Masterclass: The Tempo Pyramid - PHH 089

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more Harp Happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, the although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there, I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show.

Today's episode is another in our series of masterclasses, our podcast at the Harp Workshops, where you can follow along with me as we do a deep dive into a vital aspect of technique or musicianship. In this masterclass, we'll be working on my Tempo Pyramid. Over the years, I've had lots of requests for reviewing my system for working a piece or a passage so that it actually gets up to tempo. This system is what I call the Tempo Pyramid, and although the concept is fairly simple, it will definitely help you to try it out step by step with me. I won't just walk you through the pyramid, but I'll give you some of my bonus tips that will make it even simpler and faster and faster is our whole whole focus today. Getting the whole piece faster and closer to tempo, making that one difficult passage as fast of the rest, as fast as the rest of the piece, or letting your fingers move faster and with more agility and security. So it's a lot to do in one podcast episode, so we need to get started. By the way, in our Show Notes, there is a link to a PDF of the Tempo Pyramid that is free for you to download. If you don't see the Show Notes in your podcast app, you can find them on the podcast page@harpmastery.com just look for episode 89, scroll down the page and you'll see the show notes. One more thing. If you're listening to this while you're running or driving in the car, keep on listening. You'll be able to follow along and get a good understanding of the Tempo Pyramid concepts. Then you can come back to this episode later when you're at your harp and play along with me now. I mentioned the show notes, so you know, in the show notes for every episode you'll also find a link to a blog post from the Heart Mastery archives that relates to our podcast topic as well as a link to whatever is currently happening in the Heart Mastery world. Now for today's episode. The related blog post is about creasing increasing your finger agility with something that I call the pronking approach. Oh, you'll have to read about it. But we but we also have a link to a brand new five day intensive called five Days to Freedom. Now I announced this intensive of last week at the Creating Heart Freedom webinar and the registrations have already started.

If you haven't seen any of the emails or you weren't on the webinar, I want to tell you just a little bit about this five day live intensive. We start on February 6th. Actually we have a Freedom launch meetup ahead of the course which is on Wednesday, February 1st, but we start on Monday, February 6th and we're live for five days, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We start each of those days in the intensive with a a 30 minute finger freedom training where we'll work through some drills and training things that'll go excellently with the Tempo pyramid from today's podcast actually too. So we'll be doing some of those trainings. We do one of those again on Friday, but then Monday we have we follow that up with a workshop on freedom in your practice. And it's going to be talking about trading what doesn't work in your practice and what keeps you stuck doing endless repetitions, trading that in for some new practice protocols. So we're talking about what you can do instead to free up your practice. Then on Tuesday's workshop after the finger freedom training, we're talking about how to learn more like a child. Being able to learn with the freedom of the child and the wisdom of an adult and how to combine those. I'll teach you my baby steps giant steps system so that you have a way to actually make progress faster, to learn music faster and to free yourself to play more music.

Then Wednesday's workshop is a very special one. I'm not going to give you too many spoiler hints about this one, but it's but we're calling that the test track process. Then Thursday of the intensive, that's your day to implement some of the information and to just give your mind a rest. And then Friday we come back with another finger training and a two hour group coaching session using the test track process. And so we'll be working on that. It's going to be lots of fun. Our last intensive was a ton of fun and extremely helpful. Plus. Plus, this intensive will be held in our new Heart Mastery Hub community on a special page that we're calling the Freedom Forum. And so with this one particular.

Webpage in our community, this one particular circle it's called you'll the intensive. Participants will be able to chat and discuss and have the. Have the forum, plus all the calls and PDFs, and everything's all linked right there so that everything is in one very easy to access place. So it's going to be a really powerful intensive and I'd love to have you join us. It's a lot of learning, a lot of material, a lot of great resources to take away with you from this intensive. And it's only $47, so it really is kind of a bargain. That is, it's a bargain. If you feel like working with me for four days, it's intensive, so I'll be teaching the whole thing and the calls will be live, but of course, I' the recordings will be there for you too. So you can find out more about the intensive by going to the Show Notes that I was just talking about or by going to harpmastery.com and looking under upcoming events, you will see it there as well. So if you haven't registered yet.

I urge you to do it because it's coming up soon and it'll be really, really fun. So that's the intensive. Let's start getting to the harp and getting our tempo pyramid underway. Let me start by explaining what the tempo pyramid is and why it's helpful. All right. We all have pieces of music that when we learn them, we learn them slowly. They're complicated. We want to get the right fingering, we want to make sure that our fingers are working properly. We want to get the right notes and the right levers or pedals. So all of those details force us to take them very slowly. Probably there's some hands separately, time before we get to hands together. But eventually there comes that point where you know that you want to speed the music up. You know that there's a goal tempo, maybe there's a tempo printed on the music. Maybe there's just a speed that you want to be able to play the music at, and you're not anywhere near it yet, so you have to speed it up. The problem with this is that we know that, you know, we can work with the metronome. We can go up notch by notch. But the process seems so long and is so unrewarding. And it is a long process if that's how you try to do it. But the tempo pyramid helps you move through that whole process faster. It helps you not just sort of keep inching into the water one half of a toenail at a time, but really gets you to speed up the music. Now, there are some things you have to be aware of. I'll give you the whole system, but remember that as you're speeding up music in a shorter time frame, you're going to make mistakes. And I need you to buy into the idea right now that those mistakes are part of the process. They're okay. Just because there's some sloppiness that you encounter as you speed up the piece doesn't mean it's going to stay sloppy. That's just part of the learning thing. It's just kind of like, you know, the first time you teach a child to tie their own shoes. I don't know, do shoes tie anymore? So Velcro's a wonderful thing, isn't it? But, you know, you teach a child to tie their shoes, and those first couple knots don't look anything like they're supposed to look. But as the child gets better, the knots and the bows and start looking exactly right. And that's the thing here, too. As you start to speed up, it's not going to be pretty, but it will be. So we just need to have a little bit of patience with the process. So as long as you understand that up front that you're going to find the tempo pyramid incredibly helpful, because it's a system, a system for speeding something up and working through it in a very organized kind of fashion. And the tempo pyramid works like this. It bridges the gap between where you are now, tempo wise, and where you want to be. And it provides little benchmarks. It provides little sort of halfway points that help you get there, like little stepping stones that are more than just that next little tiny number on the metronome. We're going to take slightly bigger steps than that so that we can make progress a little bit more quickly. It also allows you to do fewer repetitions so that you know when you're trying to speed something up or trying to keep it. Keep it perfect or trying to, you know, just get it to go a little faster. It takes a lot of repetitions. And the tempo pyramid itself, you can do the entire pyramid in just 10 repetitions. Because it's not the hundred times through today that's going to make the progress for you. It's the 10 times through today and the 10 times through tomorrow and the 10 times through for the next, any number of days. That's what's going to create the progress and the security that you need. So that's what the process does for you. Most importantly, I think the tempo pyramid shows you what is possible, and it makes that gap between where you are and where you want to be seem not so daunting. It puts that really fast tempo in the realm of the possible. Or at least it does after you've done this a few times and learned to trust the process. Because the beginning of the process of speeding anything up is messy. But I already got you to acknowledge that. Right. So we're ready to move on. What do you need to do this? Well, the system I'm going to give you. And of course, there's that free PDF that you'll find in the show notes and your metronome. The metronome is essential for this. Now, if you've never worked with a metronome before or you're not comfortable doing it, then start with. Actually, the drill that we're going to start with today is a great one to help you learn to match the metronome, because that's what's important here. And remember, the metronome is about matching. And we're not using the metronome to be a tyrant. That's going to make you play faster and faster and faster. We're using it to help you step up in an organized way.

It's not the boss of you. It's just helping you. It's a tool, and it's helping you get where you want to go. So the metronome and the system, that's all you need. Let me talk you through the initial, the. The outline of all the steps, and then we'll give it a try. The tempo pyramid process, or system, has five different metronome speeds that you're going to work at. The first one is the one I call your comfy tempo. And that's the speed where you can play the music and get everything in the right place, and it feels comfortable. It may be a very slow tempo at the moment, and that's okay. We want it to be comfy. It's your comfy tempo, and there's nothing wrong with it. We're going to use that as a baseline.

And then the next level up from that, we're going to call your medium tempo. And it's about 25% faster than your comfy tempo. Now, notice that this is not just one metronome notch. If your metronome has notches, it's not the next number for sure. It's a little bit more than that. Not hugely more, but a little bit more. So we have the medium tempo that's about 25% faster than comfy. Then we've got your fast tempo, and that's about 10 or 15% faster than your medium tempo. This is the one you can think of as your goal tempo. Okay, I'll come back to that in a moment. Then we're going to have sort of the optional boost. It's a little bonus tempo that's just about 5 or 10% faster than your fast tempo. Just to build in a little bit of headroom so that you're not only playing at your goal tempo, but you know, you can go a little bit faster if you had to. And then there's your halfway down tempo, which is about halfway between medium and comfy. It's not all the way down to comfy, but it's pretty darn comfy. And believe me, after you've been playing at your fast tempo and your optional bonus burst, tempo halfway down feels very, very comfy. Okay, so the idea here is that your fast tempo could be your goal tempo. You know, if the. If that page says 120 and that's where you want to get it, well, that's your goal tempo. But check out these percentages. One caveat here. The percentages I'm giving you are extremely approximate. You know, if your metronome has notches like mine does, and, you know, it comes out to 75, and your metronome only has 72 or 76, choose one. You don't have to be very, you know, precise about these percentages, but they're a really good guideline. Okay, so those percentages play out this way, though. If your goal tempo is 120, then working backward down the percentages, your medium tempo is about 85% of that tempo, and your comfy tempo is about 70% of that tempo. So, you know, if your goal tempo is. Oh, let's. Let's say your goal tempo is. Is. I don't know, is what, 88. That's kind of a nice common number. Right? If it's sort of an 88ish kind of tempo, then your comfy tempo is going to be 60. So if you're not comfortable playing at 60 yet, if 60 is not your comfy tempo, you're comfortable playing at 50, then you're not going to be able to work up to your goal tempo yet.

Do you see where the power of this system is because of these percentages? It lets you know how far you need to go, what that real distance is like from where you are now with your comfy tempo to where your goal tempo is.

And it means that if your comfy tempo right now is 50, your fast tempo for right now is only going to be 72 or 76.

So that if the piece needs to go faster than that, you'll have to work the tempo pyramid where you are right now, knowing that we need to move your comfy tempo up so that we can move your goal tempo up so you don't have to work from 50 to 120. You only have to work from 50 to 72. And then after a week of that, we might move up and your comfy tempo might be 56 or it might even be 60. And if it's 60, then your fast tempo is going to be 88 and we're working faster. So do you see how the tempo pyramid might work? I know it's not going to make sense until we work through it a little bit. And once you see how these numbers work on the, on the PDF, it will become clear to you because I've given you some sort of sample metronome plans here just to sort of give you an idea. Once again, the percentages don't need to be precise, but they will be helpful where they are. So what we're going to do right now is take a very simple exercise and work through the tempo pyramid just to give you the experience of doing it. And we'll do that together. So why don't you get on over to your harp, I'll get on over to mine and we'll get this started. Okay, so I'm at my harp and my harp is set in C major. And what we're going to do, our drill to work on our tempo pyramid is simply a two octave hand over hand scale. So with our left hand starting on the C below middle C, we'll do four notes. C, D, E and F. Then right hand G, A, B, C, left hand D, E, F, G, right hand, A, B, C, D. And then we'll turn around and go back down. So just a very simple two octave scale, alternating hands, left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand. All right, so it's a nice easy thing. You don't have to worry about notes. So it's great for practicing the tempo pyramid and practicing working with the metronome Now, I'm going to arbitrarily pick a tempo, and I have. I'm going to set my metronome at 50. So 50 is what we're going to call our comfy tempo. And we're going to play in eighth notes, and we'll play our two octave scale at 50. So it'll be one and two and ready? Go. So up.

All right. Now, at that tempo, I can keep everything nice and even. My fingers feel good. Everything feels just right, and it's totally in control. But I want to go a little bit faster. I want to be able to speed this up. So what I'm going to do is move my metronome up to the next tempo, which would be the medium tempo, about 25% faster. In this case, we're going to move it up to about 66. So here's 66.

All right, I noticed that difference already. You can see why this is more effective than just one notch at a time. Now, having played my comfy tempo once, we're going to play the medium tempo, same scale. Ready, Go.

Oh, I feel the change right away.

And we do this tempo twice. So we'll do it again.

It's okay if it's not perfect. That's okay. What we want to do is be comfortable enough with this that we can move on. And so moving on, we're going to do. All right, fast tempo. This is about 5 to 10 or, well, 10 to 15% faster than our medium tempo. So we're going to use 72 for this.

And this would be our goal tempo. Now, if that's not your exact goal, that's okay. But that's as far as we're really going to be able to work with something that we're not comfortable with at this speed. Okay, so 72.

Ready, go.

Now, what's left? Well, our optional burst tempo. Now, we would play our fast tempo twice, but for right now, we're going to go on. We'll do that bonus burst tempo, which is about 5 to 10% faster than that. We're going to do it. Go up two notches here to 80. Okay, 80. Ready? Ready. Go.

Okay. Having played our bonus burst tempo. Phew. Right hard work. We're going to go back down to our medium tempo. Our medium tempo, if you remember, was 66. Wow. 66. That's a ways down. So let's try our medium tempo, and we'll do that. Ready? Go.

Wow. Gosh. Feels a lot slower, doesn't it?

Feels so much slower and easier than our fast Tempo and our optional burst tempo that we don't need to go all the way back down to our comfy tempo. We can just go back down to what I call a halfway tempo. It's a little bit slower than our medium speed, but not as slow as our comfy tempo. So I'm going to go down to 58 here. If you remember, we started at 50. This is my halfway tempo. Ready? Go.

Wow, this feels positively.

Sleepy.

Okay, so that is how the tempo pyramid works. But think about what you just did. You started at 50, worked it up to 80, and then back to 58, and 58 felt comfy. 58 is faster than 50. I mean, duh. But that's where we worked it back to. You've come a long way in only a few repetitions. Now, my recommendation is that you play your comfy tempo once, your medium tempo twice, your fast tempo twice, your bonus tempo once, your medium tempo twice, and your halfway down tempo once. That's nine repetitions. But in nine repetitions, you've made some progress, and that's what the tempo pyramid will do for you. Now, the scale that we were using for the. For our little tempo pyramid example is, is fairly easy. Now, maybe it's faster than you're used to playing, and that's fine. But it's certainly not as complicated as a regular piece. So I'd like to give you some ideas for how to use this. You can use the tempo pyramid to help speed up each hand separately. You can use this for hands separately practice and hands together practice.

But the trick to the tempo pyramid is that one of the two tempos, either the comfy tempo or the goal tempo, has to be something that you're very, very particular about, right? So that if your comfy tempo for anything, whether it's a passage, an exercise, a piece, whatever, if the comfy tempo is in a certain place, you're only going to be able to go so much faster to have as your fast tempo. So you might have the fast tempo be a temporary goal tempo. But that's not a bad thing, right? Because once you've worked through the tempo pyramid, your final repetition of that passage isn't even back all the way down to your comfy tempo, it's back down to your halfway down tempo. So you can see that after a few days of this, maybe a week, you're going to be able to, or maybe not, you're going to be able to move your comfy tempo up to that halfway down tempo, right? So that you can move the entire pyramid up as you go. And it may happen much faster. I mean, I said a couple of days or a week, but it might happen in just a few days. Because that's how this works. It works you through a much bigger range of tempos, right? But in a short time frame, in one practice session. And it gives you that, you know, okay, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing next. And it lets you move up.

As I said before, if you want to find out how close you are to your goal tempo, use your little calculator on your phone and make your goal tempo your fast tempo and then back that out. If your fast tempo, you know, whatever that that goal tempo is, you will count that as 100%. Your comfy tempo needs to be about 70% of that.

And if 70% isn't your comfy tempo yet, well, then you have just a little bit of work to do.

But there's more you can do with this. You can, and I would encourage you to do this, work the tempo pyramid upside down so that instead of starting slowly, moving up to the fast tempo at the top and then back down, you start with that fast tempo up at the top and work your way down to your comfy tempo. Why would you want to do this? Well, because it really gives you a taste of what that goal tempo, what that fast tempo feels like to start at, so that you're, you know, you're sort of jumping into the deep end instead of wading in. It's a different feeling. And it's a very useful technique to include with the regular upside right tempo pyramid. So in that upside down pyramid, what you're going to do is play your fast tempo twice, your medium tempo twice, then down to your comfy tempo once, which will feel like such a relief, then up to your halfway tempo once, and finish at your medium tempo twice.

So you get to finish in a pretty relaxed way. But once again, you're not, you know, you're not giving yourself that much of a break because you're starting with that fast tempo. It's really, really great to be able to do that. If you've never used the tempo pyramid before, I would suggest starting with some simple exercises like the scale that we started with today or maybe any other exercise that you like to do and just see what that's like. If you want to speed up an exercise, it's a great way to do it. And the nice thing about exercises is that you get to work on them hands separately, pretty much, which is a great way to really concentrate on your technique while you're working on the tempo pyramid too, and learning to play faster. So that's a great way to do it. If you want to speed up an entire piece, I would suggest that you work on it section by section and don't work on a longer section than you feel like you can really control. Right. If it's a four bar section to start with, that's okay. If it's an eight bar section, that's great. If you can do an entire page, terrific. But don't, you know, don't over tax yourself. Let yourself tempo pyramid a portion of the piece and then move on to another portion. And if you don't get through the whole piece in one practice session, you know, and you don't get through the tempo pyramid in the whole piece, well then the next day come back and just review at a nice comfy to medium tempo what you worked on the day before. And tempo pyramid some of the piece that you didn't get to.

But you might find that the only part of a piece you really need to work on, the tempo pyramid, is on a part that's really challenging. You know, the rest of the piece is working fine at 80, but these two measures are still at 60. That's a great time to get the tempo pyramid going for those tricky measures. And then you can practice fitting them in with the tempo pyramid too. You can make sure that they connect to the measures before and the measures after and work all that with the tempo pyramid.

Now, how long the tempo pyramid process will take you to get from where you are now to your goal tempo depends on a number of things. It depends on how much music you're trying to speed up, whether it's two measures or an entire piece. Right. And how complicated that music is for you. It also has to do with your basic level of technical facility relative to the rest of, you know, relative to the piece. I mean, if you're finding that this entire piece is technically challenging for you, then speeding it up to that goal tempo may take a little bit longer.

When you are finally able to work at the tempo pyramid so that your goal tempo is that fast tempo when you finally get there, then give yourself some time, several weeks at least, to start to feel comfortable with that tempo. You can also, once you get to your goal tempo, you can move that tempo pyramid up just a couple, couple more metronome notches just once again to build in some extra security so that you know that when you're playing the piece at that goal tempo, that's not the very fastest you can play it, but that you've actually played it a little faster.

And of course, with the tempo pyramid, as with everything in music, you need to exercise your patience, not just your fingers. It's a very reliable process and it's a lot speedier than the way we normally speed things up. But do be patient with it and just realize that, you know, like everything else, if you work it and trust the process, it's going to deliver results. So I think you'll enjoy it. Remember to be patient when the. The fast tempo brings a lot of mistakes and messiness. Don't shy away from the messiness. Just go through it once. That's why we only have you play through that bonus tempo once. And if you can only stand your fast tempo once, then just do that once and do your medium tempo a little bit more.

But don't cut the top off of the pyramid just because it's hard. Let yourself dig into the hard. You don't have to spend much time there, but you have to try it out.

So this is the easiest way to do it. Know that after you've played that fast tempo, you're going to come right back and play at a nice, much slower, much comfier tempo again. So, you know, you'll, you'll be able to calm it all down and clean it all up. Just push through the messiness and know that it's going to be there. That's part of the process too. All right, so that is the tempo pyramid. I hope you enjoyed this masterclass on the tempo pyramid. Remember, if you want a PDF so that you can have all the, all those numbers and tempos that we talked about written down for you, you'll find the link to a free PDF in the show notes for this episode. While you're there, register for that Five Days to Freedom Intensive. It's start soon and it's gonna be a ton of fun and you're gonna get so much out of it, I promise. So do sign up for the intensive while you're there. Next week on the podcast, we're gonna be talking about how to practice when you don't absolutely have to. You know, maybe like me, you're sort of feeling the winter blahs at the moment. Although I promise you, if you sign up for the intensive, you'll get out of those winter blahs quickly. But you know, sometimes we just don't feel like practicing. And you know what? That's okay. But on next week's podcast, I'll tell you how to make sure that you feel okay about it, what to do when you just don't feel like practicing, what you can do instead, and how to get yourself back on track when you're ready to so that's next week on the podcast. In the meantime, until we talk, then remember every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thank you 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.