Where Harp Beginners Go Wrong - and Maybe You Do Too - PHH 235

One very logical reason would be, well, because if I get it right, then I really only have to learn it once. If I get my technique solid, then my technique is going to be good and that's great. And if I learn all about counting, if I learn, you know, get my fingering exactly right while I'm doing all this, then I'm only going to have to learn it once and I won't have to learn it again. Trust me, that's not how music works.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists and anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us. Just go to harpmastery.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. I know what I'm going to talk about with you today could be controversial. It could sound totally off target to you. Nevertheless, I hope you will hear me out. I want to share with you why and how I think most harp beginners start wrong, even if they're working with a teacher. It isn't exactly that we teachers aren't teaching the right things or that we aren't dedicated to the success of our students who are trusting us. We are. It's just that the path we walk with them feels so slow. Now, every individual comes to the harp with a unique skill set and their own level of musical experience, their own learning style, their own level of commitment. But each student comes to the harp with the same objective, to play music on the harp. That's why I started the harp, and it's almost certainly why you did, too. So today I want to talk about the things that hold beginners back, that keep them from making the progress they want, from playing the music they want in a time frame that feels right to them. Most of these things are simply misunderstandings about how music study works and what really leads to growth. Whether you're a beginner or not, some of these ideas may open your eyes to a faster way of learning, to a shorter path to the music. Specifically, we'll review the steps that most beginners take and why those steps actually lead them away from progress. Some of these ideas may seem uncomfortable, even a little crazy, but I hope you approach our discussion today with an open mind and a willingness to investigate a different way of learning. I know I'm preaching to the choir here. You wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you weren't committed to playing the harp and to investigating anything that might help you do so a little better and a little faster. But I have so much to share today. Now, you might also have noticed that I have a webinar coming up, a free seminar coming up in just a few days, Thursday, November 20th. And I'm going to be talking about these kinds of things. I'm calling it Protactics for Beginners. And it's all about a faster way to learn. But there's so much to cover, and I thought I could give you a little introduction to that material right now here on the podcast so that we can cover some more when we get to the seminar. So while these two things are related, I've Got way more stuff to talk with you about in the seminar than I'm able to cover here on the podcast. So both would be really a good thing for you. So the seminar is absolutely free. You can use the link in the show notes to register, or you can use the link on heartmastery.com and register there. There's going to be a lot of great information. Of course there's going to be a replay for you. No worries there. And there will be some PDFs, some things that'll be helpful for you. So I highly encourage you to take advantage of it, especially if you're a harp beginner. If you're not a harp beginner, some of these things won't be quite as important for you, but you still might get something out of it. So see what you think of our discussion here today and then know that on that seminar I taking things quite a bit further. Just one more thing to remind you about before we get started, and that's that we still have early bird pricing for the getaway retreat in February open. So that early bird pricing is still in effect. And I urge you to take a look at that, take advantage of that. And by the way, if you really want to get your heart playing, moving forward faster, the getaway retreat is a great way to do that. So consider that when you're thinking about looking at the retreat and also as you're listening to our discussion today, because there's nothing quite like that concentrated bit of time where we can really get some things moving for you. So that's the link in the show notes as well. Again, you can find it@heartmastery.com but today is really all about beginner tactics and where beginners go wrong. So that's where I want to start right now. So imagine you're a beginner. It doesn't even have to be a beginner harpist. There's something new you want to learn and you're a beginner at it. So you assemble all the things you need for learning it. That's great. And then you figure out what you need to do first. Now, maybe you have an instructor to help you. Maybe you're going to, you know, YouTube university and learning there. But, but you get everything and, and you figure it out and you know, you've learned things before. You know how to do this, you've been through school, you, you've got this right. So you get your research, you're doing all that stuff, you've got your course, whatever it is, you've got a book, you've got videos and you start learning. So far, so good. Now, obviously there are different paths to learning. You could have a teacher, you could have a coach, you could do videos, you could do books, you could be self taught or have somebody else teach you. There are all kinds of ways to do it. But what I find happens to particularly adult beginners is that they do all that stuff. They get everything assembled and they figure out their learning process, what they're going to do, and then they start in and they're determined quite properly really to get everything right. So they look and they figure out what the technique is and they figure out this fingering thing and they learn where the notes are and they want to get the counting and then they've got to figure out how to put hands together. If you remember from your beginning harp journey or if that's where you are now, you know, there's so much to playing the harp, isn't it? There's so much to do. It's not just running your finger over the strings, which is nice and it's easy and it's beautiful. But if you're actually going to play, there are a lot of things you have to do. And so the good student decides to get everything right and that's where the progress halts. Have you been there with the harp playing or with anything else that the more you try to get right, the slower you seem to move forward?

This is a trap that happens to adult learners much more than to young kids. Right. If you're a young learner, then you're just doing what your teacher is telling you and you're figuring out that you know, okay, this is what I do, and then it's going to happen. You know, really question your progress and you're not designing your own path. But when you're an adult, you figure the fastest way to get where you want to go is to be sure you're doing everything right and then it's all going to work. And when it comes to harp playing, or probably any musical instrument, but particularly with harp playing, the more you try to get right, the slower you're going to go. Okay, so I just scared some of you right now. You're worried that I'm going to tell you that you have to just be sloppy and do things wrong. And I am not gotta tell you that I truly believe that a solid technique is the best foundation you can have. And that fingering is really important to developing the fluency that you need to play. And that of course we want to get the notes and the rhythms right. So those things need practicing. And granted, we need to learn how our fingers can work together and how our hands can work together. All of those things we want to do and we want to learn correctly. But getting all those details correct is not, believe it or not, a guarantee that you'll be able to play the music that you want to play. Here's an example of what I mean. There was a very brief span of time when I took golf lessons, and I didn't have very many golf lessons. I was really just getting ready so that I could play in a little friendly tournament with my husband. And so I was taking some lessons. We thought it would be fun, and it didn't matter that I wasn't going to be good. It was, you know, that kind of a thing. So I got my lessons, and I had. I got the grip right and I had the swing right. And I was doing the thing with my hips and my toes and whatever it was I was supposed to do, I had all those little details right. And the pro who was teaching me was very frustrated because he. What he said was, you have a perfect swing. He said, that's a beautiful swing, but you have to hit the ball. And the problem was I would swing in front of the ball, behind the ball, over the ball. I'd hit the ground, but my beautiful swing never actually hit the ball. This is the kind of thing I'm trying to say. You can have all those details right, but. But if they're not in service of actually playing music, if that's not what you're doing with them, it's not going to be very helpful, and you're going to be stuck getting those details right now. There is a path that allows you to do that, what you can do. And this, I find, works for people with more musical experience, as opposed to people who are coming to the harp with little musical instrument playing experience.

What you can do is say, all right, for the next two months, I'm not going to do anything but work on my technique. I'm just going to concentrate on how my fingers work and developing my finger facility and speed and learn all my patterns and do all that. And I'm not going to do anything else for two months or three months or whatever it's going to take. And I'm just going to work on that.

You can do that, and then you won't have to worry about your fingers so much. But of course, you still have to put that technique at the service of the music. You have to Play notes that aren't in the same kinds of patterns as your exercises. So there's still going to be a change that you have to make there. Real pieces call for slightly different fingering combinations than most exercises do. So there's a lot that is still going to require a transition. But what you shouldn't do is just focus on the technique and the notes and trying to get all those things right before you actually try to play music. There are easier ways to do this. You can focus on each of those things and then just play music without focusing on them. That's perhaps a more natural way to learn. Here's another example that might help you understand the way I'm looking at this. If you've ever tried to learn a foreign language and you want to become fluent at it, well, most foreign language courses will teach you vocabulary, and they'll teach you syntax and grammar, and you'll learn all that. But unless you actually practice speaking to another person, you never really become fluent at the language because you're not using the tools that you have, the language tools that you have. This is very similar to what we experience in music learning. You can have the technique, you can understand the notes and the rhythm and the counting. You can have all those pieces and in place, but if you don't actually put them into music, you still don't have the fluency to play music well. And that's really the point that I'm trying to make. You can't get everything right before you play the music. You need to get it right while you're learning the music. That's an important distinction. One very logical way to look at the idea of getting something right and why that might be a good plan is. Except that it isn't. One very logical reason would be, well, because if I get it right, then I really only have to learn it once. If I get my technique solid, then my technique is going to be good, and that's great. And if I learn all about counting, if I learn, you know, get my fingering exactly right while I'm doing all this, then I'm only going to have to learn it once and I won't have to learn it again. Trust me, that's not how music works. It's not a check the box kind of pursuit. It's something that we have to create new every day, right? We play the piece today, well, we're going to play it again tomorrow, and every day is different. And it's the same with the pieces of harp playing that we learn. And I Don't mean the music pieces. I mean the little bits and parts. So that our technique, one of those big bits and parts, right. Our technique is something that we will continually strengthen and continually work on. We will do it over and over again. I'm still using the same exercises to train my fingers that I started on when I was 10 years old. So I've been at these exercises for half a century. And it doesn't mean that I don't know how they go. It just means that I'm working on them at a higher level, like a spiral staircase, where we're still going around those circles, but the circles are going up higher and higher. So you're still going to have to work at it. And the question is, how much do you need to get right now, knowing that you're going to have to get it right over and over and over again, you're going to be working on it, that it's not something where you can just check the box and say, okay, done with that, I can go on to something else. Now, if you have to be strengthening your technique, if you have to be learning new ways to use your. Your fingers, which you will over and over again throughout your harp journey, how much effort and time do you want to put into that right now? Where is that balance point between. This is all I really need to know now to play what I'm trying to learn and working a little bit ahead on my technique, perhaps, or this is a solid technique course, and I'm going to get everything right before I move on. It's a tricky point because you can get your fingers fluent, you can get your fingers doing what we want, but they still have the challenge of the specific notes in the music. Understand, I am not advocating that you give up your technique exercises. Far from it. That's what's going to get your fingers moving and keeping them moving to the next level and the next level and the level beyond that. Technique work is important.

But if you're trying to play your music and watch every aspect of your technique at the same time, that music is going to go very slowly. The learning of it is going to go very slowly. So you need to find that balance point. How strict do I want to be now, and how much do I need to be able just to play the music? Where is that? How much do I need to work on these skills? Could be music reading, could be all kinds of things. How much do I need to work on that skill right now in order to play the music that I'm trying to Learn, and how much can I learn as I keep moving forward?

Music theory is another one of those topics. There is a lot about music theory that can be helpful to you in your harp playing, but I have always found that learning it as you go, as you come up against the things that will be helpful, the components that will. Oh, okay. Well, now that I know that I understand this better.

Learning it as you go bit by bit is going to be so much more helpful than trying to just learn all that music theory right now and figure that you've gotten the theory part down and you don't have to go back and revisit it, because you're going to have to go back and revisit it. I promise. That's the way this works. And there's a third rookie mistake, a third thing that a lot of beginners don't think about in the way that a more advanced player would. One with more experience. Once again, this seems very logical. It's a desire to finish that piece, to finish that etude, to finish that exercise, whatever it is, I'm going to get this right. I'm going to learn it, I'm going to finish it. Well, you know, music doesn't work that way either. The thing is that at this point, wherever you are in your harp journey, when you have learned everything you can to help you play that piece or that etude, for instance, at a reasonable sort of a pace, something your teacher would be pleased with, it might not be finished the way you will finish it in another couple of years, maybe even another couple of months. This is the power of review. So when you get further along in your harp journey, you can come back to those pieces and the ones that still, right now, the best you can play them is to sort of struggle through them. And they go at an even pace, but they don't quite sound the way you'd like them to sound. Well, that's because you don't have that mastery level that's going to help you play the piece that way. But give yourself a few months when the technique that you need for this piece and your experience level has changed, you can come back to this piece and play it with a lot more aplomb, a lot more confidence, a lot more expression, a lot more mastery, because you're further down that harp journey path, right? You've learned more. Remember, you're going to learn more and learn how to polish a piece as you go. So right now, you know, on day 30 of your harp journey, you're going to be playing a piece, and it's going to still sound sort of like a beginner is playing a piece. Well, no wonder you are, right? But on day 90 or day 180, if you come back and you play that same piece, it's going to sound very different because you're going to be bringing that many more months of skill to the piece that you're learning. So not only is that piece going to sound better some number of months down the road, but it's going to have benefited from all the other music you will have played in the meantime. Now, the alternative, what feels kind of logical is I'm just gonna buckle down and I'm gonna play this piece until it really sounds right. Well, the fact is the. That your skills are at a level where it's not going to sound the way it would sound if your teacher played the same piece. You need to acquire more skills, different skills that are going to help you play this piece better.

So you can't just finish this piece once and for all. Now realize that you're going to get what you can from a piece that you're working on at this level. You're going to get a lot from it, but you're going to get more benefit from moving on to the next one and on to the next one and the one after that. Then you can come back and you'll find another level of polish, another level of expression and musicality that you're able to bring out of that piece, because your skills will be at a different level. So let's do a quick recap and then see where we go from here. So where do I think beginners go wrong? I think that they try too hard to get everything right and end up bogging themselves down in the details and making their progress much slower than it needs to be. We don't need to get everything right right now. Just little bits as we keep on moving.

Beginners often think that they're going to put in that extra time to learn something once, because then they'll have it and it'll be done. But I know that we're going to have to learn it over and over and over again. That's the spiral staircase that we keep going up. We'll learn the same lessons but at a different level. So don't spend so much time learning it now. We can keep on moving. And the third one was very similar, right? You don't have to finish the piece now. You don't have to finish the etude now. You want to get it to a particular level. And you get to decide. You and your teacher get to get to decide perhaps what finished Enough is for now. But remember, you're going to be able to come back to this in a short period of time and play it very differently because everything that you can do at the harp is going to be easier and you're going to do it better in a short period of time very soon. So don't spend so much time finishing something now when you could go on and leverage the power of time and the power of a breadth of experience from doing different things. It's going to make everything about your playing easier to go on rather than to spend too much time finishing. So if those are the beginner mistakes, where is the solution for these? What do we do about it? Well, here are some general ideas to keep in mind as you're working through all the complexities of beginning harp studies. Practice the skills that you need to develop, but keep moving. Don't get stuck on them. Remember that the more music you learn, the more quickly your skills will improve. It's not about getting one thing right, and it's certainly not about getting everything, all those details right. Right now. It's about letting your fingers, your eyes, your ears and your mind explore and learn more. Particularly at the beginning stage, it's important to leverage the power of experience. Remember that more variety, variety exercises, variety of pieces that you play. The more variety you play, the faster your skills will develop. That's just the way it is. If you want to choose one thing to focus on in depth for now, that's great. You know, maybe you want to focus on your hands together, or focus on your technique or focus on your note reading or focus on your counting. Choose one thing to focus on in depth if you like, and then let the other things come along in their own time. You will have an opportunity to work on those, I promise. And they're not going to fall behind just because you're working on something else and focusing on something else. This is what I mean about keep moving. You'll find plenty more to work on, I promise you. There's always going to be something else that you want to fix and you want to improve. So just choose one thing at a time. Work on that. But do keep playing and learning more. Now, I have lots of real specific things that I want to share with you on the beginner seminar that's happening on Thursday. Today just isn't the right time to try to cover everything. So hopefully everything we talked about today will give you an idea of the sort of thing that maybe questions that you want to bring to our seminar, but certainly that'll give you an idea of the sort of thing that I want to be talking about. I want to talk about some specific solutions exactly step by step, what a beginner needs to learn and how to work on it. So we'll be sort of going through a curriculum, if you will, for beginners. That's what we'll be doing on this seminar and I certainly hope you join me for that. But I hope that in the meantime this has given you something to think about so that you don't get stuck in that early stage of your heart playing trying to get everything right. Because I guarantee you're going to have to do it over and over and over again. And the sooner you accept that it's just going to be a continual learning process, the easier it is for you because you can let some of that stuff go. It's okay if it's not perfect now. Believe me, you'll get another chance.

Next week on the podcast we're talking about how to make your music playable. Now if you remember about a month ago we talked about a simple six week holiday music readiness plan and how you could put that into effect so you could be sure that your music was ready on time for the performances that you're going to be doing this holiday season. Well, so what do you do if some of those pieces just aren't coming together? What should that emergency plan look like? How can you fix it up so that you know that? Oh well, I told them I was going to do this piece and I still have to do it, but I can't play those four measures or this is proving harder to get to tempo than I thought. What do you do to make your music playable now so that it's ready for those holiday performances that's we're going to be talking about next week on the podcast and that'll be kind of fun, sort of a little bit, a little bit light hearted, but super practical. So I'm looking forward to sharing those tips with you and believe me, I've used just about every one of them in my own playing. Of course. Don't forget to sign up for that beginner seminar that's coming on Thursday. You'll find links in the show notes and@harpmastery.com so that you can do that. I certainly hope to see you there. It's going to be interesting. And as I said, I've got a lot more to share. And of course we still have our early Bird pricing for the getaway retreat in February, so don't don't miss out on that pricing. Be sure to reserve your spot before that pricing goes away. I look forward to seeing you here again next week for another podcast. But in the meantime, remember, every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

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