Plan Your Practice Like a Pro - #019

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, I, 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 today's show. This is the final episode in our goal setting for harpist series. I hope this has been helpful to you. One of the things that is so difficult to do is to figure out what kind of harp goals you want and how to achieve them. And I think we've dealt with a lot of different aspects of that in this series to today. We're going to deal with the final piece of that, which is actually the practice that you do that makes those dreams and goals happen. It's called plan your practice like a pro. And we're going to be talking about what professional harpists do to plan their practice, whether they know they're planning it or not. And we'll talk about how you could do the same thing to get the same, same kind of results to make those goals really happen. Now, I know that a lot of professional harpists will tell you, and I probably would have done this once upon a time too, will tell you that they don't really plan their practice. They just know what they have to do and they do it. But that's not really very helpful. It's kind of like when you ask your grandmother what that secret family recipe is, what she does to make that special dish, exact taste, exactly the way it does year after year. And she'll probably tell you, well, I just, you know, I do this, I throw in a little bit of this, I do this, I do this. And she isn't even aware perhaps of exactly what she does because she just does it. You, you need the recipe, right? You want to know what to get out and how much of what to use. So we're going to be talking a little bit more and getting a little bit detailed than just the, well, you know, this is what I do kind of thing. Today we're going to talk about exactly what the ingredients are that make practice so effective and allow those professional harpists to get so much done. So we'll be talking about that. And I have one other special opportunity that I wanted to remind you about, especially if one of your harp goals involves a learning more about music theory and chord theory in particular, we are having a free webinar. It's actually a workshop type webinar. Coming up on October 6th, you can join us. It's a webinar called Two Step Chord Theory for Harpists. And it's my special system for teaching you chord theory in a way that directly applies to your harp playing. And in fact, we will be doing this like a workshop so you can be at your harp and follow along with what I do. I'll be sending you after the webinar, a PDF with all the drills that we work on at the webinar. So you'll be able to take those and use them in your practice to help you understand chords. Not just to understand them though, but to also use that knowledge to help you play them better, recognize them better, all that good stuff. So it's a very simple system, but it's really going to, I think, connect some of the dots for you. So if, as I said, one of your goals is to work on chord theory, this is going to be a great webinar for you. And if you haven't tried this method of practicing chords, I think you'll find it very helpful whether learning chord theory is one of your goals or not. So please join us for that webinar on October 6th. You will find the link to join us in the show notes. It's free and don't worry if you can't be there live. Of course there will be a replay, but the replay is available to everyone who registers. But you have to register. So please hop over to the website and to the link in the show notes. We'll get you there and you can join us and we'll get going on that chord theory. But for right now, it's time to talk about planning your practice like a pro. Now, there's no one definition of a professional harpist. There are classical concert soloists, there are orchestral musicians. There are folk musicians. There are jazz harpists and blues, blues harpists, pop harpists, those who play for weddings or background music, those who play in orchestras or chamber music or in other kinds of groups. There are all kinds of professional harpists and the term itself doesn't mean a whole lot necessarily in terms of what a harpist plays or where they play or who they play for. But I think we can agree that the one identifier that is common among all these different kinds of harpists is that professional harpists work for a paycheck. Now, that may sound, oh, I don't know, a little bit uncreative or inartistic or mundane, but it's a fact that these harpists have chosen the, that the harp is a part of their livelihood, a part of their vocation, not just an avocation. The paycheck defines how they plan their practice. You see, the paycheck brings with it a set of expectations. It brings with it the fact that there are deadlines, right? There are things that must be done by a certain date. I mean, it's no good if your piece is ready the week after the concert. It just has to be done time. And most often that concert is followed quickly by another performance of maybe the same kind, maybe a totally different kind. So there's a continuing change of repertoire, perhaps even a change of types of music. I know I loved being a freelance harpist. I loved being able to play a wonderful orchestra concert one day, a chamber music concert a few days later, and a musical the week after that. You know, I loved the change of styles of music, the change of places, the change of colleagues. I loved the experience of being open to all of those things and doing them practically on top of each other. So the professional harpist.

Is dependent not just on the paycheck for their living, but they're dependent on the skills that enable them to meet the expectations of whoever is hiring them. Right? They're expecting that the harpist they hire will do whatever that particular job of work demands. And so the professional harpist is bound by that paycheck to meet those expectations and to meet the deadlines. So you can see that their practice is going to come from a very different place from the way many other harpists think about their practice. There's no open ended, oh, I'm just going to work on it till it gets better. No, sorry, it just has to be done. There's no. Well, you know, it's probably okay, but maybe I should put it on the back burner for a while and bring it back later. No, it just has to be done and it has to be good enough.

So those particular necessities that working for a paycheck demands are things that are going to bring a very different focus to their practice. There is also another aspect that I want you to consider.

A professional harpist often needs to or chooses to pursue a wealth of experiences, as I did in my freelance career. I loved the different types of work that I did and I needed them in order to support myself. I needed to find those paychecks. So I was pursuing not just one one kind of playing, but a lot of different kinds of playing, which meant that I needed to stay flexible and adaptable and I needed to keep my skills very sharp. There's no room there for complacency or stagnation or just skipping too many days of practice. You have to keep things in shape for what you need or expect to need to do. So once again, a different focus to practice.

So.

What can we draw from this? That's where I want to go today. All right. If this is the life of a professional harpist in one way or another, and granted there are lots of different manifestations of professional harping, let's decide what is key and reverse engineer it so that we can see what their practice looks like. And bring those key elements back into your own practice. Why would you want to do this? Well, I think it's important because when you're looking at your practice, you may find that it lacks focus or that it just doesn't have a consistent direction, or that it's just not getting you where you want to go fast enough.

And the key thing about the practice of a professional harpist is that it must meet those goals. It must have focus. It does have built in deadlines that give it direction.

And because of those deadlines, it's got to produce results in a specific amount of time. And usually it's a pretty short time frame. So these, I think, are really good reasons to look at what professional harpists do and think about bringing those elements into your own practice. Do you have to create pressure for yourself? No, absolutely not. But thinking about.

Compressing the time frame that you work in, or sharpening the focus that you work with on a particular piece, or giving yourself that time frame to work is really key, I believe.

And I think we start by learning to prioritize what matters. That's the key element in any professional harpist practice plan.

They know what needs to be done right now and how to do it. So prioritizing what matters comes in a few different levels. The first one is pretty obvious and that's prioritizing what is immediate, what has a deadline. You know, if you have to play that piece in one week, you know, that's what you better be working on to be sure that it is ready in one week. So prioritizing the immediate is a great place to start. Now, if you don't have something that's immediate, we're going to have to create that sense for it, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But let's look at some of the other ways. In particular, two other ways that professional harpists prioritize. As I said, they start by prioritizing the immediate. What has a deadline, what must be done now. Then they prioritize just what needs to be done. There is a level at which something is good enough.

This is very difficult for most people to accept that the music they play doesn't have to be perfect.

But in truth, there is a point where something is good enough, and there is rarely a point where something will be consistently perfect. And in fact, the distance from good enough to perfect is. First of all, it's sort of an infinite journey, but it's not worth the effort. For most professional harpists in most circumstances, there are always exceptions. But if you're playing something this week and something else three days later.

Then you have to figure out exactly how much work you need to do, how much time you have to work, and what is going to be necessary to get that piece to the point where you can meet those expectations. I talked about a moment ago, go meeting those expectations. What exactly is required? Because you don't have time or energy to do too much work. You need to do enough.

So that the piece or whatever it is you're doing is good enough. You find evidence of this in funny places sometimes. I remember as a college student, my teacher gave me a copy of an orchestra part that I was going to learn, and she gave me the copy that she worked from. And one of the things she said that struck me so forcibly was, I know that's what the notes say on the page, but this is how I play it. I think there was some left hand that she always left out, and she did some doubling with her right hand. And she said, the thing is that conductors want to hear this particular part, and if I'm doing that other thing with my left hand, I can't get that right hand part to come across. And so what's important in that part is that we hear this. So this is why I leave out those notes and I do it this particular way. And it makes total sense because we're looking for the result.

We're not looking for playing every note on the page. And over the course of my own Career. I came to find out that there are plenty of things that just need to be adapted or edited or cut down or enhanced so that the result that is desired is achieved, so that the expectations are met whether or not we're playing exactly what is on the page. And sometimes adaptations need to be made because the timeline for learning something is so short.

So there are times when good enough is when it is just good enough. Good enough is about making sure that you're choosing your battles carefully so that you can deliver.

Your harp playing the way people expect to hear it.

Even if it is requiring something that feels like or appears to be, or could be viewed as a compromise.

So you need to know when good enough is good enough.

It's really important because it allows you to go on to the next thing. We don't get stuck working on the same thing until it becomes really, really good, really, really solid, beyond the point that is necessary.

We get to move on to the next thing. A very different viewpoint.

Than a lot of harpists and a lot of students adapt. But it is absolutely necessary in the professional world. That is not to say that we lower our standards, but we know when too much work is not going to pay off.

When playing all the notes is not going to give us the result that we want, particularly in light of the time we would have to spend doing it. That's just one example. But there are other ways that this plays into the whole. The whole prioritization idea. So as we look at your own practice, we need to decide where those finish lines are, both for deadlines and for when something is good enough for whatever that particular deadline is. So I think those priorities are really important.

And then I think that there's another level, and that is that professional harpists know how to keep their skills sharp. They know which skills are essential, and they know how to keep them sharp. And certainly that's all about technique. Technique is an important part of that. And. And maintaining the technique is one thing, but allowing for growth in their technique is also a part of that.

Maintaining a repertoire is part of that. Whatever the repertoire that they need is, whatever that requires. If, if you're an orchestral harpist, then there are some things that you always keep in your fingers, excerpts that, you know, come up from time to time. You'll see this every year, and it's always difficult and takes a lot of work. So it's always, always in your fingers and always something that re that you review. If you're a restaurant harpist, you know that there are standards that people Always request, whether you choose to play them every set or not, you know that it's going to be a continual request. And so that needs to stay in your fingers. I mean, perhaps it's something as easy as Happy Birthday. And in fact, if you only play at nursing homes, Happy Birthday probably needs to be in your repertoire. That needs to be something that, you know, you don't want to be embarrassed if somebody comes up and says, oh, it's so and so's birthday. Could you play that for us? No. You need to be ready to play Happy Birthday. That's part of meeting expectations too, isn't it? So having that repertoire, that core repertoire, the important things, it could just be music that you love. But having that ready, keeping that sharp and in your fingers is part of that. And allowing for growth in your repertoire is as well. Any professional harpist wants to be learning new pieces, and balancing the new pieces that they want to learn with everything else that they have to do right now is part of the practice plan.

Now, you will talk to, you can talk to just about any professional harpist, and they will tell you that they haven't had time to get to this or to get to that or to get to the other thing in their practice. And that is likely true from day to day. Practice time can be very limited, but figuring out how to get to all of those things regularly and consistently is what allows them to continue. No professional harpist is going to stay away from reviewing music for very long or not get to their technique practice for very long, because this is what they need in order to fulfill their obligations to meet those expectations that I'm talking about. So let's categorize what things the professional harpists do in their practice in a very general way. And then let's extrapolate from there. Let's reverse engineer, and let's look at how this can affect your practice. Here are the three things that I think we need to focus on to do that. Reverse engineering. I think we need to look for a way to serve the immediate. Professional harpists always need to meet the immediate requirements of their next performances, right? So there's an immediacy, an urgency, if you will, a timeliness that is built into their practice. And as I mentioned before, I think that timeliness gives a focus and a direction and a reason to their practice. And I think that's key. The second thing is a maintenance requirement where they're maintaining their skills, their technique, they're maintaining their repertoire, they're keeping in their fingers what they need to be able to do their job.

And the third thing is growth. Adding new repertoire, stretching their technical skills, maybe learning a new genre of something, maybe, you know, just learning a new piece.

So immediacy, maintenance, and growth, those are the three elements that would go into any professional harpist practice plan. Whether they're aware of planning or not, those are the things that they're doing to make sure that they can meet those expectations. So how do we take that and bring that down to a day to day plan that any harpist can use? There's the question. Perhaps the most critical switch that you might consider for your own practice is the idea of your practice time. First of all, if we want to learn from the pros, we know that your practice needs to be consistent, right? You can't practice once a week and expect good results. Practice is a habit, and so it needs to be consistent and regular and at least a few days a week. But what I really want to talk about is your practice time, because you don't need hours of practice. Those professional harpists don't get hours of practice. And in fact, the students that go to music schools, they're practicing hours and hours every day. And part of the reason for that is because they're not going to get the time to do it later. So there's a lot of learning that happens at that level. But you don't have to be a student at music school, and you don't have to spend those hours every day. What you do have to do, I think, is use your practice time or approach your practice time the same way you would approach a budget. Now the, the idea being that if you limit the amount of time you have to practice, while at the same time being very clear about what you have to get done, you are more likely to get it done.

Now there's, you know, there's a sort of a critical mass when it comes to practice time. You don't want to be practicing just 10 minutes a day. If you can get a half an hour a day, that's great. But don't set yourself out two hours. That's going to be unfocused time. If this is a new concept to you, the better thing to do is to shorten your practice time to say, 25 minutes. And then let's look at how much you can actually get done in that 25 minutes. And then when you've learned to use that time really efficiently and really effectively, more practice time won't be spent in just sort of mindless exploration or in undirected Unfocused practice. I mean, we've all been there. It's easy to sort of go down that wormhole and you think, well, I'm just going to do this one more time and one more time more time and one more time. And before you realize it, you've used an hour on four measures that you wanted to get right, and you haven't done a lot of what else is on your practice agenda. Right? So what I'm going to suggest is that you limit your practice time and then fit everything into it. Your best friend here is going to be a timer.

So that you know exactly how much time you're going to plan to spend on any one thing in your practice. Set that timer, and then when the timer goes off, you move on to the next thing. We want to get through all of these things in order to use your practice like a professional would use their practice. Let's see how that works. It'll take some experimentation, but you can do that. Don't overestimate the time that you have. Don't think, oh, well, let's see. I can get an hour worth of practice in every day. If really, you know that it's probably going to be just a half an hour on four days a week. Be realistic, because that's how much you're going to get in. So better to work within those time constraints. The timer will also keep you from falling into one of the two big practice traps. One would be what I call the practice quicksand, which I just described. When you're working on one thing and on one, and you just keep working on that one and working on that one and you never get to anything else. The other practice trap would be more like Shiny object syndrome, where you've got so much music and you want to learn it all. And so rather than doing your focused practice on what you think you should be working on, you pick up a new piece and a new piece and a new piece, and you never actually get to the things that you felt like you really wanted to do to help you move forward. So a good strategy for that. I mean, certainly the timer strategy works, but look at those new pieces like your practice dessert, right? Save those for the reward for doing the rest of your practice, but don't start on those. You're going to have to do your meat and potatoes practice first. So what does that meat and potatoes practice look like? Well, I think it needs to include technical work, and your technical work needs to be done consistently. It needs to include room for growth so that Your technique is not just staying the same, but is improving, which means that you're going to be switching up exercises. You're going to be working toward the next skill level, whether that's speed or agility or anything else. You're going to be moving your technique forward. So a variety of exercises or etudes or drills or whatever you like going to be helpful here. But I think you need to have a technical component. That doesn't mean you have to do it first in your practice, but I think it needs to be there the same as it would be for any professional harpist. The second major component in your practice.

Has to do with the maintenance that a professional harpist would do. We're maintaining your technique, but we need to also maintain your repertoire. So having done your technical work, we're going to get in there and go through some of the key pieces that you want to keep in your fingers. But do that review work regularly. Do it daily. Do it. You don't have to play every piece every day. Set out a little rotation for yourself, but make sure that you're playing the pieces that you've learned. Nobody wants to be in the position of having been asked to play. And then you realize that, gosh, I don't have anything ready. Maybe just have two or three pieces that you play for yourself every week. You go through those few pieces so that you know that they're fresh and they're ready to play. That's a great professional strategy that anybody, any harvest can use to keep their tools sharp, right? To keep their repertoire in their fingers. Then we get to the growth phase, right? We've done the maintenance and now we're going to go on to the growth. This is where you can learn something new. But if you think about how we've already used your practice time.

This growth phase may be a lot smaller portion of your practice time than you're used to. You might be used to spending most of your time learning new pieces.

I'd like that to be no more than a third of your practice time, at least to start with. See what happens when you spend the first, the bulk of your practice time on maintaining and growing your technical skills and maintaining your repertoire. Then we can start growing your repertoire by adding something new. And that's a wonderful way to use a limited amount of practice time. Now, if you have.

More practice time available to you and you want to use more practice time, then add something new. Do more in that growth phase, right? But don't skip the other two, because they are important.

So in a Compressed practice time. You're going to have created that sense of immediacy.

We won't have given you a deadline like a performance to work from, but we've constricted the amount of time available for your practice. And there, in so doing, we have introduced an element of urgency or an element of need or a timeline, if not a deadline, however you want to look at it. If we cut your practice time down just a little bit and make a very clear plan for what we want to do with that time, your practice time is going to be more focused, it's going to be more directed, it's going to have a lot more energy, and it's going to give you better results. This is a big win. So we've constricted your practice time to create the immediacy. Then we're working on technical maintenance and growth, repertoire maintenance, and then growth as well with new pieces.

So there is a wonderful plan to start with, to start organizing your practice like a pro. Now, if you're using your practice to meet specific goals, this gets even better because the goals themselves are going to direct the technical work. What you need to meet that particular goal. Maybe one of your goals is repertoire growth. So it's going to be right in there. So your goal will fit very nicely and will help direct the work you do in your practice time. Your practice time will just meet it in these three specific ways. So let's do a quick recap. How do professionals plan their practice? Well, first of all, they know that there's a set of expectations that they need to meet, deadlines they need to meet. So they must prioritize what matters. They prioritize the immediate. They prioritize the maintenance of their skills, both their technique and their repertoire. They understand that good enough is good enough, and they know when to let go and move on to the next thing.

They also allow for growth where they are learning new things, playing new things, trying new things, stretching their technique, enlarging their repertoire, all those good things, and they do it in that compressed amount of practice time. So how can you take these things and using the techniques, like the timer, for instance, or the dessert technique, right, These things that we talked about and pull them into your own practice. I think they're easy to do. I think it takes a little bit of planning up front, but there's so much energy that's generated by practicing this way that I think you'll find it very easy to continue. I think you'll find it gets you results very quickly, although it may feel a little bit breathless at first. It may feel just really, really different, but maybe different isn't such a bad thing. So I urge you to give this a try and see how it works for you. You're going to find that some aspects of this are just right up your alley. Some may be harder to implement, but give it a shot and see what you think. I'd like to also invite you again to join me for that webinar coming up on October 6th where we're talking about two step chord theory for harpists. I guarantee it's going to be simple, I guarantee it's going to be practical, and you get to be right at your harp and try these techniques along with me right on this very unusual webinar. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I hope you join me. Remember, the link is right in the show notes and you can hop over there and register. It's free. There will be a replay if you can't make it live and I'd love to be able to share this information with you. Next week right here on the podcast, we're going to be talking about developing finger agility. Sort of goes with what we talked a little bit about today as far as technique goes, but we're going to talk about what agility really means, how to develop it, why you should develop it, and what are some of the traps that that you might encounter in trying to do this. And of course, how to keep your fingers, your wrists, your hands, your arms healthy while you're working on technique. We'll be talking about that too. So that's all next week on the podcast. I look forward to talk with you then. Have a wonderful week and don't forget to practice harp happiness every day. 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.