Figuring Fingering

🔥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?