings me to the second purpose of your warmup. If part of it is that mental transition, the physical transition is part of that, right? So we want your warmup to be slower, gentler, and we want to use this as a. As an opportunity to look at our technique, to look at our mechanics, how our fingers move, to think about our posture. Do that posture check. Think about how your fingers move when they are moving at Their best. And to practice relaxation, maybe to listen to your tone. But this is about slow and it's about relaxed. And it's very easy to let that warm up just get a little bit too long, because this can be very absorbing and very calming. But I need you to remember to cut it a little bit shorter because just a little bit of that work is enough to set you up to do your practice. This is not your focused technique work. That'll come later. So what should a good warmup include? That posture check, Some slow finger motion, maybe with some attention to tone or dynamics, if you like that. But basically you're working at mechanics. You can do some very slow technique drills, but just a little bit of them. And you can do some varying speed drills to help your fingers not only get moving slowly, but to pick up the pace a little bit. I think those three things, your basic posture and mechanics, your review of fundamentals, and by those, I mean scales, arpeggios, chords, intervals, that kind of thing. And you don't have to do all of them every day. And then getting your fingers moving slowly and a little bit faster. I think those are the three things that a warm up should provide for you. And it needs to provide them in a short period of time. So when I'm looking for a warm up to recommend to my students, when they say, you know, what should I be using when I'm looking for a warm up to recommend, those are the things I'm looking for. They need to provide a way to work on your posture and your mechanics, your finger mechanics, slowly. They need to help you with those fundamentals of harp technique, the scales, arpeggios, chords, intervals, sort of things. And, and they need to be working your fingers at a variety of speeds. If they fit within those parameters, then they need to fit that fairly short, you know, three minute rule, perhaps, so that you can get it done fairly quickly and get to your practice. You know that three to five minute rule, right? No more than three minutes, especially if you're doing just maybe a half an hour of practice. And it certainly can be less. Less is okay, that's all right. And no more than five minutes if you're going to be practicing for an hour. And those, as I said, these are outside time frames. You can do this in less time. There's one other thing that distinguishes a warm up from technique work, from, you know, the drills, the exercises, the etudes, that kind of thing. And that is that I believe that a warmup can be a regular thing. In other words, you could be Doing the same warmup all the time or most of the time or a lot of the time. Or you could be doing the same warmup for, you know, a while and then change it up to something else. But there's value in having what we might call a regular warmup that's different from technique work. If you're doing the same technique drills or all the time, that doesn't grow your technique, that just keeps it at the same level. It's not an extension, a growth factor for your technique. But doing the same warmup all the time is helpful for those things that are specific to a warmup. It can actually become a trigger for your focus that you know, as soon as you sit down to do this warmup, you, your mind is engaged with your practice so that it can help clear your mind of all the other stuff that might be weighing you down. It can build your confidence because you have something that you know is going to set you up for your practice and it just gets you into your practice faster. If it's a warm up that you're doing all the time, I definitely don't recommend doing the same technique drills all the time. As I said, that doesn't help you grow. Doing the same warmup all the time can get you faster focus and can get you off to a better start more often in your practice. So a regular warmup could be something that you want to consider. And so I'm going to give you my three best recommendations, or at least my most frequent recommendations right now. And then I'll tell you what I do, which isn't any one of those. So let's get started. This first warm up isn't one you have to purchase anywhere. It doesn't come in a book. In fact, it doesn't even have a name. So I'm going to give it one. I will call it your basic basics warm up. How's that? It's just plain old straight up scales, intervals, chords and arpeggios. That's it. It'll get you through those basic drills. There you go. There's requirement one, right? It's getting you through those basic drills. And we'll be working them slowly so that you can check your fingers. And then you'll be building up speed. So it's going to hit all three of the things we want. The slow mechanics, the fundamentals, practice and the speed. And it doesn't have to take any longer than you want it to take. So this is what I would do. I would say pick a key and it's Even better if you don't pick the same key every day. But pick a key and then do a very slow one octave scale. I mean slow as in note, note and note. The scale will give you a chance to have every finger move and it'll give you an opportunity to do that cross under crossover that comes with a scale. You're going to go up and you're going to go down. I would do that slow one octave scale in each hand alone to start with. Then I would do it hands together. This is your really basic slow. I'm going to check every finger. Check in with your posture while you do this and just make sure that you're breathing, you're relaxed.

You'Re getting into your practice. Then play a multiple octave scale. It can be just a simple two octave scale. I would probably do this hands together. Or even better, go as far as you can on your harp. Use the whole range of your harp if you can. It's good to play elsewhere besides just the middle strings, right? So use the whole range of your harp if you can. And you can add just a little bit of speed here as well. You don't have to go as slowly as you did with the 1 octave scale. Then do some intervals. Play some thirds with one and two, play some six with one and three. Play a couple octaves with one and four and get those intervals working once again. You can do these slowly and, and think about your finger mechanics and be relaxed. Then play the tonic, the sub dominant and tonic chords. These are the 1, 4, 5, 1 chords in that key. You can play them in three fingers. You can play them with four fingers. You can play them in different inversions. You can play them hands separately, hands together, whatever you like. But you're going to play that really basic progression. This is kind of fun because those chords help you review your music theory just a little bit and help you just get all those fingers moving and playing together, right. You can do the chords flat or rolled, doesn't matter. And then I would end this warm up with arpeggios, hand over hand. Arpeggios are just kind of fun. And I would go up and down the harp with arpeggios. You can do just that tonic arpeggio, that I chord of whatever key you're in. Or you could do that entire progression, a I chord, then a IV chord, then a V chord, then, and do those arpeggios around the harp. By the time you are done with those things, you should be all ready to practice again. You can do the arpeggios starting slowly and going faster if you like, building the speed. But we've covered all those basic things, haven't we? We've talked about posture and slow work to just check your fingers. We've done the fundamentals. This is all about fundamental scales, intervals, chords, arpeggios. And. And we've built speed, all those things. And your warmup. This warmup could take you two minutes max. Very, very simple. And if you create it as a habit for yourself, this is what you always do. It's going to go very quickly and it's going to get you into your practice mindset even faster. One extra benefit of this particular warm up is that it's very portable. You don't need music once you've got your routine down for scales and your intervals and your chords and your arpeggios, you can do this anywhere, anytime, without worrying about whether or not you have your warm up with you. Now, the other warmups, if you have them memorized, that's great. But this is even easier for that. So this is a particular reason that I like a warm up like this for my students who like to use the Deborah Free you book. And I'm talking about her book, Harp Exercises for Agility and Speed. It's a great book with great exercises. And it's terrific for harps of all sizes and all kinds too. And it's at a very usable level. You don't have to be an advanced player to play this. The final chapter in her book, chapter 14, is a theme and variations. And I love this as a warm up. It's very attractive. It's based on a very simple chord progression that repeats itself, starting in the theme and then in each of the subsequent variations. And it's very pretty. That's always nice to have a warm up that you just really attach to. And I think you can with this. It covers all the fundamentals. It's got intervals, it's got scales, it's got chords, it's got arpeggios. So all those fundamentals are. And certainly it starts out quite slowly with just very simple techniques where you're, you know, just working a single note at a time. And you can play this and should play it quite slowly. So those first, the theme, the first few variations are at a nice slow, getting your fingers moving kind of a tempo. And then the spit, the speed, and then the speed builds as you go along with the quarter notes turning into eighth notes, turning into 16th notes. And so it just builds its way up there. Now you don't have to be metronomically rigid with this so that if you are playing the quarter note variations and they're nice and slow and everything feels good, and the eighth notes still feel good at that same tempo, that's great. But if the 16th notes feel too fast for you, feel free to, you know, bring that tempo back to a point where you really feel like it's a beneficial warmup to you. You still want to get your fingers moving faster as you go through the warmup, but you don't have to be absolutely correct about maintaining the same tempo all the way through, the way you would want to if you were doing this, perhaps in performance. Also a nice feature of this warmup, it. It does make a lovely little performance piece. If you need something to add to your repertoire, it's a great little background music thing. Nobody will know that you're using it as a warmup. It's just a really attractive piece. So this is that final chapter in the Deborah Frio book, Exercises for Agility and Speed. It's a theme in variations makes a great warmup. I'm also a huge fan of the leveled warm ups in the back of Yolanda Kandanasis book on playing the harp. Those level one, two and three warm ups meet all my personal requirements that I've told you about today. For a warm up, they have all the fundamentals, chords, scales, arpeggios, intervals, all right in those warm ups, but they're done in a level appropriate way. So level one is more beginner's warmup and deals with those fundamentals in a simple way that's really appropriate for somebody who's just in an earlier stage of harp playing. By the way, don't be afraid to start with a level one warm up. If you haven't done her warmups before, start with a level one anyway. And once you have a handle on those skills, then move to the intermediate level two warmup and you'll see how it builds. And then when level 2 becomes old hat for you, if you want to move on to the level three, you can do that too. That's more advanced. So not only do they handle the fundamental skills that we want, the scales, the arpeggios, the intervals, the chords in a level appropriate way, but the warm ups themselves are sort of short, medium and long. So the beginner warm up is shorter, the advanced warm up. The level three warm up is the longest of the batch, so it handles it that way too. Also, you'll find that they deal with a variety of speeds and she Makes the point in the text for the warmups to tell you, don't worry about playing them fast. She gives you a range of metronome markings and then pretty much tells you that you, you know, go ahead and ignore it. That the point of a warm up is to play slowly and you don't have to play them fast. The warm ups themselves, if you're counting them at a steady pace, it will give you that variety of speed that we're looking. So that's built right into it. And of course, when you're starting slowly, that's your opportunity to check your finger mechanics, to make sure that everything is working properly, to check your breathing and your posture. This is also very important. And you'll find more information on posture and finger mechanics in other portions of her book as well. She's very detailed about that and very conscientious about how every harpist needs to be very aware of their physical health and strength and that they're building the right habits there. So these are the level one, two and three warm ups. These are the kind of warm ups that if you memorize them, you can play them anywhere. You can play them anytime and like the free you, they sound attractive. So that you could make this that first piece in your background music set if that's what you're looking for. And people will think, oh, isn't that nice? So, you know, if you have it memorized, it's even better because then you can play it anywhere. It's a great idea to have one of these on tap so that you can warm up your fingers and start your gig at the same time. Not a bad idea. I love these warm ups. The fingering is well done and she's so careful about giving you ways to place and ways to practice these. And I think that if you haven't tried them, you'll really enjoy them. Don't be afraid, as I said before, to start with a level warmup, even if you're a more advanced player, go ahead and start with it and just see what that one's like. Give that a couple of days, then move on and find that warmup that's appropriate for your own level. Once again, this is from the book On Playing the Harp by Yolanda Kondanasis. So those three are the warm ups I recommend to my students most often the basic basics warm up of just the scales, intervals, chords and arpeggios, or the theme and variations from for you book or the leveled warm ups from Yolanda Khantanasis book.

But those aren't generally what I do on occasion I will do those. But my personal favorite warm up is anything by Bach. I know Bach didn't write for harp and that's part of what makes it a challenge, but Bach's music really speaks to me. And the that things thing about it is that just about anything that's been transcribed or that you could play from a keyboard score that was written by Bach is a great finger exercise and makes a great warm up for me. I find so much in his music. I'm so engaged by the complexity and just the elegance of what he does that it is an intelligence, an instant draw for my attention and it is actually a real treat for me. So I like some box chorales for playing chords or reading score, reading from score, just, or just note reading, practice. I like the two or three part inventions for fingerwork, the preludes, some fugues occasionally, and I use these for just technical warm ups. I'm not sitting there to play them, although sometimes that's a part of it, and I'll tell you that in a second. But just to start slowly, think about my posture, my breathing, my finger mechanics. If I'm doing a chorale, I will start and play those chords nice and slowly. Watch my raising, watch my closing, listen to my sound, think about my breathing. If I'm working on something with more notes, I'll be playing those notes slowly to warm up my mechanics, to make sure my fingers are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. And then I'll build speed into it. Whether I'm working on one of the preludes or inventions or a chorale, I'll put more speed, more intention into my finger, work that way so that I've got all those ingredients.

And I'm playing some of my favorite music. Or if I'm not playing it, I'm at least working through it. And it's getting into my brain.

But that's where the temptation is for.

Me, because I can get so involved in the music I'm using for a warm up that it takes or can take a significant portion of my practice time. And every once in a while I will give in to that temptation because it's just too strong. I love this music, but that's what makes it really not an ideal warmup because you don't want to be spending all your practice time on a warm up. So I do try to set myself a limit, work on a measure or two and then save playing through the piece, perhaps as a treat for myself at the end of my practice, so that Every once in a while, I get to actually play the stuff that I'm working on. But just to be able to have a little bit of Bach for me at the beginning of my practice is something so special and something I really look forward to. So that's my own particular warmup. Once again, I am pretty careful to make sure that I'm doing it as my posture mechanics check. Make sure my technique is working exactly the way I want. And it's got plenty of scales, plenty of chords, not so many arpeggios, mostly in the Bachelor. I'll catch up with those another time. But it's got plenty of twisty finger work that makes sure that my fingers are really moving. And of course, I can pick up the speed as I go. So it's got those components. The component, you know, the danger zone for me is in the length I've got to really curb myself in and be pretty firm with myself to say, okay, time to stop and do those other things that you need to practice. But still, I can't resist the Bach as a warmup. You may have a piece that works like that for you, that is your warmup, and it's a piece that you particularly love, and that's what you want to do. That's great, but let's make sure that it fits. First of all, our time frame. Remember that your warmup is the prelude to your practice, not the main event. So be sure to keep it within bounds. And it needs to meet those other requirements as well so that you can use it to check your posture, breathe, check your finger motion and mechanics that you're working through those fundamentals of technique, at least some of them scales, chords, arpeggios, intervals. And that you have a way to build up some speed so that you're not only playing slowly in your warmup, but you prepare your fingers to play faster as well. If it meets those requirements, at least most of the way, I think it's a valid thing to use as a warmup, especially if is something that you love. After all, why shouldn't you love your warmup?

So, enough about warmups for this week. Next week on the podcast, I'm going to be talking about the focus areas that I talk about in my Kaleidoscope practice book and in the Harpist Playbook, which is the companion workbook to that. We're going to be talking about the focus areas because I really want to talk a little bit about how they're important in your playing and maybe you some different perspectives on how you can really think about those in your practice, slightly different ones than I talk about in the Kaleidoscope practice book. So we'll be talking about those focus areas of detail, expression, continuity, control and connection next week on the podcast. Once again, be sure if you are an iPhone or iPad user, check out our new app in the App Store. I'd love to have you download it and start using it as a resource to access all your harp mastery materials to join the calls that we have in the Hub to participate in the discussion in the Hub. And we'll, as I said, we'll be offering new things in the app as well. Uh, we're just getting started, so give us a little bit of time. But we're working on it. So join us there in the app and don't forget to register for our webinar coming up this Wednesday, the Learn It Tonight Webinar. If you can't attend live, that's fine because we will send out a replay, but you need to be registered to get the replay. So please do remember to click that link and register so we can share that information with you. I'm looking forward to talking with you again next week right here on the podcast. 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 into 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.