Tuning Masterclass: Learning to Listen - PHH 073

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I, although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show. If I had to choose one tool that made a harpist life easier, I know exactly which one I would choose. The electronic tuner. Now, I belong to the last generation of harpists that grew up in a world without them, so I know what I'm talking about. Having a device that allowed you to tune in a noisy environment and be confident that your harp was really in tune was new technology when I was a student, and it was a game changer. I mean, just imagine trying to tune your harp on stage while the rest of the orchestra is warming up. Violins and piccolo showing off their highest notes, double basses and timpani making anything below middle C inaudible and the brass instruments heroically filling in the middle. Tuning in orchestra used to be a guessing game. Now, as grateful as I am for my tuner, there was an unintended consequence to this technological revolution. We harpists have stopped listening. Consider for a moment how we tune with a tuner. We play a string and then look at the tuner to see if it's in tune. Now, certainly that's the good thing about using a tuner when you're in a place where you can't hear what you're playing. But over time, using a tuner this way can cause us to stop listening to tune with our eyes instead of our ears. In essence, the tuner can train us not to listen. Of course, it all depends on how you use the tuner. A little effort and thought can turn the tuner into a powerful ear training tool.

On today's show, I'm going to share a portion of a masterclass on tuning that I gave to our my Harp Mastery members. Now, in the portion of the class I'M sharing with you. I talk about three methods of tuning with a tuner and how you can use each method to help you develop your ear and help you learn to listen. I also share the value of tuning as a pre practice habit. Plus you'll hear me answer a couple of questions from the members on the call. Note that this was a live video call and there may be references to something I'm demonstrating that you won't be able to see on this podcast or PDFs that the members have. But I know that you'll find this information incredibly useful, just the way everyone on the call did. Before we get to the masterclass, however, I want to remind you that now is the time to register for my free webinar. 3 Good Practice Habits that are keeping you from playing the way you want and how to break them. Yes, that's right. Remember I've been telling you that there are practice habits that you are doing religiously and they're ones that you know are the right things to do and you're doing them well and they're still not getting results for you. Well, I need to show you how to get past those, that these are good habits. Yes, but they're getting in your way and they're not letting you play the way you want. So I'll show you what works instead. I promise. I'm not going to have you stop doing all the things that you know are right to do, but I'm going to show you how to use them, how to do those things properly and how to do the things that are really going to get you to play the music the way you want to play it. Now this is the time to take this webinar. Believe me. First of all, this is the time of year we want to do that, right? You want to prepare for all those performances that are coming up toward the end of the year. And this is the time to learn how to make those happen so that they really you can really shine. Right? You want your heart playing to shine in the holidays, and who doesn't? But we want to set that up now, so find out what you need to do now. Second thing is that this webinar is coming up really soon. The webinar is happening this Thursday. That's the Thursday after this podcast is released. So it's coming up quickly. So don't miss this chance to register. The webinar is free and it's a lot of good information, information that's really going to make a difference for you. So I want you to Be sure that you are there. Yes, there will be a replay, but you have to register for the webinar, otherwise we have no way to send the replay to you. So go ahead, register for this webinar. Also, I'll give you a special little heads up on this webinar. I'm going to be giving you the first access to a brand new mini course that I'm running live that's going to take all this learning that we were talking about on the webinar and take it to the next level and really prepare you to play with confidence. That's a huge hint and I can't tell you anymore right now, but I will tell you on the webinar. So go ahead, register for that webinar and I look forward to seeing you on Thursday. Now, on with our masterclass.

Quick show of hands. Are you more tempted to think of tuning as a chore that you have to do rather than just kind of part of your practice? Raise your hand if it's more of a chore. Feels like more of a chore. Yeah. Yeah. Good show of hands. It's. Thank you for being honest. Yeah, I think most of us think of tuning as being, okay, something I have to do. And, well, I won't do it if I don't have to. If I can get away without it, I won't do it. And I'm right in there with you. You know, it's one of those things that's just, gosh, I've got an hour to practice and I don't want to spend the, you know, five minutes of my hour tuning. And granted, sometimes it doesn't take that much time, sometimes it takes more time depending on what's going on with your harp. So. And what's going on with the weather or anything else. Right. So it can absolutely be a chore. But I want you to see if you can change your mindset around tuning just a little bit or at least some of the time. And rather than thinking of it as a chore, I want you to think of it first of all as being good for your harp and it is good for your heart. Right. A harp that is kept in tune stays in tune better. Everything just, you know, works out better if you keep it in tune. And of course that is beneficial for you too, because it takes less time to tune every day because it doesn't get quite so far out of tune on most days. There are those days when the harp just gets totally wacky. But, you know, nothing you can do is going to prevent that. So it's good for your harp. It's also an excellent transition. Right. What I like about tuning is, is that it's that moment that separates whatever I was doing that wasn't harp related and my practice. So it's a wonderful moment of transition. It's like, okay, I'm not, you know, I'm not ready to practice yet. You know, my mind is still on whatever else I was doing, but by the time I'm finished tuning, I'm really ready to play. That's the nice thing about being impatient with your tuning. Right. It makes you really ready to play. But it's a great transition. It helps you focus, it helps get your mind in the right place. And of course, it's preparing your harp at the same time. But most of all, what's really important about tuning is that it should be an essential part of your ear training. I like what Cindy just wrote in here. She wrote, she likes to think of tuning like doing initial breathing before yoga practice. Yeah, it's very much like that. Right. So it's just like something before a workout, which is what Laurie chimed in. It's just like that. But it's really good for your ear. So most of us, when we tune, I mean, now, when I grew up, tuning did not involve anything that looks like a tuner. I mean, when I grew up, we had tuning forks and that was it. And you'd strike it. I have tuning forks here somewhere. I just didn't get one out. But you'd strike the tuning fork and then hold it to the sound, maybe, or up to your ear, and you'd hear the pitch. Maybe it was a C or an A. They were the two tuning forks that I had. Or maybe you'd check a note with the piano, but you had one note as a reference and then you had to tune from there. Tuning was a whole different experience. Now, with a quartz tuner like this or whatever kind of tuner you have, tuning has become very visual, right? Because we look for the lights to light up or the. And, you know, maybe your tuners on your phone, same thing. You're looking for the little dials to stop or the lights to flash or the needles to line up. And you're looking.

For the tuner to tell you when it's in tune and you're not necessarily listening. Now, this is not me blaming any of you because I do the same sort of thing when I'm using the tuner. I'm looking now, I try to make myself listen to. And of course, the Tuner being so visual is great if you're in a noisy environment and you need to tune because you can see the tuner is listening for you and you can see. So it's wonderful for that. And you know, when, when tuners first came out, I remember the first tuner that my teacher had, it was a strobe tuner. It was a con strobe tuner and it was a huge box. Dennis is nodding like, yeah, it was a huge box and it had this big stand up kind of microphone and, and, and the little dials went around and everything lined up and it was, it was great, but it was not very portable. And a few, over, you know, a couple of years, they got smaller. And by the time I was able to afford a strobe tuner, I got a Peterson strobe tuner and it was a big black box, but it had a handle it. And I would take it with me on every important job I did, but I had to have an outlet to plug it into. So stagehands in theaters all across the, all across the world, I'm sure, but certainly everywhere I went, those stage hands were trained up. I was going to need a long extension cord from somewhere backstage to where my harp was going to be on stage so I could plug my strobe tuner in. And gosh, those days were a long time ago. But.

This is the tuner I carry with me now if it's not my cell phone. The tuner I was carrying with me then weighed 12 pounds. It wasn't anything you could put in another bag. It was hefty all by itself. Now then they got smaller and eventually we had those nice little quartz tuners and, you know, that part of things, you know.

But I mention all this just to tell you that someplace in that transition between the tuning fork, which was great, and being able to take your cell phone with you to tune someplace in that space of time, in that technological advancement, we lost the focus for our tuning, which is that we need to learn to hear. Tuning helps us discern things about pitch, helps us focus on sound. It's not just about whether knowing something is in tune or not, but it's about how it is in tune or how it is out of tune and being able to make an adjustment, being able to focus on what you hear rather than just what you see. Now, this has larger implications too, because.

When we have our focus on looking at whether or not something's in tune instead of listening, that carries over into our playing. Maybe you've wondered if you know you're playing a piece and you're playing something and your teacher will say F sharp, and you hadn't really noticed what was going, what was wrong, they're responding to what they hear.

And perhaps you were responding to what you see. So there's a big. A big difference here. So listening is what we need to do. And listening. Training your listening skills is easiest through tuning. There are just a few basic rules that apply to any harp and any kind of tuning, and they are these. First of all, you want to tune when there's no extra pressure on your strings. So for pedal harpists, this means you need to tune with all your pedals up so that all those discs are released and you're tuning the string at its full length, whatever that happens to be. So pedal harpists, we're tuning in C flat major. Isn't that exotic? No other instrument in the world would like to tune in C flat major, but that's what we tune in. So feel special lever harpus. It means you need to tune with all your levers down so that you don't have any extra pressure on your strings either. When we have a harp regulated, the regulation is. And I'll use the pedal harp as an example because that's what I've got, but it works with lever harp as well. The idea behind regulation is that when your string has. Let me get. There's a C string. There we go. My petals are. That pedals up anyway. So that C string is now C flat. And then the. The regulator is going to make sure that when it goes to natural, that's exactly a half step. And when it goes to sharp, that's exactly another half step. So that's what they're regulating. So if you tune from flat for a pedal harp or with your lever down, whatever kind of note that is on your lever harp, whether it's a natural or a flat, you're tuning the string without any extra tension on it. And you're tuning it in a way that's likely to give you the truest tuning.

It will also be much better for your regulation because you're not running, you're not pulling your string through the discs or across the. The lever. It saves wear and tear on your strings and it saves wear and tear on your regulation. So you want to tune with your pedals up or your levers down.

After that.

Make sure that your tuner is set properly.

Most tuners have an adjustment. It'll be a little calibration adjustment. And that's where you can let me see what my tuner says here because every tuner is a little bit different. This tuner has a little calibration adjustment here. It says calib. And if I push it up or down, I can change where the A is. So right now, if I push calibration, it's showing me what that I'm. Right now it's pushed up to a 443. It's like a little number here. And if I push calibration back down, I can get it to a 440. So sometimes we push buttons by accident and you can. It can get a little wacky. So, you know, that's just something to watch for.

A couple other little things. A pickup, a tuning pickup, very helpful because your tuner won't hear every note and you shouldn't count on your tuner hearing every note.

Because you're going to use your ears. But a pickup that plugs right into your tuner is very helpful. You can clip it then you could clip it on a metal part of your harp. You can. I clip mine inside the soundboard or I'll clip it on an edge. You can clip it here, you can clip it anywhere. It works. And of course, some smaller tuners there, you can clip it right on the tuning pins and that'll work. But pickup is very helpful. Now, I also have, I don't have one on here right now. It's in my bag. But the tuners come with.

This big plug because that's what, you know, the, that's what's going to plug into your tuner. So the pickups will come with that big plug. You can buy an adapter that changes this into a little teeny plug that will plug into your headphone jack on your phone. Now, if you have a newer phone that doesn't have a headphone jack, then your. You need still another adapter to do that. You can get the little adapter that goes into the. To the, to the USB or USC or, you know, Lightning port, whatever it is on your phone. Right. So there are adapters to do that. So let me see what we got here. Should the pickup be moved on the harp as you work your way up the strings? If you have to. It doesn't. I, I don't because, Bob, I take it and I just put it inside the harp. I. This harp has a little tuning key holder that's in the way. So I will clamp it inside the harp on one of the metal ribs inside my harp and I just leave it there while I'm Tuning and it'll do the whole harp. But if you're not getting enough, enough pickup, then yeah, move it up to where, up to where you can. Then there's one other rule and that is.

Don'T play it a million times. Play it the way you're going to play it with your finger. Like, you know, play it the right way. Don't just, you know, use decent technique because that's. I don't know if you've noticed this, but you can change the pitch of a string by the way you play it. And the pitch of the string with your thumb is going to be a little bit different than with your finger. We can't help that. But use good technique. Play it and then let the tuner settle out. Don't just keep playing it until you get a reading. Play it and let the tuner hear it. Because you might find that the tuner needles sort of. It's, it's under, it's over dirt and then it settles in a place. See where it settles. Don't overplay it. Let your tuner tell you what's going on. So when you're tuning with the tuner, you're going to let the tuner hear your string. Now my tuner is telling me that's a little bit low, kind of sort of.

So there we go. But notice I'm not doing that. We don't need to do that, right? Just play it and let the tuner hear it and decide you're going to do the same thing when you tune. So that when you tune by ear, and that's what we're talking about here, I'm going to tune.

Make sure I have an ins. An in tune string. Let me make sure I get this in the right order for you. We want your string to be in tune. Then your going to tune another string to that note. And when you do that, you play the in tune. Oops. You play the in tune string first, then the other one. You want to be sure that you're tuning the out of tune string or the potentially out of tune string to the string that's in tune, not the other way around. So play the one that you know is right first and then play the one that's wrong or that you want to check. So you're going to tune the in tune string then the out of tune string and then try them together so that you tune the out of tune string to the in tune string. It's easy to mess up if you haven't been pretty systematic about it. So I've outlined on your PDF essentially three methods of tuning. One is tune every note with the tuner.

And you can.

It's a little bit tedious. It's the slowest way to tune because it's not giving you credit for your own musicality and your own ear, and it's a little slower. But when you do that, just be sure that you're listening, you know, that. That you're giving the tuner time to listen and that you're a little bit. A little bit systematic about it. Don't drift off. In the meantime, I, you know, it's really easy to let your mind wander on the PDF here. What did I say? It has the advantage of the tuner doing all the work for you, but the tuner might not hear every string, in which case you're going to still need to use your ear. What do you know?

I always like to start in the middle of the harp, whether I'm using a tuner or not. Because.

If I'm not using the tuner, if I start and make that middle octave in tune first, if. If I go out of tune as I go up the harp and out of tune as I go down the harp, I'll only get half as far out of tune as if I start at the bottom and try to tune from the bottom all the way up. Does that make sense? So tuning the middle first gives you the best option for making your harp really in tune. And let's look at tuning method 2. Tuning method 2 is. Is really good for helping you learn to tune by ear. It gives you the security of working with the tuner and then the opportunity to make yourself think and really work at tuning by ear. So we start by tuning that first octave with the tuner. All right. I got my C in tune. It's pretty much in tune from where I left it before. I like it. My D.

Okay. My E. Oh, that E is sharp.

Okay. My F.

Try that again.

The tuner seems to settle out on a little bit flat. Let's.

It's a tad sharp right now, but it's a tiny bit sharp. Okay. The G.

My tuner says it's sharp. I don't trust it, but I will trust it.

There we go.

Okay. Don't worry if the tuner, you know, is telling you you're tuning a G flat and it's telling you it's an F sharp. Don't let that bother you. Right. Okay. It's an A flat. Good. B flat. Oh, that's a little flat. I could even Hear that?

There we go. And we'll do one more C. Just because. Oh, I already did that one. What do you know? So now we have the whole middle octave in tune. And we tuned it with the tuner. So I tuned it mostly visually. So we've tuned the middle octave with the tuner, and now we're gonna. We're gonna go off on our own and we're gonna tune by ear. So the idea is we're going to tune in octaves, and I like to tune going down first, because if you tune the lower registers on the harp, then they'll resonate nicely when you tune the upper end of the harp. And you'll hear the. The whole harp tell you whether or not it's in tune. So the next note I would tune then would be the B flat below middle C. I haven't done that. And we're going to tune it by. I listen to the B flat that's in tune, the B flat that's out that I haven't tuned yet. I'll play them separately. I'll play them together. Oh, listen. Together, you can hear it go. It's. It's not in tune. So I have to be sure that I'm fixing the lower one. There's the upper one. Here's the lower one. And now's the moment of truth. You have to decide whether it's a little too high, a little too low. If you haven't tuned by ear very much, it's okay if you're not right, but make small, pretty small adjustments. Now, on the big strings.

A small adjustment is not. You're not going to hear it a lot on the little strings, a small adjustment could be too big and will make your string break. Right? So you want to, you know, tune it somewhat. You can tell that's out of tune. Now there's my in tune. It's a little too high. So I'm going to tune it down and I'll check it again. Oh, that's better. Let me check it. Oh, that really is pretty good.

Okay, I'll take that. It doesn't have to be perfect perfect. It just has to be close enough. Because perfect perfect sometimes doesn't happen, especially with gut strings. And if you like, you can check it with a tuner and see how you did. The needle's straight up. I must have done okay. All right, let's do A's. So there's my in tune. Oh, it doesn't sound right either. Let's play them together.

And once again.

This is too High. I've had windows open and our weather dried out today, so it's not surprising that this is a little high.

I'll play it. And I. Did you hear what I just did? I played it and made the adjustment while it was still vibrating so that I could sort of hear what I was doing and hear it line up.

Isn't that a nicely in tune octave? Can you tell? You don't hear any of those little beats and it just sounds right. And you're going to work your way all the way down the harp that way and then you come back and you work your way all the way up the harp now. So that's what you're going to do. You're going to listen, check it with the tuner, tune it until you think it's right, check it with the tuner again. And that's how you learn how you use the tuner to help you learn to tune. But method three is where you kind of free yourself from the tuner almost all together. And what you're going to do is tune just the one note to start with a C or a C flat or an E flat. If your lever harps tuned in F, then you have to move this to an F. But you're going to tune just one note with the tuner and then you use this pattern of fifths and octaves to tune. So that's what's outlined here on your PDF. It says, I think method three. There you go. So starting at letter B, you're going to tune the octave, then the fifth. Ah. So you have to learn how to tune a fifth. There you go. Then the octave, then the fifth, another fifth, then the octave, then another fifth. Right. And you'll do them that way and another fifth. And then the octave. Oops. In tune, that would be first. And then tune the fifth again.

And then.

Then you can tune by octaves all the way down again and by octaves all the way up. And once you've tuned that first octave, so finishing letter B on that, she do that proof pattern. See how you did.

And at any stage you can check it with the tuner. But that's how I learned to tune. I learned to take the C or the C flat or the A. Tune by Octave, tune by 5th Octave. 5th.

Tune that fifth. Sometimes I tune the fourth depending, and then I check my octave. I use a different proof pattern than that one and then I tune by octaves. From there it's. It becomes very fast. But that's how you tune. So does this make sense how you tune and how to tune with those octaves just to let yourself listen on the PDF, I've. I haven't been strong enough. I don't think about reminding you to actually listen, but in those little things, to remember. I do remind you to tune every day. But when you are tuning, remember you're training your ear and it's. You need to listen so that. Listen and evaluate. Decide which way you're going to tune. Just don't react right. Listen and think, I'm tuning this up. It's okay if you're wrong. You can always readjust right. It's like, whoa, okay, I thought that was sharp and it's flat. All right, never mind. I went the wrong way. So, you know, listen, check it with the, you know, check it with the tuner. Check your decision with the tuner. So check your progress. It will be slow. If you've never done this before, it's going to be a slow process. So just do that for an octave or so and then go back to tuning with the tuner just so you can get your harp tuned. But don't miss this opportunity to learn to listen. So listen and check and listen and check and make the decisions with your ears and not just your eyes.

I hope you enjoyed the portion of that masterclass on tuning from the My Heart Mastery archives. And I just wanted to clear up a couple points, couple questions you might have after that masterclass. One is about the calibration. I talk about the calibration on your tuner, and that's just the setting of the standard note that you're tuning to. The most common calibration setting, the one you're going to want to use. The one I use most often is a equal to 440. 440 is just the frequency of the pitch, and that's the most common, most universal standard. You'll find some deviations from this, of course, but tuning your harp to a 440 is pretty much what you want to do most of the time. The other thing I wanted to mention was about the proof pattern that I talk about, the series of chords that can help you be sure that you're tuning your harp the right way. It's just a little check to see if you've done it right. The proof pattern that I use most often is the one that's in the Method for the Heart book by Carlos Salzato and Lucille Lawrence. In fact, all the tuning instructions for that third method of tuning are in that text as well. So that's the Method for the harp book.

There are other method books that you know will instruct you on this and give you slightly different proof patterns as well. The Universal Method for the Harp by Boxa is one of those. It had a terrific tuning reference as well. So, you know, definitely check out a text like that if you want to see these things written down. They're all over the place. Just follow the steps. But remember to use your ear when you use your tuner. Your tuner is just a wonderful check so that you can see if a note's in tune and then look to see what the tuner says. Right? So you're gonna use your ears, then use your eyes, and that's how you learn to listen. You're gonna find that using your ears that way just helps you be so much more aware of everything you're hearing and everything that you're playing. It's a terrific skill to develop. And don't let your tuner prevent you from developing it. Use your tuner to help you. Another quick reminder. Please join us for that webinar on Thursday. Three good habits that you need to break. And we'll be talking all about that. I know you're gonna find that really helpful and clear a lot of the confusion out of the way for you. Uh, next week here on the podcast, we're gonna be talking about how to turn that piece into an etude the right way. You know, you're always saying, oh, well, you know, this piece is terrific. It's just like an etude. Well, is it really? And are you practicing it the right way to use it like an etude? So that's what we're gonna be talking about here on the podcast next week. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your sp. And all you have to do is play. I look forward to seeing 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.