Suni once said ’you always made everything feel possible’.

Best endorsement of my teaching EVER.

🎶 💗

If you’d like things to feel more possible in your harp improvisations week in and week out, that’s what I do.

For beginning, intermediate and advanced harpists.

Send a message, let’s talk about making all your harp playing more possible together.

 

 

Yes, it really DOES seem like that should work.

I just got my first Instant Pot, and pressure cooking food saves time and makes food taste great (at least so far. Try Butter Chickpeas, yum).

So pressure should work for improvisation, too? Nope.

Adding pressure doesn’t make humans better improvisers, musicians or people.

It just doesn’t.

In my experience, making the music fun in a loving environment is simply more productive and joyful.

In short, you’ll get more done, be more creative, improvise better when you are having FUN!

And two-for-one:  Want to know what the alternative to pressure is??

FUN!

We’re supposed to be serious about stuff – music, improvising, and perhaps business and parenting and sports and work and money and whatever.

And yes, some of it requires serious attention.

But when you sit down at your harp to improvise, if you feel pressure building, what if you asked, ‘what if this was FUN?’

Then just sit for a moment, and feel what it’s like to be having FUN.

Would the pressure be gone?

Maybe, but more likely, not entirely… but at least it would be FUN too.

FIVE WAYS TO HAVE FUN AT THE HARP

If the pressure is building – you can feel it, I can feel it – and you can’t figure out how to break the cycle…

… the answer is FUN.

So for you? Today?

Please, please… pop the lid on the pressure cooker. You’re not a short rib.

Here are 5 Ways to Have Fun at the Harp

• Play glissandos. Long ones, short ones, one handed, two hands going in opposite directions. How many different kinds of glissandi can you play?
• Close your eyes and grab 4 random strings, one with each finger. Play as solid chords, arpeggiated chords and rolled chords.
• Play Blues in D with any backing track on YouTube. There are dozens and dozens.
• Play a White String Improv. Set your harp to Key of C, then play only the white strings. Set a timer for 5 mins.
• Find a backing track for a favorite song and start to learn it by ear.

Or something else?

And then DO THAT.

You’ll get a lot of playing (and I mean “playing” as in fun!) done, probably faster than you would have from inside of the cooker… just sayin’.

And if your pressure cooker is your harp playing and you’re tired of squished?

I got you. I know how to take off the lid AND still get you where you’re going – with a healthy dose of fun and a lot less misery.

Send a message, let’s talk coaching.

What do you think?

🔥If I had a nickel for every struggling student who told me: “I wish I had known this when I had started playing”…

I’d be able to buy a new electric harp. 🔥

A few days ago, I was out on a day-long road trip with a new friend, one of my favorite things to do. 

While we were heading home after a nice day of sight-seeing, I had a deep thought. 

“With all the struggles that my music students have, about 80% of the time it comes down to one thing.” 

And it took me years to figure out what that one thing was. You see, as a harp teacher I often struggled, too. I had to study how students were making mistakes and then figure out how to fix it. 

I kept moving forward, learning from my own teachers, and from my own experience as a college writing instructor, rowing coach, and mentor. 

After several years (YEARS!) of teaching, I realized two crucial things about learning and performing music that changed my teaching and my student’s learning: 

🔥FIRST, no matter where the mistake is happening in a piece or song, the real issue is in the measure or few beats before the mistake. 

In other words, the mistake is starting earlier than you think it is. You need to back up to a spot well before the mistake happens, and start looking for points of confusion and tangles. 

🔥SECOND – and this is where the 80% comes in – the problem is fingering. Yep, straight-up fingering. I’ve learned to tell students that the fingering written in their music is a suggestion and may not work for them. 

They need to TEST the fingering to make sure it’s right for their hands and their fingers, and that it works with the song and their interpretation. 

I’ve been AMAZED at how quickly a student can get untangled and unstuck from a problem section just by incorporating these two strategies for learning a piece. 

All it takes is mindset…the mindset to not give up, and not get frustrated. 

Instead, it takes the mindset of a problem solver, who is willing to look at the problem from multiple points of view, including the measures before the problem, and the fingering that is written in. 

🔥What mindset do you have about solving musical problems and fixing troublesome sections? 

🔥Do you have the problem-solver mindset, so you can become the harpist you’ve always wanted to be?