Monthly Archives: September 2023

Pumpkin Spice Everything

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  1. Pumpkin Spice Everything

Remember when Pumpkin Spice was an autumn thing? It originated with holiday pies and then after hundreds of years (somehow, I’m not going to pretend to understand the mechanics of food fashion) it moved to coffee.  Then it migrated to other foods like cereal, donuts, yogurt, snack chips, etc.

This is wonderful – if you’re a pumpkin spice fan.  You get more opportunities to enjoy your treat in many forms.  If you wanted to, you could be awash in pumpkin spice (literally – there’s pumpkin spice body wash).  You could take your freshly washed pumpkin spice self to chase your pumpkin spice donut with a pumpkin spice coffee.  Pumpkin Spice Everything!

But there’s a dark side to Pumpkin Spice Everything (PSE).  When PSE is all the time for everything, it’s easy to get burned out on pumpkin spice.  With enough exposure you can become tired of it and PSE loses its attraction.  You see a PSE item and think, “ugh” or worse, “yuk”.

What does this have to do with playing the harp? Well – everything, of course!  Instead of coffee, donuts, and body wash, think air, jig, march and instead of pumpkin spice insert broken triads, boom chucks, or octaves.

When you introduce a left-hand pattern in a tune, it might be exciting and captivating – dare I say it – perfect.  But if it appears everywhere in everything you play, it will lose that special quality that made it perfect to begin with.  Not only will perhaps get bored with playing it, your listeners might lose that flare of interest they looked forward to and drew them to the music.

Don’t misunderstand – I’m not talking about how complicated the left-hand pattern is, only that it should not be used to inundate the listener (like with an overactive shake of pumpkin spice!).

If you are new to arranging your tunes, it might be uncomfortable to branch out from stuff that works and with which you feel comfortable.  If you’re less experienced with playing, you may doubt your ability to play different patterns.  Believe me, you will get there!

Are you maybe in a comfortable rut? Not sure?  Just observe your playing.  If you always use your “go to” patterns, you’re probably in a rut.  You might be at the PSE stage where everything is the same all the time.  But how do you keep the specialness of your left-hand patterns and make them something that captures attention?  Here are a couple of ideas –

Copy/Paste! I’m sure you have books and recordings of your harp heroes.  If you’re at a complete loss about where to start, listen to their recordings and read their books of arrangements.  What patterns do they choose?  How do those patterns mate to the melody? (and if there are patterns you don’t like, you can not do those!).  You can also copy/paste from more than one harp hero.

Cheat Sheet. Put all the left-hand patterns you can think of on a single page – a cheat sheet.  Keep it nearby your practice space so you can try options in different places in each of your pieces.  Start with something you know well so you’re not struggling to play the tune and have smooth sailing to try something fresh (PS – if adding something in sends the melody into a tailspin – go back to learning the melody, you don’t know it as well as you think you do).

Make up your own – there’s no rule that says, “these are the sanctioned left-hand patterns, all others are forbidden”! (some might argue this point, but why are you listening to them?)  Try your ideas.  Some will work.  Some won’t. Remember Edison? There were loads of failed attempts before there were light bulbs!  Better still, record your ideas – because your ideas will dissipate into the ether whether they’re good or bad.  If you’re recording, when serendipity strikes, you’ll be able to recreate it.

Have you fallen into the Pumpkin Spice Everything season with your music?  Had you noticed if you had? Did you try any of these ideas?  Do you have other ideas to keepbthe excitement?  Let me know in the comments!

100 Days

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I’m not sure what it is about big round numbers, but they are kinda captivating.  Like this little bit of inspiration – there are about 100 days left in the year!  Woohoo!

Then the question is what should you do with them?  I mean – come on – just think of all the things you could do with that time!

You could convince yourself that the year’s nearly over so you might as well coast.

Or you could dig out your goals for the year, take their measure, and decide the year is wash and maybe next year you’ll start over.

Or you could dig out your goals for the year, take their measure, and decide that you crushed that and you can cruise until January.

Or you could see that opportunity of having all that time remaining to do more cool stuff.  For you. To make even more progress. How great is that?!

So what could you do in 100 days?  How about:

1 Commit to learning one new thing each day (doesn’t have to be music, but that’s probably a sure bet!).

2 Commit to practicing every day.  Actually practicing.  It doesn’t have to be a full blown, formal practice, it could just be for fun.

3 Commit to paying a compliment each day – to yourself.

4 Commit to identifying what you’d like to do in the following 100 days after this (ok, that’s just a nice way to say get a head start on your goals for the next year).

5 Consider making an “activity board” so you don’t get stuck in a rut and can leverage your creativity!

6 Think about what you would do (differently?) if it was the beginning of the year rather than most of the way through it)

You can focus on music (after all, why are you here?) or you could take an even broader view and approach to enjoying the remainder of the year. 

Which of these will you do? What did I forget to include? Let me know in the comments!

Dear me

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Dear me

No matter where we are in our harp journey, we have the opportunity to enjoy the ongoing process of becoming musicians.  It can also be easy to get distracted or unfocused or sidetracked as we meander on our path. 

Sometimes we fret over whether we are doing enough, growing enough, accomplishing enough. We compare ourselves to others – even though we know we shouldn’t.  We often spend more time than seems appropriate telling ourselves to stop thinking that way.

But what if we could be our biggest cheerleader?  What if we talked to ourselves like we talk to our friends?  What would we say?

This week – I’m going to give you some homework.  Write a letter to your future self – to you in 5 years.  Tell yourself all the things you have done and what you’re working on now.  Whisper your fears, and hopes, and plans.  Then tell yourself where you’d like to be when you are where they are.  And how you were thinking you might be going about getting there.

You might be scoffing – this is silly you might say.  But what if you suspended your disbelief for just a sec? Then you might see the wisdom in thinking about who you would like to be later. 

And since you’re talking to your future self, you can be bossy.  You could tell yourself that you will have to do something hard so that your current self can successfully do the thing you have been talking you out of.  You could be brutally honest and suggest you stop doing things that you repeat so you don’t have to risk failing – so that future you will be there (when you get there).

But while you’re writing, how about you also tell your future self how proud of yourself you are (or should be).  And maybe relate what you’re hoping you’ll have done by then (and maybe what’s stopping or inhibiting you?).

So, get out your nicest writing paper and do your homework!  Let me know in the comments what you think after writing to yourself.  What do you think the letter you get back will say? What would be your response?  If you’d like to share too, let me know!

 

 

HARP in Space!

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HARP in Space!

This might be old news to you, but I just learned that NASA has a HARP! 

Ok, for NASA, HARP means Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas.  What?

NASA HARP Logo

HARPs in Space!

Loads of science-y words to say Hearing the activity of the Sun.

No, really.  The idea is to capture data from the sun and the plasma it puts out, and then listen to it to find patterns.  Patterns that would be harder (or impossible) to find visually.  Or by a computer algorithm. 

The sounds represent the same thing as you see as the Aurora Borealis – how cool is that?! 

As musicians we know all about patterns in sound.  Sound patterns are our stock in trade!  And NASA is inviting you to participate to help explore the data!

This is one of a number of NASA projects open to Citizen Scientists to help them analyze data.  Data is something they have tons of so they need help getting it all poked at.  They provide the open-source tool with which you can poke at (and possibly reveal) what’s hiding in the data from space.  They point out that it’s like using sonar to see the ocean.  They’ll even train you to find stuff so you can identify what they are looking for.  You could find something no one else has identified – again, how cool is that?

Would you like to be a NASA citizen scientist and participate in the HARP project?  If this is interesting to you, you could easily participate!  You can get more information here or sign up to participate here.

Do you think this is as cool as I do?  I’d love to know if you decide to participate – and what you find! Let me know in the comments!