Next Level Technique: 3 Myths You Need to Bust - PHH 244

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way? I'm Anne Sullivan and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackled the real challenges harpists struggle with. The sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance and and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear, step by step solutions. The same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity and joy, you're in the right place. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. If you heard last week's podcast, you may remember that this month's podcast episodes are all about growth. Your growth as a harpist and the systems and the skills that that are necessary for that growth. Last week we talked about three key systems that you need to have in place for growth. Now if you missed that podcast, I've put a link to that in the show notes for today's episode. And that episode was called Architect yout Harp playing growth with three key systems. It's episode 243. You can find it on harpmastery.com or I've linked in the show notes for you. So. So that was last week, but this week is all about technique. I know it may sound like a dry as dust topic to some of you. Harpists generally fall into two distinct camps. Those who hate doing technique exercises and those who love them. So if you love your Grossi and your La Riviere or whatever exercise book you use, this podcast is gonna be right up your alley because we're gonna dive into how you can use what you are doing now to get to level of technical proficiency. If you're in the other camp though, one of those who feels like exercises are torture when all you want to do is play pretty pieces, I hear you understand I'm talking to you as a convert. Granted, it was many years ago when I realized finally that exercises weren't just for solving problems, that they were really more like the gas in my harp playing engine. I totally understand just wanting to play music. So what I want you to get from today's podcast episode is that a consistent plan for strengthening your technique will take your playing further faster than just about anything else. And this Plan doesn't have to be all exercises either. We're all about harp happiness here, and that includes when you're practicing your technique. But as we all know, harp playing progress, improvement, upgrading up, leveling, whatever you want to call it. It's not just dependent on your technique and putting those pieces into your practice. It really needs a plan. And I was talking in the last episode about being the architect of your heart plan growth. And I want to invite you into a bigger process that takes that into account. I have a new intensive course that is coming up in February, and it's called the Harpist's Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive. It's a five day, just, you know, a one week, couple hours a day kind of course, the way I've done these intensives before. And it's all about really setting yourself up for the growth that you want, creating the system, creating a plan so that when you sit down at the harp this week and next week and every week for the rest of the year, you know what you're going to do and why. And that applies to your technique, it applies to the music that you're learning, it applies to all those auxiliary musicianship skills that support our playing. So on this intensive, we're going to be creating that plan that's going to take you through the entire year. So if you've been working at a upgrading your practice habit and becoming more consistent with that, I want you to be able to take that practice habit and really create the results that you want from it. Because it's great if you're putting in the practice time, but it's way better if you're putting in the practice time on the right things. It's not just doing the right amount of time every day, whatever that is for you, but it's about spending your energy on the things that are really going to make a difference in your harp playing. And I've been doing a lot of systems organizing in my own playing and practice. I've been working with my Gold Circle students to help direct their playing in a more organized way. And, you know, the beginning of the year is just so energizing that way. Right. January comes along and we're ready for a new start. Well, apparently I've been doing that in a big way and I want to include you in that process. So you can go to the link in the show notes, you'll be able to go to harpmastery.com, go to upcoming events, and you can register for the Harpist's Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive. There are lots of details on the page that talk about what we're going to be covering and how we're going to be doing it. And I'll give you some of the pieces that we're talking about with technique you're going to learn today. But what that course is going to do is show you how to implement it and to actually create the plan for you. So today we're talking big concepts. That's a really hands on workshop course and I am so excited about teaching it and I hope that you join me for that intensive. So you can use the link in the Show Notes or the link@heartmastery.com to read more about the intensive and to register. And I certainly hope you do, because I can't wait to work with all the people on the intensive to create this blueprint that's going to work for you. It's not a one size fits all. It's your blueprint and we're going to work together to create it. So I wanted to be sure that you knew that that was coming up because if you like what you hear today, you're absolutely going to love the detail that we can get into in that intensive. But today we're just talking about one little aspect of what would be your big blueprint, and that's technique. So I titled this podcast episode Next level three myths you need to bust. And that's because I really think that what holds people back in their technical development is how they're thinking about it. It's not so much that these are legendary myths, it's just that these are big misunderstandings that can really slow down your technical growth just because they're not focused on the things that are going to move you forward. So I want to start our discussion today by really talking about those misunderstandings, those myths, and seeing if one of those might be something you're working through. And let's talk about what we can do instead. We're also going to talk about what leveling up your technique really looks like. What would it mean for you? And how will you know if you've actually leveled up? That's a good thing, right? Because we want to know we're making progress. We want to know we're moving ahead. So let's get started with these three myths. Here's the first one. And I know that I am as guilty of this as most of us. There are times when I absolutely subscribe to this idea and I know it's not right. And here it is, the idea that we get enough technique Work just from our music. We don't need to do anything else. This is so tempting to believe. After all, you're playing hard, challenging music. You're having to work on the technical demands of a particular piece. So obviously, it's making your technique move forward, right? Well, yes, your music is going to move that particular skill forward. But if that's all you're working on, your technique is going to have holes in other places. We know we can't work on every single skill every day. But a designed technique, rotation is something that is going to build your technique all around instead of just, okay, well, I'm getting really good at this particular fingering now, or this particular hands together thing, or these big chords or whatever that one thing is that your piece is requiring. Instead of just getting good at that, we want to build your technique all around here. It's not just about the way your fingers move. Technical development is about recognizing patterns. Yes, with your fingers, but also with your eyes. We learn so much by what we see in the music, even if we're just looking at an exercise. And our brains, those wonderful computers that we have in our skulls. Right. Our brains will take the information we've fed them in our technique drills and it will apply in our music. But if all we're learning is situational, I'm learning to play these chords in this piece without looking at all the other things that go into those chords, like the intervals, like, how do we arpeggiate them? Do we play them in different patterns? Those fingers? Even if all we're looking at is that one situation, we're not really moving our technique forward. Right. I think that makes sense. So every time I'm tempted to say, oh, I've done plenty of technique work today because I worked so hard on the technical requirements of that particular piece. I know that I need to go back and, well, if I worked a lot on arpeggios in that piece, maybe I don't have to do arpeggios in my technique work, but I do need to work on my scales. I do need to work on my finger independence. I do need to work on, oh, maybe on my trills or my harmonics. There are so many aspects to heart playing. I don't have to tell you that because, you know. But that's one of those things. We really need to resist thinking that we've already done it in our music. We don't have to spend extra time on techniques. Dangerous path. That's myth number one. Only serious harpists need to practice technique. Well, they certainly do, don't they? If you're a concert harpist. I mean, imagine being a concert harpist. You've got all this music that you need to play all the time, and you need to have your technique sharp enough that the critics are going to know that you're a technical virtuoso. Well, yeah, you need to be practicing technique. And if you're playing at that level, you're probably practicing technique a lot. You probably put as much practice time into technique as many harpists put into their entire practice. So that's certainly true. They need to practice technique. But why shouldn't the rest of us? You know, the idea that because you don't have big concert or performance aspirations doesn't, you know. Well, because I don't want to do that, so I really don't have to practice my technique. That idea doesn't really hold water because you want to play well, whatever it is you're playing, wherever it is you're playing it, even if you're just playing for yourself. You don't want your fingers to have to stumble. You want your technique to be able to respond to what you want it to do and to be the support system for your music. You want to play well, right? Well, that takes technical drill. Darn. You might have thought you were going to get away with it, but just because you don't want to play concerts, you still want to play music. And that's how we do it. We do it with our technique. Your technique not only allows you to play more smoothly and to play more musically and to play with more expression, but it allows you to learn pieces faster because you're not struggling with the technical challenges that come up in each piece. So guess what? If you're putting in enough time on your technique work and working at it, developing it all along, you won't even need your pieces to provide technique work for you, because you're going to zoom through them. Well, maybe not zoom all the way through them, but you're going to have fewer technical challenges as you go. So, yes, whether you're planning to play in Carnegie hall or just for the cat, yes, you need to practice technique. As I mentioned at the. Really, at the outset of this podcast, your technique is the gas for your harp playing engine. It's what allows you to go. I mean, you can have all kinds of energy for playing the music and you know what you want to learn, but if your fingers can't handle it, it's not going to work. Your technique needs to be there. So technique Practice has nothing to do with what you intend to do with your harp playing or where you want to play or who you want to play for. It's just about playing the harp. That's it. Myth number three. This is one that will apply to some of you and not so much to others. This is the idea that technique practice is boring. But I want to throw in the opposite as the same kind of difficulty here, the same kind of misunderstanding. Because for every harpist who says technique practice is boring and I just can't do it, there is a harpist who says, oh, I could spend all day just doing exercises. And neither one is right. Yeah, technique practice doesn't have to be boring. It shouldn't be just about putting in the time and playing exercises. Because your technique practice is that time when you get to focus on the important aspects of harp playing that your technique needs to support. It needs to support your sound, it needs to support relaxed playing. You need to be able to be agile and flexible and facile as you move around the strings. It's all about speed. It's all about special techniques. And when you choose a focus for your technique practice, like, okay, today I'm just going to work on mechanics, making sure that all my fingers are working properly, where today I'm going to work on tone. And the focus of all my technique practice is going to be on tone, where it's going to be on fundamental skills like scales and arpeggios, where it's going to be on playing faster. When you choose a focus for your technique practice, then you are absolutely working on what you need to do to upgrade your technique so that you can learn music faster, play music better. Technique practice becomes interesting when you actually focus on it. I remember quite well when I learned this lesson. I was 16. I had been playing the harp for a long time already. I'd been playing the harp for eight years at that point. And I hated the technique exercises. I just. I couldn't see the point of them. And it was just so difficult for me to try to drag myself through the exercises that my teacher assigned to me each week. I was not a fan, to put it mildly. But when it came time for me to absolutely straighten out my technique, when my teacher more or less read me the riot act and said, okay, this summer, you need to straighten out your technique, because if you want to play the music you want to play, your technique needs to be at a different level entirely. So when she read me that riot act, I knew that I had to do something differently. And I was taking some harp instruction over the summer, and it was definitely a technique, focus, plan. And my job was to get through these exercises, to get through these etudes and hours of practice just spent making sure that my fingers were doing what they were supposed to do. Now I had an extra challenge that my teacher hadn't figured out how to address because her fingers were really great and naturally strong for the harp. And I am naturally double jointed and my fingers were all over the place. And if this was not something that she could straighten out, particularly since I was so resistant to doing the work that needed to be done. But that summer I dropped the resistance and I realized that, okay, this technique work had to happen. And all of a sudden I had a very clear focus for all the work I needed to do. And technique took on a completely different aspect for me. It became about that summer anyway, really working on my mechanics and watching how every finger worked, the curve of every knuckle, closing every finger after I played it. Now, if that sounds like water torture to you, I can tell you in total truth that it would have sounded like water torture to me just the, you know, a couple months before that summer. But it was necessary for me to make that change. And so all of a sudden, technique work became interesting. And I never looked back. Once I discovered that it's the technique work that allows me the time and the concentration to think about my sound or to think about my relaxation or to think about what my fingers do when they cross under or cross over in a scale. That's the time that I have to really dig into that and make sure that my fingers are serving me the way I want them to. That was such a revelation to me. And as I said once, that, you know, switch flipped, that was it. And technique work became interesting. But let's look at the other side of the coin here. If you're the harpist who just loves their technique work and you could spend all day at it, I want you to remember that the point of all that technical work is so that you can play music. So please remember to balance the practice that you do. Yes, we need technique work, but our technique is there to serve the music. And what a shame if we spend all this time doing the technique work without putting it to its very best and highest use of playing the music that we love and playing it well. That's what it's for and that's what I want you to remember. So, you know, if you're working on your technique a lot, well, that's terrific. And you can can work on those drills all you want, but don't let that stop there, because that's not what it's for. Ultimately, it's to support the music that you want to play. So remember that too. So those are our three myths. And I know that they're the kind of thing that all traps, really, that all of us fall into at one point or another. And they are again, that you think you get enough technique work from your music. No. Technique requires more all around work than that and more focused work, more intentional work that only serious harpists need to practice technique. Well, frankly, if you want to play the harp, that makes you a serious harpist. Whether you're playing a big important recital or you're just playing for your neighbor, it doesn't matter. Even if you're just playing for yourself, you want to be able to play well, right? And technique practice is not boring. If you do it right, it's a focused way to improve everything about your music. So that's what technique practice is for. Let's talk about leveling up. What might leveling up look like? What a good question and kind of fun to imagine. Of course, I can't tell you exactly what leveling up is going to look like for you, at least not here on the podcast, because everybody's different. Where you are in your harp playing is not where I am in mine. It's not where your neighbor harpist is in their playing. It's all, all different for each one of us. And so leveling up needs to take into account where you are now, where you'd like to be, what you want to play, and of course your practice habit, which is going to be the driver of your technique. Right? If you're doing your technique work, that's great. But it's obviously going to be different if you're spending five minutes a day at it or if you're spending an hour a day at it. So leveling up is going to be different, but in general, it means we're going to rethink our approach to what our technique does for us and how we study it. I mean, give a moment here and think about what you would need to do that's different from what you've been doing. What you've been doing has gotten you here, but that doesn't mean it's going to get you there. That's that old saying, right? What got you here won't get you there. And that's as true with our harp technique as with anything else. The exercises that we did the way we did them that developed our technique to this point, if we keep doing them that way, we're just going to stay right where we are. We need to change something up. That's where leveling up is going to come from. Now, it could mean that you move to a different set of exercises easy enough. It could be that you stick with the same exercises, but. But you do them differently. Maybe it's time to change up the tempo. Maybe it's time to try them in different keys. Maybe it's time to do them hands together. Or maybe it's time to look at a more challenging technique book. That's always an interesting option because while every exercise book that I know of is going to cover a lot of the same things, each one covers them just a little bit differently. And the way you were doing your scales in this book aren't going to be the way you were doing your scales in that book. And so it's going to give you a little bit different experience and a little bit of a different challenge. And that is a way to definitely level up. But think about how you're going to manage that level up, right? Are you going to need new etudes? Are you going to use some simple drills like scales and arpeggios in addition to your exercises? By the way, I love plain old scales and arpeggios and chords as exercises, but I don't like them as my only exercises because I want things that are just a little bit more challenging. If I sit down and just play scales, that's going to be great. But there's a lot, a lot more to heart playing than just scales, no matter how twisty we make them. So I like to work in a variety of patterns. So you can use exercises, drills, etudes, a combination of all those. But this is where you get to plan and then figure out how you're going to fit that plan into your week. What are you going to do for your technique? That's how you're going to rethink your approach, and that's how you're going to really intentionally move your technique to the next level. But of course, there's one more really important thing you need to do, because when you're rethinking your approach to your technique and you're looking to level up, you need to know what leveling up is going to look like when you get there. So establish a marker. Choose how you are going to measure your growth. Are you going to choose an etude that serves as your sort of, you know, end of level test? You know, like a little completion etude. Like, okay, well, when I think I've completed my plan and leveled up at the end of that, I'm going to be able to play this etude or maybe this particular piece. And this might be a really good place to put a review piece, one of the more challenging pieces that you've learned. Maybe you haven't played it in a little while and you're going to try leveling up your technique and then bringing back that review piece and seeing how it goes. Now that can be a great way to say, wow, look at this. I really can play better than I did when I was learning this piece the first time. You don't have to choose one of these things to measure your growth. You can sort of take it as understood that having done all this work, your technique is going to be better. And you might notice it just from the kinds of pieces that you're able to learn and how much faster you're able to learn them. But it can be really fun to be to pick something that's going to be that, that little bit of a test to just demonstrate your new level of skills. And I wouldn't be at all averse to saying, well, you know, choose a reward for yourself. Maybe that's the day you go, I don't know, get a manicure or, you know, do something fun for yourself. Say, ah, I put in all this hard work, it's time to get a massage. Do something that is going to reward yourself for the work that you've done. That's always a fun thing. A little bit of a celebration can fuel us to continue and to get to that next level. Because there's always another one, isn't there? So let's take a moment and just review what we've talked about today. We talked about the three myths or misunderstandings around technique. You get enough technique work from your music. You really don't. Only serious harpists need to practice technique. Well, we're all serious harpists. Or looked at another way, we all need to practice technique and technique. Practice is boring. Well, not when you apply the focus. That's really going to bring power and intention to your technique practice. We talked about how your technique is the gas for your harp playing engine. It's what allows you to do what you want to do. And then we talked briefly about leveling up what that might look like for you. You get to figure that out. Where are you now and where do you want to go? And then rethink your approach to the technique work you've been doing. What do you need to do differently in order to get to where you want to go so you can refresh your approach? Level up that demand, level up the skill, figure out how you're going to do that and when. Give yourself a timeline and a plan. And lastly, choose a way to measure if you've leveled up to celebrate what you've done and to really reap the rewards of your hard work. All that is so important. But I'd like you also to think about this. As you've been listening today, you may have discovered that your technique is really sort of the problem, but not the whole problem. The bigger problem is that you've outgrown the way you're working on it. So many of us do our technique work all the time, but we don't know how to find that right technical focus for the kind of harpist that we want to become. What you're working on next, that next level, so many of us get stuck there. And of course, it's because it's really hard to see your own next level clearly from inside your own practice room. So if you're ready to stop guessing which technical skills actually deserve your attention and how to work on them, that's what the Harpist's Breakthrough Blueprint is going to help you with. Because inside that course, I'm helping you design your personal curriculum, one that aligns your technique with your repertoire and your musical goals, so your practice at the harp finally starts to transfer into the confidence and consistency and beautiful music that you want it to. So if you're looking for that kind of clarity and you'd like a little help with it, I. I'd love to work with you on that, too. And that's what we'll be doing inside the Harpist's Breakthrough Blueprint. And I urge you to check out that link and register for that intensive. Now, next week on the podcast, we're talking about next level musicianship. And I'm going to be describing and explaining what I call the sensory triangle. This is something I came up with a number of years ago as a really great way to explain how we learn music, how all our senses are involved, and how we need to develop them, the various skills that need to come together to make our musicianship really rock solid. So we're talking about the sensory triangle next week on the podcast, and please don't miss that. I think you're going to find it really, really enlightening. So that's next week. In the meantime, remember, every day is a day, you can add more Harp Happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend. Subscribe for your weekly Harp Happiness Boost and check out harpmastery.com or the harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.