Tweaking Your Technique: 3 Ways to Level Up - PHH 034

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.

Ah, technique. Working on it sounds dull, sounds not creative, definitely unmusical. And while there are great ways to make practicing technique more interesting and expressive, that's not what we're talking about today. What I want to talk about today is how the dull, routine, detailed type of technique work can be the missing piece in your harp playing. Now, not that you aren't doing that technical work already, but most of us harpists need reminding about why we need to do it and how to do it in a way that lets us level up. You know what I mean? Right? You've looked at pieces of music that you want to learn and maybe decided not to start them because you know that you weren't going be able to play it fast enough. Or maybe there were arpeggios that you knew you wouldn't be able to play with the smoothness that you want, or the chords that you couldn't place accurately or fast enough to make the piece what it was supposed to be. Now, maybe you decided to go ahead with the piece and learn the technique as you went along and that turned into a long haul, trying to learn that piece and the technique at the same time. And probably you never finished the piece. Now that's. That's a worst case scenario for sure. And I'm. I'm sure I'll. At least I hope that that hasn't been your usual M.O. right? You have had a more balanced approach than that. But still, trying to learn a new skill or take your technique to the next level at the same time you're trying to learn a piece is a very slow road. Now, the other side of the coin, for instance, right? You've got a strong, dependable Technique. And so you can learn the music that you want to play without struggling with fingers that won't do what you need them to. All you have to do is learn the notes. That's where we want to be at that level where our technique isn't holding us back, but is helping us move forward. Now, naturally, it takes some of that dull routine work to get there. And so you've been doing that, so why isn't it working? That's what I want to dive into today. Not just why your exercises and etudes and all the rest doesn't seem to be getting you anywhere, but what you can actually do about it. And I want to suggest not a huge overhaul of your technique work or hours of additional exercises. After all, if you remember last week's podcast, we're trying to look for that easy next step, right? That small bite, not try to eat that whole elephant all at once. And the good news is that's how technique growth happens, in small steps taken over time. But that doesn't mean that you can't speed up the process a little with just some key tweaks to what you're doing already.

Why simple tweaks? Well, because we tend to overload ourselves with everything that we think needs fixing, and you can't fix everything at once. Technique is a continuing process, right? I mean, like eating, for instance, right? If you eat well today, that doesn't mean that you don't have to eat well for the rest of the week. Same with technique work. It's a daily habit. And keeping that daily habit equals long term growth. But when it comes to technique, we want to make sure that your, your habits are going to take you where you want to go, not just keep you going around in circles.

So speaking of where you want to go, it is winter here and it's cold and it's snowy and it's rainy. And I am so looking forward to, to our getaway retreat in Florida in March. I am so ready to go there and get back to, to teaching in that wonderful location and that terrific house, working with a small group of harpists. And I would love you to be one of them. Our retreat is scheduled for March 23rd to 28th. It's in a, a house, a big house just for us in Davenport, Florida, which is near Orlando. So it makes it really easy to. And we can help arrange for harp rentals if that is something that you need and you're interested in coming to the retreat. So don't let that stop you when it comes to the, the COVID protocols. You know, we're in the midst right now of another sort of resurgence with that extremely transmissible. Transmissible. Is that the right word? Omicron variant. So, so it, you know, it's a little scary. I get that. And we're going to do everything that we can do to make sure that you can attend safely. So we'll see what, you know, see how the situation progresses and find out exactly what we need to do as we get a little bit closer. But I thought you might want to just get a little picture of what a day at the retreat is like. And you know, we had our last retreat here just before the pandemic hit. You know, we got home and I think the pandemic hit that, you know, things were starting to become panicky the following week. So it's, you know, this will be two years since we've done one of these and I'm really excited about it. But think about what that day might be like. Usually, you know, we, we are, you know, you can do what you like in the, in the first part of the morning we get together and, and have breakfast, which of course is cooked right in our house. So, you know, so that's easy to do. We have a wonderful, a wonderful friend who takes care of the, of and the cooking and all that stuff for us. So it makes it extra, extra nice. And so, so we have breakfast. Then we start with some, some stretching, some physical, you know, stretching and physical warmup. My friend Mary Jane d' Arville is going to be at the retreat again this year, or at least is planning to be. And so she always leads us in these really creative and fun sort of warm ups. Then we have our, at the harp warmups, we have some workshops, we have some ensemble and masterclass time that comes up during these few days. But every day you get some, one, you know, one on one time with me and with M.J. and so you're getting the instruction you need and the, the, the really incomparable experience of being with a group of harpists, a small group who are all part of the same experience, doing the same thing, focused on the same sort of thing. So, you know, we have a really easy, relaxing time. Lots of heart playing, lots of camaraderie, you know, lots of just being able to be with each other. And that's one of those things we have been so missing lately. So I hope you can join us for the retreat. You'll find a link to, to find out more and to register for the retreat. You'll find that in the show notes or you can harp. Hop on over. Oh, there you go. Hop on over to heartmastery.com and look in the header where it says upcoming events and you'll find a link there to take you to the retreat page and you can find out more. We would love to have you with us and need I say it is a great way to, to level up, whether it's technique or music or anything else related to your harp playing. So that's what we'll be doing at the end of March, and I hope that you will be doing it with us. But now let's start talking technique.

What do we mean when we're using the word technique? Well, very basically, technique is the way our fingers do the music, right? They are our tools and that's how we make our music. When we say that someone has a wonderful technique, generally we mean that they play with smoothness, with fluidity, with security and accuracy, and perhaps, yes, fast. But we're talking about the way their fingers get around the strings and that's generally what we mean by technique. But what technique study and what having a strong technique does for us is so much more than just nimble, speedy fingers. Certainly a strong technique allows us to get around the strings and around the harp securely with very few errors. You know, that's what it's for, right? But it's also about control, relaxed control. Certainly relaxation is an important part of this, but it's the kind of control that allows you to be very precise with your rhythms. It's the kind of control that allows you to have a very well developed graduated dynamic range, right? Where you can make a crescendo, for instance, from piano to forte and have it be very well defined and even. Because your fingers are even and you have the control to do it. You see what I mean? It also has to do with evenness of tone, right? So that your fingers know how to match each other in terms of dynamics. They know how to match each other in terms of sound. You don't have one finger that sticks out extra loud when you don't want it to. So it's that kind of control. You can see this same kind of control, you know, when you're trying to play a chord, even a two note interval, but certainly a three or four note chord as well. And trying to play all those notes exactly at the same time, right? Having all those fingers fire evenly and equally and at the same time is part of the control that your technique should be, you know, should support.

Likewise, an evenly rolled chord Is dependent on that same kind of control where your fingers can play at exactly the time that you want so that that role sounds equal, even, and not like it's stuttering a little bit. Right. So all of that is control, more than just speed and nimbleness. Right. There's that control that is for rhythm, for dynamics, all kinds of expression, and certainly all kinds of timing and effects as well. And then there's the stuff that we don't think as being necessarily technique related, but is so technique dependent and that has to do with quick music learning. And why do I say this? Well, and we'll get into this a little bit more in just a moment, but when your technique is fluent or well developed or strong or whatever you like, when you're, you know, when you have a solid technique, your fingers don't have to struggle to play the notes. All you have to do is learn the notes for a particular piece. You're not struggling to get your fingers to actually play the notes so you can learn music a whole lot faster. Your fingers are able to say, in effect, oh, seen this pattern before, Know how to play it? Move right along, please. And so your music learning goes a lot faster. It also is key. Meaning your technique is key to fluent sight reading. Yeah. Because when you are not worried about your fingers finding the right strings, then you can concentrate on the notes that they need to play. All you have to do is read the notes and you know your fingers are going to get to the right places. That's essential for sight reading.

Think about it for a second and you'll see exactly what I mean. Consider this. If you are having to look at the music and then look back at the strings so that you can find the strings you can't sight read doing that, you'd get, you know, you'd get a, you'd get a sore neck, wouldn't you, from having your head twist and turn all the time. And your music learning would be a lot slower because you're going back and forth and back and forth so that all those things too, that don't seem necessarily on the surface, technique related, but all the music learning skills, sight reading, all that stuff is dependent on your technique. So that the better your technique is, the easier those things will be. Okay, so hopefully I have convinced you of the importance of a strong technique, but maybe you didn't need convincing about that. So we'll move right along. So what does it mean to work on technique? Well, you know the big three things to work on for technique, right? Your fundamentals Your scales, your arpeggios, your chords, those very basic musical building blocks that we just have to know. Your fingers have to be able to get around these and to do them so that with such fluency, with such ease, that you don't have to think about it. That when they see a scale passage, they just play it and you're not thinking about, you know, what finger to put where. Now, let me elaborate just a little bit to say that, you know, in a scale passage that I encounter in music, you know, I'll play it the first time I see it, but I might want to go back and be more specific about my fingering as I start to practice the piece and think, oh, yeah, I really want a group of three fingers here and a group of four fingers there. You know? You know, there's fingering that makes more sense, and you make those decisions. But to have your fingers just be able to play it the first time they see it is what we're looking for. And that's why we practice scales and arpeggios and chords, because that takes care of a lot of what we see in our music every day. Beyond the fundamentals, there are the exercises. Now, think about an exercise book and what's in it. An exercise book is a book filled with patterned drills, Right? Very. Usually they're very repetitive. And the. The book itself is probably, no matter what book you've got, very well organized so that you're working on all these different finger patterns. And yes, while they're based on scales and arpeggios and chords, they're often a little. Well, the word I like to use is twistier. Right. The. The fingers play perhaps out of order, or the scale notes aren't right in a row, or patterns are just a little bit different. So these are patterns that are based on those same building blocks, but are a little bit more elaborate. And they are replicas in miniature of patterns that we see in music that we play.

I'm. I'm. No, this is one of the things that my students know about me. We'll be playing a piece of music, and I'll see this particular double finger pattern. And my students know that, you know, when I tell them, oh, that's a conditioning exercise. Five pattern. They know exactly. Oh, yes, that's right. I should be using this fingering because they've worked on their conditioning exercises and the conditioning exercises. This is that very slim little book by Carlos Salzado. It only has 10 exercises, but the first six are all finger patterns. That are these more or Less twisty sorts of patterns and conditioning. Exercise 5 is a pattern that has you alternate between playing your second and fourth fingers at the same time and your thumb and third fingers at the same time. It's an extremely challenging technique the first time you try it because it's, you know, it's a little bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. It's one of those things. But that pattern itself happens to, to, to show up in real music all the time, so that when your fingers are used to doing it as an exercise, it's no longer daunting in the context of a piece. And that's what those exercises are supposed to do for you. And then the third component of technical work are etudes, right? Etudes I like to refer to as the missing link, right? They take those patterns that you've been working on and the fundamentals and the exercises, and they put them in a musical context. But it's a limited context. It's not like.

I'll use the term in quotes here, it's not like real music. It's in between, isn't it? And I'm, I'm not necessarily talking about concert etudes now, you know, the kind that people perform in recitals, but the regular old etudes in an etude book that take one of those skills.

And make it a lot more like a piece of music, so that it's still sort of a somewhat limited musical context because you're focusing so much on that one particular skill, but it gives you a chance to make it more musical and make it more like a piece. So that's where etudes fit in. Now, all of these elements of technique practice are important, but what you do with the time you spend on them can make the difference in how fast you strengthen and develop your technique. Whatever technique work you do, you need to be focusing on one of these three key areas.

These are the three I'm talking about. They're not the three elements of technique practice, right? But these are the three areas you need to be paying attention to. Pure mechanics, what your fingers do, finger patterns and speed. These are the three things that whatever kind of technique practice you're doing, they need to be things you focus on. Now, I know you've been working on all these things, but you need to be sure that your practice is going to move you forward, not just keep you doing the same old, same old thing. We want to develop your skills, not just, you know, keep the status quo. So let's take a look at each one of these three things and figure out what's important about them. And I will suggest one tweak that you can use. You make that to your technique practice, and it will start you leveling up right away. We'll start by talking about mechanics, pure mechanics. This is just how your fingers work.

And on the one hand, it's the simplest thing to talk about. On the other hand, it can be a hot button issue because this is where we get all bound up in method, right? There's the French method, the Russian method, the Salzato method, the grand method, Renier's method. There are, which is the French method, but all these various methods, and there are more than that, and then there are all kinds of hybrids of, you know, a little bit from this one and a little bit from that one. A method is simply a really unified way of looking at the mechanics of your technique. Method has a lot to do with why you're doing what you're doing, why your fingers are working a particular way. But the fact is that all of the methods have a lot of points in common, right? When we're thinking about what the mechanics apply to, we're thinking about how your fingers move, how your thumbs play, the position of your wrists and your arms relative to your body and to the harp and your posture in general. All of those things are part of the mechanics. And what every technique is aiming to do is to create the most efficient combination of these things so that a harpist can play with ease, can be relaxed, and can play the music they want to play without their body getting in the way.

Now, certain things that are pretty much the same from method to method is that your fingers need to close. Your fingers need to move into your hand, not pull away from the strings, not play the strings by pulling with your arm. But your fingers need to close into your hand. This keeps your fingers in motion, keeps them relaxed, keeps them supple, and lets them play with a beautiful sound.

Your thumb also needs to move. Now, some methods will have your thumb higher than others, but the fact is your thumb needs to move. It will close toward that, you know, middle knuckle on your second finger and it will move. And that motion once again will help keep you relaxed and keep your tone nice and round and rich, not tense or tight.

Now, how you use your arms and your wrists at the harp varies greatly from method to method. Some have your arms up, some have your arms down. Your wrists, no matter what method you're using, should be at a pretty natural angle. You don't want them too bent inward because that's not healthy. And you don't want your wrist angle to keep changing because your arm helps to hold your hand steady, and your wrist helps to maintain the angle of your hand relative to the strings. So you don't want your wrist to keep flexing in and out when that's not necessary.

Whatever you want to do, you want to be sure that you're not using excess motion when you play. Your mechanics should be efficient.

Now you need to investigate the kind of particular technique that works best for you.

You don't have to make it a detailed study. Just keep on doing what you're doing. But it does make a lot of sense to have a teacher look at your technique just from a purely mechanical standpoint and make some suggestions. You know, what do you. What does the teacher see that you don't see, frankly, because you're too busy trying to play. Right. You know, what are you doing that could use some tweaking or some improvement? So getting some. An outside opinion and having somebody watch you play and look at it can be extremely helpful here.

One last thing to consider is that when we're talking about motion is the whole idea of coming away from the strings after you play. There are different words for it. Raising, releasing, aesthetic, gesture, all sorts of stuff. Different methods, do the release differently. My overall suggestion that sort of hopefully crosses methods here is that your gesture should be natural.

It should relate to the music and not just to the visual. It needs to be part of what you're playing, needs to relate to it, and not to add inefficiency to what you're playing. Right. So sometimes less is more. Might be another way to say that. Now, I say that in all. In all honesty, I grew up learning the salzido tradition, and so we do raise salzido harpists. We have that aesthetic gesture thing. And it's depending on which generation of salzado students you are, you learned to do it a little bit different. Differently. I learned a few different ways from different salzado students myself. But.

But that's, you know, one opinion of what that gesture could be or should be. There are very different ones, and, you know, choose the one that works for you. But I would say that you want to have it be an easy part of your technique and something that feels organic to what you're doing, something that relates to the music and doesn't feel like it's just sort of tacked on at the end. So just something to think about. I don't want you to focus on that, especially not what we're talking about today. That's not going to make a big difference. But what I would like you to think about is that working on your mechanics and how your fingers work is worth just a couple of minutes every day doesn't have to be a long time. Because if you're doing a couple of minutes thinking about your mechanics every day, then you're keeping it fresh, you're keeping your technique clean and clear and top of mind in your work. And that's fine. But a little bit every day will go a long way. So that's my big tweak here. Do this in your warm up time. Just a little bit of really paying attention to how your fingers move, how you're sitting at the harp, how all of your body is working to help you play. So just this couple of minutes will allow you to focus on all of that and to make sure that you're reminding yourself and your fingers what correct technique looks like and feels like. Before you dive in to your more complex kind of practice, you could write a little reminder on a post it note and stick it on your stand that that's what you're going to think about.

A little bonus tip here. Take 45 seconds or so, even less than a minute right in between segments of your practice to just do some very slow, relaxed, mechanic kind of drill. Maybe just a slow scale or a slow arpeggio, just to refresh your fingers and, you know, sort of bring them back to neutral kind of before you start that next segment of your practice. But mechanics is where technique starts and it's worth a little bit of time every day. Now what about those patterns, those patterns I was talking about that you come up in exercises? Those patterns are the vocabulary of your heart playing. Those patterns are so, so important. They, they help you build sort of an automatic response into your fingers. I mean, it's, it's fluency, right? Think about fluency in terms of language, right? You need vocabulary because the vocabulary allows you to communicate more fluently. It allows you to communicate with more expression, more precision. And these patterns are the same thing. So we're going to build that vocabulary of finger patterns. Those are those, you know, they're sequences that our fingers know so well that they can do them without our thinking. Scales, arpeggios, chords, obviously they're basic patterns, but there are many more. And that's what those exercise books are for. Now you've discovered the power of patterns yourself. If you've ever started a new piece and there was this pattern, lots of times it's a left hand pattern, right but there's this pattern that kind of is all over the piece. And your hand find that pattern really awkward. Maybe it's like a left hand Alberti bass pattern or a special chord pattern or something. And maybe you can remember that there was a time that you struggled with something like that the very first time you encountered it. And it took you a while to learn that pattern before you were able to really make that piece work.

So that's what those exercise books are for. They're designed to grow your finger vocabulary so that when you see those patterns in, you know, real music, when you see those patterns, your fingers just kind of say, oh, yeah, I know how to do this.

And that's all we need. When you. The more patterns that your fingers know how to play, the quicker this will all go. This is why I like to say, don't spend tons and tons of time on one exercise. Go through a lot of them regularly because you want to have a very large vocabulary. We can always go back and perfect things, but you want to have a larger vocabulary for your fingers. So here's my quick tweak for this. It's an easy one, but it will make a difference, I promise you. Don't over complicate things. Just get out one of your exercise books. It doesn't have to be a new one, it could be one you already have. And work through that book page by page. Don't skip anything. You're developing your vocabulary this way in an organized kind of system, right? And if you've already used that exercise book before, that's terrific because you can take that to the next level and start adding a little bit of speed or maybe playing it in a different key. Give yourself a little bit of theory practice there. Or maybe you could play those same patterns hands together when you've already played them hands separately. It's so simple. You don't have to wait till you encounter a pattern in a piece and say, oh, no, I can't do it. Do it now. Just get out that exercise book and start working through the patterns. Easy peasy.

But I did mention speed, didn't I? And that's the real bugaboo. That's what we think we need help with. But it's not as hard to develop speed as you might have thought. I'm not quite sure why it's so scary to think about playing fast, but I know that it is. And the, the fear, I think, comes partly in that we practice so hard to do things well, slowly, and then we start speeding something up and it seems to fall apart. And so we backtrack and we play it again slowly. And then we go forward again and it makes a mess. And we can't seem to reconcile our desire to play faster with our desire to play well. And yes, there's a lot of value in just going for broke with speed and playing slowly and sort of, you know, finding that middle space over time. But that's a hard way to do it. On the other hand, trying to inch something up, especially a piece of music, right, Trying to inch it up gradually is another painful process and can take too long. So what I'd like to suggest is this. I want you to work on developing speed without needing to do it in the context of a piece that's harder. If we get your fingers moving faster in your exercises, it might help you feel a little bit more confident that they'll be able to do that when you want them to in the service of actual music.

So I'm just going to give you the tweak right now because I know we want to play faster. I don't have to convince you about that, but I probably have to convince you that there's a way to work on it. And here's the easy, the easiest way to start developing that, that speed in your fingers. I'd like you to take one exercise. Yeah, it could be a scale, could be arpeggios or chords, could be an exercise from an exercise book. But just pick one. Remember, we're not trying to overdo this here. Right. Pick one exercise, and I'd like you to play it with the metronome at the tempo that you like to play it, that you know you can play it well. And that's going to be your bass tempo. And I want you to play it with the metronome at that tempo every day this week.

Then I want you to play it again every day next week. But I want you to raise the metronome speed by several beats per minute. I mean, this is the kind of thing I always say a notch, because I have always grown up with those old fashioned metronomes that had, you know, notches and they went up two or three or four points or more, you know, beats per minute that would be in between notches. So raise it several beats per minute, two to four beats per minute. So next week you'll do the same exercise, but just ever so slightly faster with the metronome for the entire week. The next week, same exercise, with the metronome another couple of beats per minute faster and then one More week this month, same idea, same exercise with the metronome, but still a few more beats per minute faster.

Only do that with one exercise because we don't want to spend too long at this. But over the course of a month, you will have raised your speed with that exercise by 10, maybe as many as 20 beats per minute. That's a lot. That's going from 60 to 80 now in, you know, in car terms, that's, you know.

We should do that in just seconds, right? It's going to take us a month, but that's a big jump. And if you can do that, and I know you can, you now have a method for taking a lot of things faster. Plus you have the knowledge that it's not your fingers, its familiarity, because that's when we can develop speed, when we know something, not just know it in terms of notes, but when our fingers are so comfortable with the pattern that they can speed it up. That's why I'm having you do this over the course of a month, not over the course of a week. Speed depends on knowledge, on familiarity, on comfort.

And when you know that your fingers can actually play that fast, it makes it easier to try it in the pieces of music that you're trying to speed up, and it will give you a system for doing it. I find most of the time when we want to speed up a piece of music, we're not allowing ourselves enough time to really get there. And that's part of why it's frustrating. Not all of why it's frustrating, perhaps, but that's part of the reason. So let's do it with one exercise and start developing speed that way. So there are the three things I want you to work on. Mechanics, very simply, just a couple of minutes a day, not more than two or three. I really mean that, right. Just to give yourself. Do it as part of your warmup, perhaps. Time to check your posture, your arms, your fingers, your thumbs. Make sure everything is working in a relaxed way, moving the way it's supposed to. It's just a quick check that everything is going right. Then those finger patterns. Develop your vocabulary. Go through those finger patterns. Go through those exercise books, one exercise at a time, all the way through the book. Learn all of them. Remember, when it comes to this kind of thing, quantity is important. Maybe not more important than quality. I want you to play them well, but I don't want you to focus on one so much that you never move on to the next one. Right? We need quantity. We want a large finger vocabulary, your Fingers will benefit from it. And your playing will. Your music will, too. And then, of course, when it comes to speed, yeah, take one simple exercise, whatever exercise you want to speed up, and just speed it up over the course of four weeks.

See what you can do. It might help you be brave, help you be courageous. You might find out, and I think you will, that you can do more than you thought, Play faster than you thought, have a better technique than you thought. You can level up, up with just these couple short three little tweaks, Right? Those three tweaks, leveling up. It's a good thing. Thank you so much for joining me today and I hope you can put these tweaks in practice. I'd love for you to join me again next week when we're talking about musical genres, about what makes one musical style sound different than another, how those basic musical elements fit together in different ways, and talking a little bit about what you might like, why one style of music seems to connect with you more than another, how to explore that a little bit, how to explore some new genres. So just thinking about fun stuff. It's sort of a musical creative adventure here on the podcast next week, and I certainly hope you join me for that also. Speaking of joining me, I'd love you to join me on our getaway retreat in March. Please do hop over to harpmastery.com or use the link in the show notes and take a look at our getaway retreat page. You'll find it on the website under upcoming events and take a look. It's going to be so much fun. And just think about that Florida at the end of March, strawberry season. Oh, okay. I'm looking forward to it. And I can't. Just the thought of fresh strawberries is just. I'm ready. I am so ready and I would love to have you join me. So in the meantime, you go over register for the retreat. At least. I hope you can come. We have a few openings only because it's a small house. Well, it's a big house, but it's a. It's still a small group, so I hope you can join us for that. And I look forward to talking with you right here on the podcast next week. See you then. 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.