The Ultimate Time Machine: Harness The Power Of Your Metronome - PHH 111

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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 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. Okay, here's my question for you today. What would be the scariest words you could hear in your lesson? I can think of lots of possibilities, but I'm guessing that one of those phrases that comes to your mind might be, I think we need to get out the metronome. If that's a phrase that makes you start to squirm on your harp bench, you're not alone. Learning to use the metronome is one of those things that we teachers often fail to teach our students. Oh, sure, we pull out the metronome in lessons and tell our students to practice with it at home, but we don't often really show them how to work with it or or when to use it. And why we almost turn it into a punishment. I sometimes worry I sound like the Wicked Witch of the West. Well, my pretty, you counted that badly. It's time for the metronome for you and the little dog, too.

But the metronome is for more than just identifying and solving, counting errors or uneven beats, or torturing students. It's not just for pushing the tempo faster and faster. Used creatively, the metronome can actually slow time for you, helping to create enough time for you to do what you need to do. It's not just about practicing slowly so you can play fast. It's about smoothing out the bumps and coordinating the many processes that go into playing a piece of music. It can help you be more expressive. And yes, you can even use the metronome to to calm frantic fingers or frazzled nerves and to help you focus. Now if you're one of those harpists like me, who absolutely loves working with the metronome, then congratulations. You've learned to harness one of the most powerful tools in any musician's bag of tricks. But don't leave me yet. I have some cool metronome tricks you may not know to share with you today. But if you're like the majority of harpists out there, you're not quite comfortable using the metronome. In fact, you may not be quite convinced of its value as a practice tool. My hope is that the ideas I'm going to share with you today will spark your interest and encourage you to make the metronome your best practice buddy.

I'm super excited right now because in just two days I am kicking off a brand new series of workshops that I'm calling Summer Camp Sizzlers. We start with our first workshop on Wednesday. It is not too late to join. So there are three Summer Camp Sizzlers. These are essentially 90 minute online sessions, but I'm theming them like harp camp for adults. And they're going to be lots and lots of fun. But they're really geared toward working on a few of the specific areas that we harpists always need more help on and need to concentrate on. So the first camp, the one that is starting on Wednesday, that would be Wednesday, July 5th. And that summer Camp Sizzler is our practice camp. How to fix it and move on. If you've ever, ever gotten stuck and.

Your practice is just kind of going around in circles and you're not getting your pieces finished in this camp, we're going to solve some of that. We're going to work on how to favor efficiency over repetition, where repetition goes wrong for harpists. Yeah, we know we need to fix stuff, but there's a point where you need to stop fixing and move on. And we're going to talk about how to identify that point and how to actually do it. But it's our summer Camp. Sizzler isn't just about the workshop. It's really about the fun. We'll be starting with a warmup. I'm calling these LALA warmups, like L A L A Lala warm ups. And you have to attend. I can't tell you what it's about, but it's going to really help you use your warmup time better. So we're going to play together and do a lala warm up. I have a super speedy ensemble that we're going to be doing. Then we'll be doing our workshop. We've got a little game we're going to play. We actually have a craft that we're going to do. Yeah, I know it's possible. We're going to do a little craft. Don't worry, you don't have to cut straight or use, you know, glue. So if you're not completely scissor safe, that's okay. You'll still be able to do this. And we're actually going to have a little campfire sing along, too. So it's just going to be a lot of fun, but it's also going to be really powerful. You're going to come away from practice camp with a very personal summer practice plan just for you. We'll show you how to put that together. But practice camp isn't the only camp. We have two others. We have technique camp coming up in just a couple weeks after that. And then a couple weeks after that, we'll be doing finish camp. How to finish your pieces. Crossing that invisible bridge right between. Well, I'm practicing it and now I need to play it. So those are the three camps we're doing. Each camp is a live workshop, as I mentioned before, and I'm offering it twice on that day so that I want to be sure that everybody has the opportunity to attend live. So we're going to be offering it in the morning and offering it again in the evening. Well, my morning and evening might depend on where you are, but there are two opportunities to attend live. And it's not, you know, it's not like I just give the workshop once and then record it the second time. I'm live teaching there both times. So we're going to going to be doing that. And I have to tell you that I'm so excited about these. I want everybody to be able to attend. So the workshops are super inexpensive. They are $27 a piece. $27. You get the workshop, you get this PDF which is, you know, like nine or 10 pages long, that with all the materials in it, it's going to be a ton of fun. You have access to the replay recordings. We're leaving everything up until the end of September, so you have plenty of time to look at this. So even if you can't be at the session live, you' able to get all the value out of it. And of course, if you like the idea of all three summer camp sizzlers, we've created a little bit more savings for you. You can bundle them together and you can buy the all three Summer Camp Sizzlers. You can attend for just $70. So that's a savings of like $11. So, you know, it's really a bargain. And there's a lot of content here. You're going to get a lot of really good stuff packed into a short amount of time. Because if you're like me, you want to get out and enjoy whatever good summer weather we get and, you know, I don't know, head to the pool, head to the beach, head to the lake, whatever you want to do. So it's not about taking up your summertime. It's not about making you work harder. It's about just using some of your summertime. Just a little, you know, smart. It's just smart is what it is. So those are our summer Camp Sizzlers. As I said, they start this Wednesday, July 5th. But you'll be able to still join even if you can't make that first one. That's not a problem. You'll still have access to it. And we've put the link in the show notes. Or you'll be able to find it on the events page@harpmastery.com. so I hope you join me for the summer camp Sizzlers. I'm super pumped about them. They're going to be a ton of fun. And while those were a ton of fun, maybe you're thinking that this metronome topic is not so much fun. But. But let me start with a fun little idea for you. I realize this dates me, but do you remember the old Rocky and Bullwinkle TV series? Well, if you do, if you don't, check it out on YouTube, because they were hilarious. It was, you know, cartoons for grownups back in the 60s. However, if you do remember, you remember that there was a segment on that show about Peabody and Sherman. Now, there's been a movie and an animated series since that time about Mr. Peabody and Sherman. But in the original, on Rocky and Bullwinkle, you know, Peabody is this genius dog. And Mr. Peabody has a wayback machine. And he takes the little boy, Sherman, back in time to various important moments in history. Things like, you know, the Norman conquest or something. He takes him back in history, and usually it's a little bit wacky. This was, I believe, called, you know, Peabody's improbable History. So there were some things that weren't quite factual about it. But the idea of the wayback Machine always intrigued me. This machine that could take Peabody and Sherman back in time. Right. What if we could control time? I thought that was the most interesting idea, because in our music that's exactly what we do. We. We control time, and the metronome is part of this. Often we think of the metronome as controlling us. You know, it's cracking the whip, right? It's got that. That click that's meant to keep us in line and make us play at the right time. But what if we turned this idea around and we started thinking about using the metronome to make things easier for us so that we could control time? Sort of like our own private little Wayback machine. We could use it to our particular advantage. That would be pretty amazing, wouldn't it? Well, bear in mind here, as we talk through all these little metronome tricks and techniques, that you call the shots here. You're in charge. That click on your metronome, that means what you want it to mean. It means what you say it means. If you want that click to represent the quarter note, it does. If you want it to represent the eighth note, it does. Meaning that the same click, right, could be 1, 2, 3, 4, or it could be 1 and 2 and. Or maybe it's a half note and it's going to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. And you're in charge of the click. You get to say what it means. And there is no right or wrong number. We get so wrapped up in, oh, this piece needs to go at this particular metronome marking, because that's what's printed at the top of the page. But when it comes to practice, and to a certain extent, too, when it comes to performing, for sure, right? But certainly when it comes to practice, the only number that matters is the one that is working for you with what you need to do right then. So that if you need to practice something slowly, then you set that metronome number. It doesn't matter if the piece is supposed to go at 120. If you need to take it at 50, that's what you do. Or maybe you say, okay, well, you know, 120 is really nice, but I want that 120 to be the eighth note instead of the quarter note, and that's your practice tempo. That's fine. There's no right or wrong number for this. The metronome is there to help you with what you need to do. It's there to help you eliminate hesitation, right? It's there to help calm you down so you don't have to be quite so frantic about getting to the next notes. And most importantly, it's there to help you develop your coordination.

Let me explain that One a little bit more. When we play, we are doing a lot of things, and I'm not just talking about pieces with a lot of notes. You're reading notes on the page. You're translating those notes on the page into strings that you're going to play. You're getting certain fingers on those certain strings, and you're playing them in certain combinations at specific times, in specific, specific rhythms. You've got all this stuff happening. And at the same time that you're playing those notes, you're looking for the next ones, and you're working those out. And then maybe you've got levers or pedals that you're trying to work onto, and you're trying to, you know, get the expression and the dynamics. There's a lot going on. And even if you're only reading a single line of music and playing with one hand, there's still a lot of processes that your brain is coordinating. Now, our brains are amazing, and they do amazing things for us. They're able to look at those notes on the page and tell us what strings we should be playing, tell our fingers, which strings to get to and which finger to get to, which string. There's so much that happens, but when we're learning a piece, we're often trying to assimilate all this information, and it's not coming to us in an orderly fashion.

So that that's when we have these sort of log jams. We can't find where our fingers go. We can't get to the next strings on time. We can't get any of that stuff lined up. So if you picture it as sort of a conveyor belt where there are a lot of people and they're doing this part of the process and this part of the process. And if they're not working at a coordinated pace.

Then the end product isn't going to be very good. Right. We need this person to do this before this person can do that. You know, this rivet has to go in before that rivet can go in, whatever it is, right? So the coordination happens at this level that we really can't control. I mean, we can't say, okay, brain, think of this now and tell my hand to do this and finger do. You know, that's not the way we operate. Those things happen when we, from our grand managerial role, say, there's the note, there's the rhythm. This is what it means. And now I'm going to do it. But that's a lot to do when we're playing well, all Those processes are lined up. All those people work on the conveyor belt. They're all doing everything that they need to do in a perfect synchronization.

And everything's happening just the way it's supposed to. And we experience this in our music playing when we're reading the notes on the page and our fingers are doing it and the tempo's nice and steady and everything's working in that, you know, lined up, synchronized, coordinated sort of way.

But when we're just learning things, you know what it's like. Think about when you try to put something hands together, and it's kind of hard and you're trying to figure out which hand does what when. Well, that's a coordination we have to develop. And at that point, that's not when you want the metronome going, click, click, click, click, do it faster, faster, faster, faster. What we want is the metronome to help slow things down so that we have the time we need to get everything lined up, to get all those little imaginary people on our conveyor belt working in sync again and working together so that we know where we need to go and we have the time we need to get there and do what we're supposed to do. So the metronome is going to give us a way to coordinate those processes by helping us stay slow. Now, that doesn't mean we aren't going to play fast. And it's useful, of course, for that, too. But the coordination of processes is so important that I want you to just imagine for a second what happens when it doesn't work. I mean, I already talked about the log jam sort of thing, but think about how we actually experience that. If you are playing along and then you have a hesitation, maybe you often hesitate when you get to the end of one measure before you start the next one. If you need to hesitate there because you can't figure out where the next next notes are, you have a little mini logjam in that coordination of processes. You're not reading, thinking far enough ahead to actually get where you need to be when you need to be there. So that's a process coordination. And if we keep playing at that tempo where we need to make that hesitation all the time, we're never going to learn the coordination that we need to get there. We're going to be just, you know, lunging for the strings. Right? And we've all done that. But that's what the metronome can do for you. If the metronome says, no, look, this is the space of time. You have. You've got a. A nice slow click now, and you have all this time to look ahead and prepare for that so that you don't have that hesitation there, but you learn to get there and in a prescribed and correct amount of time, not just whenever you feel like it. That's the difference. And that's where the metronome can help you line things up. Because once you have those processes coordinated, once you know that you can get, for instance, across that bar line in the correct amount of time, even if that's a big amount of time at the moment, right? Your beat's very slow, and so we're going to take a long time to get across that bar line, but we can do it without hesitating.

Then we've got everything lined up. All our people on the conveyor belt are working together. They're just still working too slowly. So now we can start to raise the tempo. And of course, the metronome is good for that, right? But then we can start to raise the tempo, knowing that we have that process coordinated. We know how to get across that bar line in the slow tempo. And it's going to be much easier to have that happen at the faster tempo as well. Once you have those processes lined up, you can speed up. So that's why creating time is so important. When you have the time you need to do what you need to do, then we can take the frenzy out of it, we can take those unmusical hesitations out of it, we can take the frantic scrambling for notes out of it, and you can make your music expressive, calm, confident, all that good stuff. So that's why this is really important. But let's talk about some of those ways that you can actually use the metronome for this. One of the more common ways to use your metronome would be to use it to give you time to fix an error. When you have a passage that isn't working for some reason or other, then whatever speed you've been working at, you know, put that metronome on and use it at half tempo. So if you've been playing a passage at about this speed, 1, 2, 3, 4, and something's just not working, you can't get. Can't get it to be smooth. Then let's take that same metronome click. You don't have to reset it or anything, and let's change it and let's work with it at half tempo. So instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, it's now 1 and 2 and. And we can go slower if we need to, but try it first at half tempo and use that to help you find exactly where the error is. Is it something you're not placing properly? Is it because you don't know what the note is or which finger to use? What is it that's really causing that error? Half tempo or slower if you have to, will allow you to see where that error. It will give you time to fix it. So that's the tempo that you're going to start practicing this passage at to really, really fix it. And then once you've got it nice and calm, then you can use the tempo pyramid to speed it up. Right. I've talked about the tempo pyramid before, and if you need a refresher on the tempo pyramid, you'll find it in episode 89 of the podcast. I've put a link to that in the show notes as well, so you could go right there. But it's episode 89. I did a masterclass on the tempo pyramid. How speed something up using guess what, using your metronome. But. So that's how you're going to fix something. Let that metronome be slow enough so that you can find the error and then play through it so that you can fix it up and get it back to the right speed. So that's pretty simple, right? Well, the metronome, the same kind of.

Technique is going to work for helping you get those hard things sorted out, the things where you know what the difficulty is, you just need need some extra time to do it. And this might be a tricky fingering or it might be some big jumps or some big chords that take you extra time to place or could be petals or levers where you need to be really metrically, rhythmically accurate with how you push them. Right? You want to push them on the same beat every time, so you want to be really accurate with those. Or it could just be learning to get hands together, coordination. And once again, working with the metronome at a very slow tempo will help you here. It'll give you time to do what you need to do. Remember that you're working at coordinating those processes. You're working at making sure that everything can work together. And so when you know how much time you need to do something, then you can, you know, give yourself that amount of time and actually get it right, which just feels so much better. So let's say that you've got some big chords to place and they're taking you extra time. We'll use the metronome to help you learn how to place that chord. So we were at chord A and we want to get to chord B. And if our metronome speed is normally this and we can't place it in time, well, we can use that same speed or we can slow it down. But let's work with that speed and try to get there on time. So maybe play chord A and then just place the fourth fingers of chord B on time. So you play A place fourth fingers. A place fourth fingers. Now let's try placing four and one the outside fingers. So play chord A. Then place the fourth fingers and thumb for both hands for chord b. So a 1 and 4, a 1 and 4, a 1and 4. Then try the other combinations of fingers and use the metronome to help you make that jump in an orderly fashion. Or if your issue is hands together. One of the ways I like to use my metronome for hands together practice. When I'm having trouble putting something hands together, first of all, I usually work the hands separately, very close to tempo if I can, so that each hand is going.

By itself at a pretty good clip, you know, pretty close to where I want it to be. Then I pull the metronome back or I just use that half tempo idea again and start hands together at half tempo. So if my right hand is happy playing bum bum beam bum, and that's what it's going to do in real life at the, you know, performance tempo, right goal tempo, is going to play a 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. I'll make sure that both my hands can play that speed. Then to put it hands together, we're going to go twice as slowly. So instead of 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, we're going to go 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and work twice as slowly or even slower if you need to. But once again, it's the metronome that's guiding that. So it's not a haphazard, oh, let me see if I can get everywhere kind of process. But it's absolutely organized and you're working at getting everything where it needs to be. And your metronome is keeping you slow enough, helping you resist the temptation to make it sound like music and play it the way you want to. Right. It's keeping you slow enough that you have time to do that. So let's think about what it might be as if it gave you time to add expression. I'm betting that you never thought of using your metronome to help you be more expressive. Right. We Think of our metronome as our little robot, right? But it can. It can give you time to work out those expressive details. You know, what it's like, you're playing along and the next thing you. You know is, well, you got all the way through that part you were working on. But, oh, shoot, I forgot the dynamics. I was so busy with everything else, I just forgot them. I. Working at that slower tempo can give you time to do a lovely slow motion crescendo or decrescendo or maybe a subito dynamic, you know, where the dynamic changes very suddenly and we always forget to do it, or it's not really clean, it's just a little bit sloppy when we're going faster. This gives us a chance to make the dynamics just as clear as the notes that we're playing. It can help you gauge an accelerando. I've used a metronome this way for, you know, if your piece is at one tempo and then you're going to gradually speed up to get to a faster tempo, if you know what you want your faster tempo to be. One of the things I've done is put my metronome on that faster tempo and just let it click and. Oh, horror of horrors. Ignore the metronome for a little bit. I know it's. It can be difficult to ignore it once you've trained yourself to really listen to it. But ignore that metronome, which might. You might enjoy that, right? Ignore the metronome. Start from your slower tempo and work at your accelerando and see if you can land at that tempo that your metronome's giving you for your goal tempo. So it can help you do that. It can help you in a similar way, prepare for a tempo change where you might set your metronome at the new tempo. You know, if your piece has maybe an andante section and an allegro section, and they just go right from one to the other, well, play your andante section, but have your metronome already going at that allegro tempo. That can actually be a really good exercise and discipline for. Okay, I need to keep my slow tempo to ignore what's going on right now, and then I need to match that other tempo. It's a more slightly more challenging use of the metronome, but it's a great way to do it. Now you can set the metronome and have it off and then quickly turn it on, and that can work too. But. But learning to ignore it and then to match it can be an interesting exercise for sure. So, but don't forget its value in helping you build in the dynamics when you're working slowly so that they can be clear and exact and very purposeful. But I've been saving my favorite ways to use the metronome for last here. And these two are techniques that you can use to help calm things down. Now, one of the ways that we get kind of all tense and nervous as we're playing is when we know we're coming up to a spot that's difficult. We know we're coming up to one of those places that could go, okay, or it could just fall flat on its face. And we've practiced it so hard. We've put so much effort into that particular passage that when we know it's coming up, our whole body tenses up. We start to flinch. I call that a flinch point. Right? You're. You're starting to. Oh, no. Oh, no. Getting all tense and tight and getting ready to flinch. Well, use the metronome and put it on that. That tempo where you're going, right? And then I want you to play through that tricky passage from before it and all the way through to after it. So if. If your tricky passage is on line four, start on line three and play all the way through line five. Put your metronome on the tempo that you want to play, the tempo that lines three and five work beautifully at, Right. You're worried about line four, so you put your metronome on that tempo. And then as you get to line four, just do line four twice as slowly. So you're going along 1, 2, 3, 4, 1. And here comes line four. And so all of a sudden, we're in 1 and 2 and 3. And as we get to the end of that treble spot, right back to 1, 2, 3, 4. Now, obviously, you're not going to perform your piece with this section of a couple of measures or whatever it is at half tempo. We don't want that. But what this technique will do is it will start relaxing you. You'll know that you have time to do that passage correctly. You don't have to flinch. So this will help release the flinch. Then what you can do is you don't have to use the metronome as you do this. You can not slow down quite so much, but still give yourself a way to relax and calm down the flinch. And eventually you'll be able to get it up to tempo with everything else and not be dreading it for, you know, half a dozen measures before you actually get there, which does the does it no good. I don't have to tell you that you've probably done it as I have and realized that the more you worry about it, the worse everything gets, right? So we don't want to flinch. Use the metronome and that half tempo technique to calm you down. Now the metronome itself can be wonderful for building in a habit of calm before you start playing a piece. One of the things that happens when we play, you know, we're all nervous if we're performing for somebody, right? We're all nervous and we're even if it's just in a lesson and we just, we get in there and we start and we start before we're really ready. Now there are a lot of techniques and I have a lot that I teach, but the metronome is a really nice one here. So before you start playing your piece, as you're practicing it at home, put your metronome on and you're going to play with your metronome here, at least for the beginning. But what you're going to practice is starting the piece, listening to that metronome, feeling the tempo that you want to go.

Feeling the rhythm of the piece, hearing the piece in your head at that particular speed in your mind as you sit there. Before you start to play, hear how that piece starts, hear the first few measures, hear what it's like. Let the metronome keep you in the right tempo and keep you focused. And then begin to play with the metronome on. And you can use this, you know, do that same thing a few times. You can use this to practice starting a performance. So you're going to put your metronome on, sit there with it, listen to it, let it calm you down and hear those first few measures of your peace in your mind. And then when you really know that you're hearing them at that right tempo, keep the metronome on and begin to play. And play the first, I don't know, line or two of your piece. Then stop and do it again. Do it several times in a row. Let that be your pre performance habit so that when you sit up that at your harp and you're ready to play for somebody, you hear that nice calm metronome tempo in your head, you hear the piece, and that way you're already focused and ready to start and not a bundle of nerves before you start. Wouldn't that be wonderful? And see, the metronome can do that for you. Who would have guessed? Are you intrigued? Are you thinking, okay, let me try Some of these things. Let me just use my metronome to help me instead of always cracking the whip over me. And you know, you are in charge of it, right? You get to be the grown up. You get to use your metronome how you like. But I certainly hope that you do use it because it is a wonderful tool and we can. I'm happy to talk more about the metronome, but we will do that another time. So I, you know, let me know. Send me a little. Send me an email. You can always email me@podcastartmastery.com and let me know what metronome techniques you have tried that seemed to work well for you or that interested you or that you might want to learn more about. So let me know. Also, don't forget about our Summer Sizzlers. I would love to have you join me on those calls. It's going to be so much fun. I promise to make it a lot more like, like summer camp and not just like another, you know, another workshop, another online workshop. We've got fun stuff to do. You know, who would have thought you could do games and crafts and all that kind of stuff, right? But I've got them all planned for you. I'm so excited. So the Summer Camp Sizzlers, they start this week, but that's okay. If you're hearing this later than, than Wednesday, July 5th, that's just fine. You'll be able to still get that, get those recordings and we have those others coming up later in July and at the beginning of August. So you'll be able to, to join us for all of those. So please use that link in the show notes or go to Harp Mastery and look under upcoming events and join us for those Summer Camp Sizzlers. They are going to be fun next week here on the podcast we are talking about taking the plunge into video. What it takes to make a video you can be proud of. Now, we're not talk tech really as much as we are talking about the actual playing and the recording process, how to get through it without pulling your hair out, how to prepare for it properly. Um, the technology is, is much easier to work out, right? You can get your lights and your microphone and all that stuff worked out and still have a hard time. So we're going to be talking about the playing end of that. So taking the plunge into video next week on the podcast. I look forward to talking with you then. But in the meantime, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world and to your spirit and all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp Happiness every day. See you next time.