Stick It! Your Guide to Secure Finger Placing - PHH 149

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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 me may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. We harpists take our Finger placement Seriously Getting the right fingers on the right strings at the right time is paramount. One misplaced finger and a whole passage can go wobbly. One of the quotes of Johann Sebastian Bach that comes to my mind at this moment is this one it's easy to play any musical instrument. All you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself right. Well, Bach was known for his sense of humor, and so without knowing the context for this quote, I like to think that this wasn't intended to downplay the difficulty of playing an instrument, but was a little more tongue in cheek. But it's still a little depressing. Our physical connection to the harp strings is key not just for playing the right notes, but for our speed, our tone, our range of expression, our relaxation, even our confidence. When our fingers are placed too loosely on the strings, they can slide up or down or even off the string altogether. This makes for uneven rhythms, a weak sound, and inconsistency. Of course, if we grip too hard, we end up with too much tension to play well. Now, I've often wished for magical mini magnets that would stick my fingers to the right strings at the right time so I could play without concern, almost carefree. But fortunately, I had wonderful teachers who taught me that I didn't need magic magnets, I just needed to make my placing stick. That's our topic for today's show, Sticky Placing. If you've never thought about your placing as being sticky or otherwise, you're going to find this Discussion interesting and probably very enlightening. I'll talk about what sticky placing is other than a term. I think I made up what it can help you with and how to practice it. The practice techniques may even be ones you've heard of and not used because you didn't see the point. I hope to change all that for you today, so stay tuned. As always, we have some extra little goodies for you in the show. Notes for this episode. One is a link to a blog post from the archives called Five Finger Foibles. Fix them now. I'm just glad I could say that. But some interesting looks at some things that your fingers might be doing that are actually getting in your way and not being helpful. So you might find that blog post interesting. And then also a big reminder that this, this is the final week of our Harp Mastery Hub Challenge. Now, if you don't know what the Hub is, that is our free social community. It's not social media, it's not Facebook. It's our own private community. So it's ad free and all that kind of stuff. So it's free to join. You just need to sign up with your email and the Hub gives you access to a bunch of things. Not only is it a place for discussions, but but it also is the easiest way to access our live Monday warmups, the warmups that I do nearly every Monday. You can get into the Hub and then just find the link to join the warmups. From there. It's always in the Meetup section. But every month we have a Hub Challenge. And it's just a little thing, a series of prompts that you can use for your practice over the month. It's very simple, very low key, very low stress, but just something interesting and fun to keep us all moving. And this month's Hub Challenge has a very special prize. Now, I love giving out prizes. So for the people who complete all four weeks of the challenge, we, I collect all those names, put them in a little random drawing and we choose a winner that way. And I will say that although it would be best obviously if you did all four weeks of the challenge, that over the four weeks of the month there's nothing to say that you can't get in there and get caught up quickly. And you may want to this month for our Jigging it challenge just because I think the prize is very cool this time. The prize that we're giving away for the Hub Challenge is that the randomly selected winner will work with me to pick a piece for me to arrange so you get to choose my next arrangement. We'll coordinate it together so we can be sure that. That the piece is is legal for me to arrange and that, you know, we can work out all those details. But the winner will also get a personalized copy from me, and their name will appear in the dedication. So I thought this would be kind of a cool little thing to do. So choose my next arrangement. That's our prize for this month. So that's, I think, pretty nice motivation for getting in there and doing that challenge. So, once again, if you're not a member of the Hub, it's easy to join. You'll find the in our show notes and right on the Heart Mastery homepage@heartmastery.com Easy to join, totally free. And there's always something fun happening. So I'm going to try to describe sticky placing to you because before we can really talk about its usefulness in your playing, I need to describe a little bit about what I mean. Now, sticky placing is a term that is pretty descriptive for me, and it's one I've used with my students to talk about how they need to have their hands on the strings. I'm not sure that anybody else uses that term, and there are probably much more elegant terms for it. But think of this analogy and you'll see what I mean. Imagine a trapeze artist. Now, I don't know anything about being a trapeze artist, so I might have this all wrong, but it feels pretty good to me. So just go with me here. The trapeze artist is swinging from bar to bar, right? So swing, and then they release from that first bar, and they need to grab the second one that is coming toward them. Well, their grip is the most important thing right there. They need to grab that bar with enough strength so that they don't slide off, right? Too loose a grip and they're ending up in the net. But at the same time, if they grab it with too tight a grip, then they won't be able to somersault around the bar or whatever it is that trapeze artists do. And however they call it so, right, their grip has to be just right. It has to have enough security that they have the control and the safety that they need, but it has to have the right flexibility to allow them to continue their forward motion. That's what our placing needs to do for us, too. And there are some interesting parallels with the trapeze artist. First of all, much of what we do is in the air, right? We're holding up our Arms, we're in the middle of the air. The only connection we have to anything is the strings. And unlike some other instrumentalists where they're holding onto their instrument the whole time and moving their fingers, our fingers are moving over a lot of different strings. We're not just in the same place moving our fingers, we're all over the place. So that means that we're in the air, similar to a trapeze artist. Now, there's nothing life threatening about this, but our performance, and I don't mean, you know, playing for others kind of performance, but the way our music sounds is completely dependent on our grip, on our placing. If our placing is too tight, then we're tense and our fingers don't move. If our placing is too loose, it can go all wobbly. We can be slipping and sliding on the strings, and our playing isn't even.

Placing on the strings for us. And sticky placing in particular here is all about control. It's all about developing the means to have the right control at the right time. And it's about choices, because when we have enough control.

Then we can control our dynamics. We have choices over our dynamic range, over the speed that we're playing. We have choices with every note. And if we don't have a solid enough grip on the strings, then we're. Excuse the phrase here, but we're hanging on for dear life. We're trying to just get these notes out, but they may not sound the way we want, they may not have the tone that we want. We're just kind of sliding over the strings. And sticky placing gives us enough control to be able to play the notes that we need to play securely and confidently, but yet is loose enough to be able to make them sound fluid and expressive. It allows us freedom of movement, it allows us freedom of choice, and it allows us security. At the same time, an interesting experiment is to play just a very fast one octave scale. Choose a right hand, a left hand, whatever seems to work for you. And just do that quick one octave scale with your fingers very loosely and lightly on the strings.

Let the grip be just a little bit too light. Now, we all know what a too tight grip is like, and that's painful. It's bad for you, right? You're just gripping the strings. It sounds terrible. You can't move. We know what that's like. But experiment with too light a touch on the strings. So play that really fast one octave scale and see, do your fingers slip? Do they slide? You can probably play really nicely at a soft dynamic that way. But can you actually play a loud scale that way? Can you play loudly, make a nice forte sound? Can you get a lot of tone? Are the notes even? Do they sound equal in terms of dynamic and in terms of rhythm? And it's very difficult to play that kind of a thing well when your grip is too loose. So that's one way to experiment with non sticky placing. And hopefully that'll be enough to encourage you to keep listening and find out exactly how to do sticky placing. So let's talk about the qualities of sticky placing and how to achieve them. First, I want you to think about sticky placing as a sense of connectedness to the core of the string. So that we're not thinking about just brushing the surface of the string as we play. We're not thinking about plucking the string. I think that's a word that sort of has the wrong idea to it. I mean, yeah, that's what we do, but that's not really what we want to think of. I want you to think of the getting all the tone out of the string by actually pulling through the center of the string as you close your finger. We're talking here about other words might be the meat of the string or the core of the sound, or using a lot of flesh, getting the full sound. It's all about digging into the string instead of just playing on the surface of it. Now, this is different. It will be a little bit different. The amount of energy it's going to take to do this will be different for each person and it will be different on different instruments. Harps with lighter tension won't require as much energy to do the same thing. But playing that core of the string, playing through the center of the string is playing into the meat of the string. That's where the sound is, that's where the fullest tone is. And that's what I want you to practice. So you're going to start by just putting your fingers on the strings. You can use any strings you like. Just put them lightly but solidly on the strings, all four. And then just squeeze the strings just enough so that you can see them move. We've talked a lot about this recently at in the My Heart Mastery community. And placing and squeezing is a wonderful way to really feel what those strings feel like and feel the center of the string. But we're going to go beyond just that right now. So after you've sort of squeezed the strings and you feel where that meet is, choose one, put a couple of fingers on something that's that's comfortable for you. You don't have to have all fingers on to do this. Maybe put on three, two, one, and a little triad or something. And start with a third finger, or start with your second finger and experiment with pulling through the string and pulling your finger into your palm so you're not brushing the surface of the string. You're not, you know, just sort of coming across the top of the string and into your hand. You are not plucking the string and coming into your hand. You're actually pulling through it. And your finger will sort of slip off the string as you pull through and will come into your hand. When you think of this as one motion, your finger can move right through the string and into your hand, and you'll see the string pull this. You should actually see the string move, right? Not just vibrate after you're done, but you're going to pull the string with your finger. That's part of what we're looking for in this part of the exercise. We want your finger to actually move the string before it leaves the string. That's how you know you're really playing the string. Not hard enough that it buzzes. And don't put so much force into it that your finger just. You lose all the control that you are trying so hard to develop just enough to move the string. Play through the center of the string and then into your palm. Now, once you get the hang of that and don't overthink it, you know, it may feel very different to you, but there's no particular right or wrong way to do it beyond what I've described. So don't, you know, worry that you're doing it wrong. Just try it. I would say that what is important is that you use your best technique to do this. So be sure that you're sitting properly and your arms and your hands are where you want them, where you would have your best technique, right? Because otherwise, what's the point of doing this? We want your best technique behind this. And then try this. Then once you get the hang of that, experiment with different dynamics. Sure, it's easy to get a nice full forte from that, but can you do the same thing, moving the string but then releasing with less tension to get a softer dynamic? I think what you'll find is interesting is that your soft dynamic will still sound rich and it will sound full. It will be a very different soft dynamic from what you might be used to playing. A lot of the time when we play a piano dynamic, it's right on the surface of the strings. And sometimes that's what we want. We want a nice, light, airy sound. That's one of the beauties of playing the harp. It's such a tactile instrument that we have many, many different sounds that we can make depending on how we use our fingers. But that's also sort of the easiest one. And I don't want you to get stuck just playing the surface of the strings when all that richness of the harp lies deep in the heart of the strings. And we're going to release that with this. So you're putting your hands on the string in your very best technique. And do try this with both hands and take your time to try it with all fingers individually. You know, you don't have to have them all on the string at the same time. You might want your thumb on while you play your fourth finger. And then try your third finger and your second finger. Maybe put two and three on while you play your thumb. But experiment with pulling through that center of the string. Make sure the string moves and just let your finger come off the string as it comes into your palm. This may be a different way of thinking about closing your fingers than what you had thought of before. I talked a moment ago about the idea that this is one motion and not two. Right. It's not play the string and then close. It's playing the string as you close, where the closing is just the natural extension of that original motion. And you can experiment with different dynamics to do this. One important factor, stay relaxed. This is not about tension. This is about motion. It's about intention. It's about thinking about this string in a different way. So don't create too much energy around this. You don't want to work too hard, you just want to think differently. This kind of an exercise is perfect for a warm up. It will help you limber up your fingers just by thinking about how they actually play. Remember, your entire technique is important here. So be sure you're paying attention to all those aspects of your technique as you play each one of your fingers. And think about playing through that core of the string. This is how you experience the, the tone, the tone choices that sticky placing gives you. But obviously it's not sticky placing in action. So that's what we need to talk about right now. Oh, before we get to that, I should have talked about your thumb a little bit because the thumb motion is very different from the finger motion. You might want to think of it as pushing through the string. But I still like to think of it as pulling through.

The essence of your thumb motion is that it requires space to play right, so it can't be scrunched against your second finger. So if your second finger and thumb have no space between them, you need to turn your hands, angle your hands a little bit further forward toward the column of the harp, so that there's space in between your thumb. In the Salcedo technique, we always talk about it as thumbs high, but it's all really about that space between your thumb and your second finger. No matter what method you're playing, if your second finger and thumb are squashed together, your thumb doesn't have the space to move that your fingers do. And your fingers are now, because of the work you just did, using that space to pull through the center of the string. Your thumb needs its space to work through that center of the string as well. So be sure that you've got. Got that nice distance between your thumb and second finger. Sometimes it's described as a C, but whatever it is, it's open and your thumb has room to close toward that knuckle of your second finger, and it can pull or push through that center of the string. You're going to get the best thumb sound of your life, I promise you. But you need that space to do it. Now, as we start talking about working on sticky placing in actual practice and playing, I want you to understand my own angle on this. I was trained in the salzato harp method. That's how I grew up. So that's my own particular slant on this. But what I'm talking about is applicable to every harpist, every method. Different methods have different ways of talking about this, and there are other ways of working on this as well. But I can describe best to you what I know. So don't discount this just because you're not a salzido player. Whether you're playing classical music or folk music, whether you're playing a pedal harp or a lever harp, it does not matter. We want our fingers to be able to stick to the strings. And this is how I'm able to tell you how to do it. So I just wanted to. I wanted you to understand that before we got too far into this discussion, the shorthand for sticky placing practice in the salzido world is loud and slow. And you may have heard this, you may have heard that he advocated practicing loud and slow as the way to learn a piece of music. That's. As I said, it's a shorthand and it leaves a lot out. And it's perhaps something you have heard and discounted as being essentially unmusical and not useful. And truthfully, if all I heard was loud and slow, I would think the same thing. But I have a little bit more background to bring to this. And so I want to help you. If this is something you've heard and thought, I don't want to practice that way. So let me help you with that and let me tie it into sticky placing. First of all, Salzato believed, as you know do most harpists, that tone is really important and that a beautiful, mellow, fluid tone was of prime importance for every harp player. And he said, yeah, speed is important, but tone should never be sacrificed to speed. So that it was more important for him to help his students play with a beautiful sound and then develop speed as it came later. So he developed the. Once again, I'm resorting to loud and slow as our shorthand. This particular practice technique he used to give security and consistency when it came to learning the notes. After all, we all know the value of practicing slowly, right? You have the chance to get to the right notes and at the right time. So that's important. Right? So slow practice gives you that security and consistency. It also allows you to develop very clean buzz. Free playing. Buzzing comes from inaccurate replacing primarily. So we want to have very accurate replacing. All right, so now you can see the sticky placing stuff starting to come in. If we have that calm control with the right amount of energy behind it as we place and replace, we're going to get cleaner playing, less buzzing. So that part of this loud and slow thing is all about being sure that your finger not only places well, but replaces well, and then has the chance to play with that full sound. Yes. I prefer to think of it as a full sound rather than loud. And this is really how I was taught. It's not about playing loudly. It's about getting to that core of the sound that we've been talking about all episode. Right? So getting to that core of the sound and making a very full sound at that very slow tempo allows you to get the security, the secure, clean placing that gets you to the right notes at the right time without excess motion. That would create buzzing, and you can even include dynamics, but they're all going to have that full sound. So your pianos are going to be sort of probably stepped up in volume, but you're practicing with the idea of that full, beautiful, mellow sound and the relaxation that goes with it, the proper motion behind it all the time. So if loud and slow doesn't sound like fun to you? This may. This is practicing sticky placing. Yeah, it's the same thing. But think about how we talk about it, right? What we want to do is to have our fingers securely on the string as if they were sticking to the string, so that they can play through it, create that beautiful tone that we're talking about without the tension, without the buzzing, and without the fumbling. Right. They're going to be on the strings securely. I think it's very important how you think of the volume here, that it's not necessarily loud. We're not trying to put a lot of force behind this. We're trying to put a lot of motion behind it. So the motion of your finger playing through the string is more important than the actual volume. What's going to happen is you're going to get a rich, full sound. And it doesn't have to be a forte dynamic, which we can sometimes create by tension. And that's not something that we want to incorporate in all our playing. We want our playing to be relaxed. There are a couple critical differences, though, between just playing slowly and playing slowly with sticky placing. With sticky placing, we're really looking for an economy of motion so that your finger isn't kind of wiggling around trying to get to the right string, but that it gets to the right string efficiently and securely, confidently, perhaps even as if your finger knows exactly where to go, because that, after all, is what we want. So that your finger knows exactly where to go, and it gets there without any extraneous motion or fumbling, because that's part of where buzzing comes from. It's going to get to the right string smoothly and efficiently. So the economy of motion is something that you're looking for. You're making sure that all the extra hand motion or arm motion or finger motion is just taken away from your playing and that your playing is efficient as possible. This may be an entirely different way for you to think about your playing. It's not just getting to the right string at the right time, no matter what, which is certainly a legitimate technique, especially when we're playing for someone else. It's like, okay, I don't care how I get to that string. I just have to get there. But the point is that if you've practiced getting there the most efficient way, your finger will have practiced the best way to get there. And that will be giving you the most secure foundation for any kind of playing that you do. Another benefit of practicing slowly with this sticky placing sort of idea is that it's helping you concentrate on the sound that you're making rather than just the notes. It helps connect you to a more musical aspect of what you're doing, so that it's not just the right notes at the right time. It's actually about the most beautiful notes at the right time. And it gives you a way to think about your technique that goes beyond mechanics and gets into music. And I think that this is an absolute strength. It's such a valuable viewpoint or listening point, if you like. But to think about the music and the sound that we're making, more than just getting to the right notes at the right time, and to connect all of those things in practice, being able to go slowly enough that we can get rid of anything that detracts from that idea, whether it's the excess motion, fumbling, buzzing, whatever it happens to be. And of course, pedals and levers come into this, too, not exactly as part of sticky placing, but as part of this kind of practice where we're looking to be efficient, we're looking to be music centered, and we're looking to actually work at the mechanics that include not just how we're playing, but the relaxation that we're playing to produce the sound that we want. Now that you know what sticky placing is and what it can do for you, I'd like to talk about some ways you can incorporate it into your practice and see how it might help you remember that the key hallmarks here of sticky placing is practicing with a slow, full sound. You're practicing slowly, using a full sound, looking for very efficient finger motion that is clean and it's fumble free, and that your fingers stick to those strings when you place them, you put them where they want to go, and that's what they play. And then, of course, when they play, they're playing with that beautiful full sound. So those are the hallmarks of sticky placing. One of the easiest things to do with sticky placing, one of the fun ways to start using it is just to use it as you play exercises. Of course, you can use it in your warmups, but just to go through a scale, an exercise, and think about your placing as being sticky. Notice how much more intentional sticky placing is than just playing slowly. Right? I said that just a moment ago. It's not just slow, it's getting your fingers onto those strings. Thinking about that trapeze artist connection, right? You want to get that finger on the string and then have it pulled through the string so that it's clean and beautiful, both of those things. So practicing this with your exercises, simple exercises or more complicated ones, fine. Remember, it's all about slow. You don't want to work at this going fast. It's great for as you're first learning a piece. This is a terrific way to get those right habits into your fingers. Once again, going beyond just slow playing, it's slow, very intentional. It's also good for putting hands together because it brings that level of.

Certainty and purpose to your placing. You're not just trying to get to the right string at the right time, you're trying to get to the right string at the right time in a particular way. So it's very good for learning a piece of. When I'm working on a piece and I'm working on a particular passage or section of a piece, I love to use this kind of practice as a first and last repetition. You know, if I'm practicing it and I'm going to play it, maybe get it up to tempo, and I'm working at a rhythm thing and maybe I'm working at a dynamic thing and I'm doing a number of repetitions of this. I love to start with that sticky practice repetition or sticky placing repetition, and then end with a sticky placing repetition that is slow. Thinking about a full sound, thinking about everything being very clean and efficient. It's wonderful for helping you bring back a review piece. You know what it's like to bring back a review piece. It seems like it's going to work for a moment and then, then it's like, whoa, I've never seen this before. But going through it either section by section or the entire thing with this whole sticky placing idea is going to bring it back securely and the right way you're going to be redeveloping the right habits or instilling them if you didn't learn them this way the first time. If you're working on a piece that's very fast, use this kind of practice technique, the sticky placing, to help calm it down. So that if you're playing the piece at 120, 120, and you're working and you're working and you're working, maybe a tempo pyramid around that tempo, that's fine, but maybe end your practice with a little cool down repetition. That's all about that slow full sound. With sticky placing, it will help calm everything down and make those, those habits that you worked so hard to develop the first time. Stay. So that's a very valuable technique. And one of the ways I always use sticky placing practice is when I'm preparing a piece for performance. I'll be working the piece at tempo and making sure that I can play it at performance level. And then I will take it back and do a slow, full sound, sticky placing repetition of the piece so that I know that I can calm it back down, that it's in my control, that I have all those details still lined up. And it's great, especially in those last few days before a performance, to practice a piece. That way you won't forget to play it fast just because you're practicing it slowly, but it really can help relieve your nerves as well. So that's sticky placing. It's all about getting the right fingers to the right string at the right time with no excess motion and allowing them to play with a beautiful tone. Remember, you're not sacrificing the tone to speed. You're creating security and consistency. You're getting rid of extra buzzing and you're creating a relaxed, full sound. All of this while you're practicing the notes to your piece. Sure, you can use this with exercises and I, you know, advocate that you do, but this is a wonderful way to practice. And I think you'll find if you've not thought about placing as needing to be sticky before, as needing to really, you know, have that firm grip on the string so that it's securely placed and so that you have control, I think this will be an interesting, perhaps game changing experience for you. You're going to think about, wow, okay, this is something I've been missing. My fingers have been sort of loosey goosey on the strings. No wonder they're not always playing exactly when or how I want them to play. So I would love to hear from you. If you try sticky placing, be sure to send me a little note. You can send it right to me through the podcast@podcasteartmastery.com and I'll find out from you what you think of sticky placing in your practice. Well, a couple of quick reminders before we wrap up for today. One is don't forget to participate in our Harp Mastery Hub challenge because that Hub challenge prize, I think is going to be fun. I'd love to work with you on creating my next arrangement. So you'll find the link in the show notes and you can of course join the Heart Mastery hub right@heartmastery.com easy to do. Next week on the show we're going to be talking about self criticism and how to maintain your objectivity in your practice and playing. So that is next week on the podcast and in the meantime. Meantime, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.