Placing Chords: How to Find the Right Strings the First Time - PHH 205
Practicing Harp Happiness
The great Zig Ziglar, much-beloved author and motivational speaker, never played the harp as far as I know, but one of his most often quoted remarks is perfect for today’s topic. Zig said, “You hit what you aim at, and if you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.” If you have ever had difficulty placing the notes in your chords, today I am going to teach you how to fix your aim. Of course there is more to placing and playing chords than just aiming at the strings, but you do have to get to the right ones. This is what makes three-note chords more difficult than two-note intervals,...
info_outline
Review Done Right: It’s More Than Repertoire - PHH 204
Practicing Harp Happiness
Do you review your pieces? If you don’t review your pieces regularly, then keep listening because today we are going to explore the different reasons you might want to start and a few different methods for review you might want to try. But here’s the thing; if I asked a dozen harpists who say they review their pieces how they do their review, I will get a dozen different answers. Some people schedule it; others set a rotation. Some people do both. Some harpists are trying to develop a repertoire list of music they can play at a moment’s notice. Others are trying to keep the last piece...
info_outline
Why Slow Practice Works - and When It Doesn't - PHH 203
Practicing Harp Happiness
My harp background is in the Salzedo method. This is the technique method devised and taught by legendary harpist Carlos Salzedo. It was at the time, the early part of the twentieth century, a startlingly different concept of harp playing and harp technique and the aim was to bring the harp into the modern world. The aesthetic of the method varied in almost every way possible from the French tradition in which Salzedo was trained. But we aren’t discussing physical technique today. We are discussing practice technique, one practice technique in particular: slow practice. Please...
info_outline
Rhythmic Confidence: It’s Not About the Math - PHH 202
Practicing Harp Happiness
If I had the opportunity to teach music to an absolute music newbie, someone without any previous musical instruction or experience, I know exactly how I would begin. I would start without printed music. That’s hardly revolutionary. The German composer Carl Orff is known today not only for his most famous work, Carmina Burana, but for the innovative methods he brought to musical education. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze created Eurhythmics, not the 1980’s pop band with Annie Lennox, but a system for teaching music through movement. Music schools throughout the world have been teaching young...
info_outline
Are You Practicing Enough? - PHH 201
Practicing Harp Happiness
Here’s a question we’ve probably all wondered about at some point: am I practicing enough? As a teacher, I can tell you that my experience has demonstrated that if a harpist - and this includes me - has to ask the question, the answer is probably no, you’re not practicing enough. But of course, the real answer is likely a little more complicated. It depends on what you’re trying to do. On the light end of the practice spectrum, if you’re just trying to keep the rust off either your fingers or your pieces, you probably only need a few minutes each day. On the other end, if...
info_outline
Small Steps to Break Through and Grow - PHH 200
Practicing Harp Happiness
How do you measure something that is unmeasurable? How do you quantify something that can’t be contained or counted? How do you assess something that is completely subjective? You might think you can’t, but yet, that’s what we attempt to do every day in our practice. We try to gauge our progress. We try to determine exactly when a piece is “finished.” Exact measurements aren’t possible in music. We can’t time our progress. “This piece will take exactly 37 days to learn to the degree of polish that I personally want.” If only we could have that degree of certainty, the whole...
info_outline
Making Music Sing: A Phrasing Primer for Harpists - PHH 199
Practicing Harp Happiness
I’ve been playing concerts with my flutist friend Joan Sparks for more decades than I care to admit. Our work together has included concerts, being Artists in Residence at schools and retirement communities, producing our own concert series, recording multiple CDs (actually even a couple of cassette tape recordings back in the day) and commissioning some significant works for the flute and harp concert repertoire. In fact, one of those works turned into an actual question on the TV show ”Jeopardy.” I’ll tell you that story at the end of the podcast. Of course, our collaboration...
info_outline
Etudes: What You Never Knew They Could Do For You - PHH 198
Practicing Harp Happiness
Fact number one: harp technique is hard. That’s a given. Making our fingers steady, stable and strong enough to play in mid-air, defying gravity with every pluck, is very challenging. That’s a fact. Fact number two: our technique is a major factor in our playing. It enables us to play the music we want to play. Or it limits us. If our fingers can’t play it, we can’t play it. It’s that simple. Fact number three: If you feel like your technique is holding you back, there are ways to fix that. And today I want to suggest two ways you might not have explored. These are two ways to use...
info_outline
Here’s Your Sign: How to Tell if You’re Making Progress - PHH 197
Practicing Harp Happiness
The day this podcast episode is released, we will be living Day 55 of this year 2025. According to the calendar, we’ve already had 55 days this year to get things done, to grow, to accomplish. We’ve had 55 days to play the harp. If you set goals at the beginning of the year, this is a good time to check in on them. Are you where you thought you’d be? Are you ahead of the game, checking things off your list and moving on to your next steps? If you are, here’s a huge high five from me. That’s the way to create harp happiness. Today we are going to revisit your goals. We’ll look at...
info_outline
What to Do When Your Music is Boring You - PHH 196
Practicing Harp Happiness
They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Unfortunately, familiarity also breeds secure and confident music. We want to play our music well, and so we need to know it inside and out. That takes time. Learning music also takes time. And the longer we take to learn our music, the harder it can be to stay interested in it. No matter how much we love a piece of music, it is possible to get bored with it. Also, there are times when we are required to learn a piece that we don’t really like, perhaps for a performance or an exam. Practicing a piece we don’t like can feel like torture. I...
info_outlineThere are plenty of things we can muscle through: fatigue, a headache, the last email, the last pot to wash, paying the bills. But we can’t muscle through harp playing, especially when it comes to our fingers. For all that we talk about strong fingers and considering how hard we work them, they and the bones, tendons and muscles that support them are relatively fragile. So when we talk about strengthening our fingers, we don’t want to do any more heavy lifting.
Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about how to train your weakest fingers to be stronger by training them the right way, gently.
What do we mean by saying a finger is weak? How do you know if a finger, or even more than one finger, is weak? Weak fingers can manifest themselves in one of four ways.
First, you may have knuckles that collapse or lock up. When this happens, your finger may feel like it gets stuck on the string or frozen; it won’t move when you want. Or it may play unevenly or unintentionally play more than one string at a time.
Second, it may not have the same tone or volume as the other fingers. It might be louder or softer. It can feel like the volume knob is broken.
Third, it may feel awkward or uncoordinated, compared to your other fingers. It may not place accurately. It may not play well in combination with other fingers.
Lastly, it may not be independent. Actually, lack of independence is at the heart of some of these other issues, too. When your fingers can function independently, they have good dynamic control and can play evenly and equally with the other fingers in whatever combination is called for. Clearly, this doesn’t mean that every time you stumble over a fingering, it’s because of weak fingers. More likely, you just have a new finger pattern to learn. But a finger that causes you to constantly accommodate it, is a weak finger. And today, you’re going to learn exactly what to do about it.
Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:
-
Get the Harp Mastery® app for iPhone and iPad.
-
Related resource Strengthen Your Fourth Finger blog post
Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected]
LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-178