Three Easy Ways To Get Your Hands Playing Together - PHH 113

Welcome to the show. There are markers along the road in every harpist development signposts that indicate you're making progress. These are like those highway signs that tell you how many miles you are from the next town or city. Like New York City. 90 miles. That's one we see a lot in my Philadelphia area now, no matter how long it's taken you to get to that point, and regardless of the traffic jam ahead of you on the New Jersey Turnpike, New York City is now only 90 miles away. Graduating from three note chords to four note chords is one of those harp markers I talk about often. Another one is fluent hands together playing.

Fluent may not be the best word to describe my meaning. It's more a comfort level, the point at which hands together playing is not any more difficult for you than playing hands separately. Many harpists develop fluency playing hands separately and then are frustrated when that fluency doesn't translate to their hands together playing. What they don't realize is that the processing of information that is required for hands separately playing is very different from what is required for hands together playing. It's a harp version of the saying, what got you here won't get you there. My students have all heard me talk about this before and often it's painful to me to see harpists struggle with music learning and slow progress simply because they were never shown a better way. In this episode, I will detail how to put hands together in a way which is faster, easier, and will yield massive results, not just in the long term, but almost immediately. And while there are a lot of angles we could touch on today, I want to focus on three things you could do today to improve or develop if you feel like you're starting from scratch. Your hands together skills. I also will tell you about two things you are likely doing now, which you must stop and immediately. And I mean today. So get out your notebook or your practice journal and your favorite pen and be ready to take notes. Or just listen now and come back to this episode later to be sure you capture all the info you need. You're going to want it all, trust me.

But first, I want to give a special shout out and thank you to all of you who visited my Spotify channel and have become monthly link listeners. We have lots of new stuff in the works and I'm going to be so excited to share that with you as time goes on. If you haven't visited my Spotify channel, just head on over to Spotify. You can even search for Spotify with Ann Sullivan Harp. It makes it Easy to find and you'll see me. And you can become a monthly listener there too. And you'll get notice of all the new stuff that we post as it goes up. Also, a special thank you to those of you who are already registered for Technique Camp. Technique Camp is one of our summer Sizzler camps. We had practice camp a few weeks ago and Technique Camp is happening this week. It's a 90 minute workshop that we have, you know, made really fun, just like summer camp. So we, we've got a campfire song, we've got a game, we've got a craft, the whole thing. And this is all about technique. Not necessarily, not really, in fact about doing drills. We're not going to be doing a lot of drills. It's about how to use the exercises that you already do to help you play your music better. You know, we do all that technical stuff, but we don't always connect it to our music. There's not always, you know, that direct connection. We think, well, I could use some of the parts in my pieces, like exercises and I can do my exercises. But making that direct connection, figuring out what you need to make your fingers do their job better. And then you know what your technique, your technical work can actually do for your pieces, how to make that connection. That's what we're talking about in Technique Camp. So I'm looking forward to that. We've got a lot of people signed up. If you haven't joined us for Technique Camp yet, go ahead and register. So even if you're listening to this a little bit after the fact, because I know people go away in the summer. I do. So if you're listening to this a little bit after the fact, that's okay because you can still get in there. You won't be on the calls live, but you will have the replay. The thing is that it's only a 90 minute workshop and it only happens on one day, but I do it twice. The calls are essentially identical, but you get to attend either of them, or you can attend both of them if you want, but we record both of them and post those replays so you can join Technique Camp even if it's already happened and, and still get all the info, all the advantage of everything. So you get the PDF and the replays and the whole thing. And in fact, Practice Camp has already happened, but you could still join Practice Camp the same way too. So be sure to check that out. You'll find the link for Technique Camp in our show notes and that'll point you to all the other Sizzler camps as well. We have one more coming up after that, the beginning of August, and it will be official finish camp about how to take your music from that, you know, messy middle point to the finish point. So we'll be working at that at our third Sizzler camp this summer. So I would encourage you to check both of those out. And in fact, some of the things we're talking about today will be only enhanced by the stuff we're talking about in technique camp. It's technique camp won't as be. Won't be as specific to hands together playing. Today we're really going to get down to the nitty gritty and talk about what makes hands together playing different and what makes it more difficult and how you can make it easier. And we're going to start that now.

I want you to think about your harp playing for a minute. Not about what's good about it or what's bad about it, but what it actually is. I mean, when you play the harp, what are you doing? Not, once again, at this artistic, musical level, but physically, what are you actually doing? Well, you're reading music, so you're looking at something. You're assessing, you know, what those dots on the page mean in terms of what strings you need to play, what fingers you need to play it with, what rhythm those notes are going to be. You're listening to them and figuring out, you know, does this sound right? Does it sound wrong? Is it major? Is it minor? How does this play into the whole piece? Where is it in the melody? So you're reading, you're listening, and somehow those notes, those things that you see translate into directions for your fingers, and your fingers get on the strings, hopefully the right ones, and hopefully the right fingers on those right strings. And then your brain sends signals to actually play. There's a lot of stuff that's going on. I mean, thank goodness we are able to do this kind of processing with our supercomputer brains and not think about it, right? If we had to do all of this consciously imagine how painful doing anything would be. If you had to say, okay, now, second finger. You're going to put the pad of your finger on the string, and now you're going to pull it toward the hand. There we go. Pull it all the way in. And if you had to think about every muscular movement, it would take forever. And we do. Our brains just automatically fire that information. Our fingers go, yep. And stuff happens. Sometimes it's the right stuff, sometimes it's not. But that's what practice is about. So that's not our problem. And so when we're doing all that stuff, we are busy. We might not think about it as being busy. It's amazing to me how we're doing all this stuff and we can still go on autopilot, can't we, and be playing something almost unconsciously. It's astounding. What miracles of computing and all this kind of processing, everything we are as human beings, it's just astounding. So, you know, let's acknowledge that we're doing a lot. Whether we're playing with one finger, one hand, two hands, two hands and two feet, I don't know. But when we're doing just hands separately, practice, just one hand at a time, we've got all that stuff happening. So I'm going to break it down into sort of three components. We're reading the music, we're placing our fingers, and we're playing our fingers, right? So those sort of three big categories of stuff that's really all I can think of, the micro things that. The micro parts of the process that happen in there, we're just sort of going to lump under these three big categories. So we're going to read, place and play. And when we're doing this with just one hand, you know, hands separately, right? Just one hand, we have it in that horizontal dimension only. We're looking at one line of music, we're following it across. So part of our reading isn't just looking at a single note. It's allowing us to track that music in a forward motion. Right. We're not just reading this note, then reading this note, then reading this note, we're reading, placing, playing while we're reading the next note so we can place and play it. So while we're reading the next note so we can place and play it. So we're always sort of reading a little bit ahead, and then our fingers are doing what we're reading, but we're already reading the next one. It's this amazing cycle that happens. It's a lot of stuff just for one hand at a time. Now, when we put two hands together, though, we're not just doing all the processing for one hand and all the processing for the other hand as well, but we're creating a coordination between the hands that's totally separate. So hands together isn't just left hand plus right hand. It's not just one plus one equals two. It's left hand plus right hand plus an entirely different coordination. It's More like one plus one equals a million. There's so much more that happens.

So while we are systematizing our reading and our placing nicely with one hand at a time, and you might get your right hand going beautifully and your left hand going beautifully, realizing, of course, that your right hand is. And this word is in little air quotes here. Your right hand is reading treble clef. I mean, obviously your right hand doesn't read it, but, you know, it understands what your brain is telling it, and it goes on to the treble clef strings. Right. And. And your left hand is reading bass clef. Once again, when we combine them, we have two clefs going at once. No wonder hands together playing is hard. So let's just take a moment and just absorb the idea that hands together playing is not just, okay, well, I can play my left hand and I can play my right hand, and they work just fine. So hands together will work just fine. No, there's no guarantee of that at all because hands together is completely different. So in order to read hands together music, you know, both clefs at the same time. Both hands at the same time, whether they're in separate clefs or not. Right. So in order to read those two lines together, we're reading with a completely different processing that we want to coordinate. And then our placing of our left hand and right hand is going to be another coordination. Sometimes they might place in a similar way. Sometimes they might place identically. Often maybe most of the time they're placing differently because they're going to play different things. And so we've got a different coordination that has to allow us to process the information that, okay, this hand's doing one thing, this hand's doing another thing, and they need to be doing this at the same moment. Two different things, most likely at the same moment. So our reading is going to involve a different coordination, a different process. Our placing is going to involve a different process. And we thought it was just our playing because if we get our the right fingers on the right strings, that's only two thirds of our task. Our third task is, okay, my fingers are here. Which one fires now? Right? Yeah, exactly. So we want to know which finger has to fire, and that's yet another place we could get fouled up. So there are three things that happen in a different way when we're reading hands together or playing hands together. We need to be super solid in our note reading, knowing both clefs. If you're still struggling with bass clef or with treble Clef. If that's the way you roll, then it's time to do just a little bit of extra work to make sure that you get that skill as. As, you know, as developed as it can be. Right. So always, you know, always working at your note reading is not a bad thing to do because, trust me, memorizing isn't going to help here either. So it's just going to make the process slower. We need to be able to read well in both of those clefs. We need to be able to trust our fingers. That's why we do technique work. Some of the stuff we're talking about in technique camp, again, that's why we do our technique work, so we can trust our fingers to do their jobs without us having to think, okay, now, third finger, you're going to pull the string and all those little minute details. They need to take care of that on their own. And they will. If we've done enough playing, you know, if we've done a reasonable amount of playing and done our, you know, our technique work all along. Yeah, we can trust our fingers more than we usually do, I think. And then we need to control time. Ooh, there's a scary part. But in hands together playing, much more so than in hands separately playing, we need to be sure that we are lining everything up in time so that the things that need to be read together are read at the same time, that need to be placed together are placed at the same time, that need to be played together are played at the same time.

And obviously, rhythms might be different and your hands are going to do different things, but the fact is that that first beat and the second beat, the third beat in the measure happen at a specific time, and everything needs to be there. Your hands need to be on the right strings, and you need to know what those strings are. That's the reading part. They need to be on the right strings, and then they need to play the right strings. It's a lot. Okay, so hands together is hard. You knew that, but now you know why. And now that you know why, we're going to make it less hard, I promise. But we're going to start with a couple of things that you must not do. And the thing is, we all do them at some point. But I'm here to change the way you think about hands together playing. And the first thing, the most important, the thing that will make the biggest difference for you to stop doing. I want you to stop learning hands separately first before you drew hands together. Now, I know this is heresy. This goes against what many of you were taught from the beginning.

But I'd like to tell you that this is a better way. What I'm about to tell you, when you spend a lot of time learning right hand and getting that just so, and you're learning your left hand and getting that just so, and your hands separately are terrific. Well, that's really nice, and it's really good, and it's not time wasted. Exactly, because we want our hands to know how to play their stuff.

But hopefully you understand from what I was just telling you about that that didn't help you put those hands together. Hands together is different. Hands together is not. Well, I've learned my right hand, I've learned my left hand, and so now hands together will work. That doesn't. Hands together is different. So please, when you start that next piece.

Don'T figure that. Okay, I'm going to learn my right hand, and I'm going to learn my left hand this week, and I'm going to do that. And then next week, I'll start putting it hands together. No, no, no, no. I'd love to suggest something completely different, and I know it's not going to be comfortable for you, but take the first line of your piece. Take the first few measures. If that's all you think you can muster the energy for, do the whole piece, but do it hands together the very first time you see it. Okay, it's going to be a struggle.

But you will have already done it. So first of all, you will have climbed that mountain. You will have done the hardest thing, which is to put those hands together first. That doesn't mean it's going to be pretty, doesn't mean it's going to be smooth or correct. Although if you get used to this and your hands together, playing gets more fluent, guess what's going to happen. That part's going to be much, much easier. But if you tell yourself that you're just going to learn the hands separately now and then learn, learn hands together later.

You'Re just putting off the evil day. So get in there and learn and play it. That section, take four bars. Play it hands together. Play it hands together one more time. Then go back, look at the right hand, and just make sure that all of you know that your right hand knows what it's doing for those four bars, that your left hand know what it's doing for those four bars. So check it hands separately, and then do it hands together two more times. Make hands together your default learning system. Hands separately is really good practice for checking something, you know, okay, this is hands together and it's got some rough spots. Let me make sure my right hand is good with its fingering and all that stuff. Let me make sure that my left hand is good with its fingering and all that stuff. And then I'll go back to hands together.

The objection that I hear from a number of harpists is that, well, I'm not good enough to do that yet.

My answer to that is this is how you get good enough. You have to realize that hands together playing is what you want to do. I mean, assuming that your piece has a part for a left hand and a right hand, your piece isn't going to sound like a piece until it's got both of them. So let's make learning the hands together the priority and hands separately practice the way to fix and polish and, you know, correct what you need to correct. So that's my first don't. And I've got to get off my soapbox because I can be on this one for a long time. So that's my first don't. Don't make it a practice to learn hands separately first. Hands together right from the beginning. Here's the second one. Hopefully by the time we get through today's episode, I can turn this around for you. But the second don't I have for you is.

A phrase that I learned from the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. No stinkin thinkin'.

I want you to stop thinking that you can't do hands together. You can learn this. You just haven't had the system for learning hands together taught to you. It's not your fault. We teachers just say, okay, well, you know, take this and do it hands together three times. Do it hands separately twice. Whatever it is we tell you without really detailing instructions for how to put something hands together, it's really truly easier than you think. Now, I know you've been trying to work on your hands together skills with your pieces, and that's why it's hard.

Right? We just say, okay, put it hands together. And you're struggling with notes and rhythm and all those complexities that come with a piece. That's why it's hard. That's why it's frustrating. I'm going to show you now three steps. I'm calling them my three do's. Right? Three things that you should do that are going to help you practice your hands together skills, not just practice your music with both hands. Do you see the difference? Yeah. If you're practicing your music with your, with both hands, with hands together, the way I just recommended you to, then you know, that's, that's great, but you haven't built up the skills for that. You build up skills in your technical exercises all the time. Right? We practice our scales, we practice our chords, we practice our intervals and our arpeggios, those basic skills, those fundamental skills. And we usually practice them hands separately or maybe hands together. And usually when they're hands together, they're both hands doing the same thing or close to the same thing. Maybe scales in tenths or something. Right?

What I want you to do, this is our do number one, is that I want you to mix and match those basic drills. So when you do those basic drill exercises, I'm going to play my scales, I'm going to play my intervals, or I'm going to play my arpeggios, or I'm going to play my chords. Say, all right, well let me practice my scales. Practice them your normal way and maybe practice scales and maybe chords. Okay, I'm going to practice my chords. Then what I want you to do is play a scale passage, a scale drill in one hand and a chord drill in the other hand. Make it very simple, but just something really basic going up this, going up the scale is fine. You know, Do a C scale in your right hand while you play a C chord in your left hand. Maybe playing that C chord on every other note. Right. You're doing a scale, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. And you're playing your left hand on C and E and G and A and C. Right. So that you're playing a chord and playing a scale.

Yeah. And then reverse it. Have your left hand do the scale and your right hand do the chord. Guess what? You're practicing hands together. You're practicing playing hands together. You're getting your hands to do two different things at the same time and you're matching them. You can do the same thing with simple three note arpeggios, like a ceg. Maybe a ceg kind of arpeggio. And do that in one hand while you're doing a scale in the other hand. Don't worry if the notes don't exactly sound beautiful together. That's not the point of this particular kind of practice. The point of this is to get your hands doing two different things at the same time. Now eventually there are, you know, there are complicated versions of this where you can be doing more intricate patterns or, you know, things where your hands are doing wildly different and More difficult things. But let's start basic. Have one hand do one and another hand do another. Keep it easy, keep it simple, keep it basic. Okay, so combining basic drills, mixing and matching basic drills would be do number one, do number two. What I would like you to do is to sight read something that's super easy every day. So we'll give this one the title of Super Easy Sight read. Okay, So I want you to pull out the most beginner book you have. The kind of beginner book that is the sort of thing you first look at when you first see the harp and go to the very first piece that has two hands in it. I know one of the first series I started when I started the harp as a, as a young student, as an 8 year old was I worked from the fun from the first series by Sam Milligan. And so you can go into those books, they're perfect. Sylvia woods teach yourself to play the Folkhart book, Perfect. The Suzanne McDonald Linda Wood Harp Olympics books, perfect. Betty Perrette first harp book, perfect.

Anything that is easy for you, but hands together and I want you. And you know, it can be four measures long, it can be eight measures long, something really super easy. But sight read one of those every day.

Hands together, of course, don't spend any time hands separately. That's not the point. You're going to sight read it hands together. What is this going to do for you? Well, first of all, beginner pieces use those same basic building blocks. I was just talking about the scales, the intervals, the simple arpeggios, the simple three note chords. Those beginner pieces are going to use those same things. They just don't have quite the pattern and predictability that a drill does. On the other hand, they're usually simple and often familiar melodies. Right. Kind of think twinkle, twinkle Little star sort of thing so that you have that going for you. So this is one step up from the mix and match strategy I just shared with you. You're going to take those super easy pieces, sight read one every day. You know, sight read it, turn the page the next day, do another one, turn the page, do another one, whatever it is. And probably there are two or three of those on the same page so you won't even have to turn pages so often. But keep that book right there and you know, make it a habit to play hands together.

Right away for one of those kinds of pieces. It'll get you more accustomed to, to the hands together way of thinking and it will use the skills that you're building from those Mix and match skills. So that's a fabulous way to do it. The sight reading will also just, you know, give you that sight reading edge too. You know, it'll check your note reading, all that good stuff. So the sight reading is a terrific drill for this. Don't skip it, please. All right.

And then the third one. I know. I wonder if you can guess what the third one is. You can think about the things I like to talk about and maybe you've already figured it out. I want you, when you do your hands together, practice, whether you're doing it with the basic mix and match drills that we were talking about or your sight reading, or whether you're doing it in a piece of I want you to be sure that you're practicing your hands together, playing with counting and with the metronome. Now, it doesn't have to be fast. Remember I just talked a couple of episodes ago on episode 111 of the podcast about using your metronome to create time to slow time for you. And I'm gonna. And one of the things your metronome can do for you if you have a passage in your piece, for instance, that works okay, hands separately. Not okay, hands together. Find a nice comfy hand separately tempo and put your metronome to that tempo. Maybe that tempo is a quarter note like this.

And maybe that's a nice tempo and you can play both hands separately at that speed. Well, let's take that same quarter note speed, that same metronome. Click. But let's make it worth the eighth note now. And let's try it. Hand hands together with the metronome counting carefully, but with the metronome now in eighth notes. So where we were doing before, in our hands separately playing, we were doing 1, 2, 3, 4. Now in our hands together playing, we're doing 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. And if that hasn't created enough time for you, make it even slower. You could make it the 16th note, for instance, 1E and 2E and right. So you want to count because that's going to help you make sure that you're playing the right beat at the right time. So even if you weren't using the metronome, counting would be important because it's going to, you know, if you're saying one and two and you're going to be able to line up that part of the beat that you're saying with where you ought to be on the page and it's going to help you keep your place a little bit better. The Metronome, though, is going to give you the solid foundation for building the process, for building the coordination that we want to have happen.

When you can.

Get your hands together.

Smoothly at a tempo, even if it's an excruciatingly slow tempo, your hands are doing exactly what you want them to do, but they're doing it in sort of super slow motion, but they're working. That means you've got the coordination going. And from there you can start to speed it up. Because at that point, you have taught all your processes, the reading, the placing and the playing, to work together and to work in sync. And now we're just going to turn up the speed, but the processing will still be there, and you'll be able to speed up.

For a little bit and still feel comfortable with the processing. There will come a point where all of a sudden you know that you've gone, you know, a notch too far. You've gone just a little bit too far. And you can feel the processes jam up in your head. You can feel that sort of mental confusion like, okay, wait, what comes next? Okay, and that's time to just step it back down just a little bit.

Work at the fastest tempo that you can, work comfortably and then push up from there and let it. Let it be gradual. Let yourself sink back into the comfort level whenever you want. Go back and go. Do it more slowly because that will help you refresh everything. Remember, you're building the coordination of processes. You're not just trying to get to the right notes. You're trying to make everything line up. And that's really the key to this whole discussion. That's what I want you to take away from this, because that's the reason for the don'ts and the do's today. The coordination of processes that happens hands together is why practicing hands separately and expecting that to work for hands together playing doesn't work because the processing is different. And it's also why this is easier than you think. If you've been trying to get to hands together playing from hands separately playing. That's why it's difficult, because there's a better way. There's another way to do this, and that's what we described in the three do's here. The mix and match basic drills. Take your very basic basic exercises, the kinds that you don't need music for. Do some simple scales or arpeggios or intervals or chords. Have one hand do one, the other hand do the other. Switch it up so that your hands get used to playing together. Also do these drills with the metronome because once again, we're building in the coordination of these things. Right. Okay. Do number two, the super easy sight reading. Super easy. But it's got to be hands together first. You don't get to do this hand separately. You only get to do it hands together. Once again, we're just stepping up slightly from the basic drills to an actual piece, even if it is a little baby piece. And do number three, always count and always use the metronome when you're working with hands together skills development, particularly. I mean, you know, I use it when I do my hands together practice for a piece too. Right. But. But always for this kind of skills development because that's where the coordination will be. It will be when you have defined amount of time to make all those things happen. The read, place and play system. Right. So that's hands together playing and processing. I imagine that for some of you, this is a whole new way to look at it, and I really encourage you to try it because it will make a huge change in the way you think about hands together playing, in the way you approach everything. When you get more comfortable with it, you will learn your music faster. And you know that's where the fun is, right? Absolutely. That's where the fun is. So there's more of this, more of these little, little gems to come in our technique Summer Sizzler camp. So if you haven't signed up for that already, and thank you to those of you who have the link to join us is in the show notes for today's episode, or you can find it at upcoming events on heartmastery.com.

We have some fun stuff to talk about. Next week, we'll be talking about Christmas in July. And this isn't all about not. No. It's mostly. Let me put it that way, it's mostly not about how to prepare your music for next Christmas. It's more about how you can add some Christmas cool to your harp playing this summer. So there are some interesting things you may not have thought of that we'll be talking about on the podcast next week. So I hope you join me for that. Please. 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.