There are so many connections between seemingly disparate things – activities, ideas, technicalities. This concept of making appropriate estimates of ourselves resonated with me.

I was reading Arnold Schwartzenegger’s email today, and he had some good points that will directly align with our harp playing. He points out that we (humans) typically overestimate ourselves at a micro level but underestimate the quality of outcome at a macro level. What could be more true with respect to our practice?!

What does overestimating the small look like? How about expecting ourselves to be able to flawlessly sight read a brand-new piece of music on the first try? Or thinking that we will thoroughly learn a new tune in a single practice session? Or expecting a short number of repetitions will result in flawless performance?

These are all clear overestimations. We would never suggest to someone else that any of the above will result in the perfection we crave. So why do we make such overestimations of our own practice?

But equally, we discount how much we can accomplish with steady, consistent practice. A little time every day will result in more learning and accomplishment because it starts small (and manageably) and builds overtime. If we apply a structure over time, we will learn more tunes and be able to play them more successfully.

In other words, 20 minutes of practice every day will result in more growth than 3 hours of practice the day before your lesson. Other things we have talked about before also make it work better to – keeping track of what you get each day, deciding (specifically) what to work on that will help you make meaningful progress in both the short and long term.

But you also get more by small and consistent – you will also be more confident of your learning and playing. Because you haven’t crammed your grasp of the music will not be tenuous!

So, if you find yourself thinking that you’re never going to learn the music, stop underestimating yourself. Acknowledge you will learn – a little bit every day. You won’t master the tune in a week. But you can gain a little mastery each day, stacking your gains – no matter how small,

Don’t lose sight of the fact that you will want to overestimate the small gains but also that you’ll underestimate what you can build with consistent practice over the month, the season, the year, and over the years.

Doubt me? Pull out your Christmas music and prove the point to yourself. This is music you have practiced (somewhat) consistently on a long-term basis with “cram practice” (November?) but also long-term practice (how long have you been playing those tunes?)

Stick with it. Put in the time – but in small bites.   

Because, as Arnold says, “when you stop underestimating yourself, you start becoming unstoppable.”

What can you achieve if you take it in small, consistent bites? Let me know in the comments!

We musicians are always learning, developing, growing. That may be the best part of being a musician. Our constant growth is good for us – keeping our minds working! And that keeping active still leaves us with room to grow!

And yet, we often hem ourselves in. We want everything to be easy and quick. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. We need room to grow, and we have to take it. We need to acknowledge that need – and take that space.

We’re good (typically) about having the physical space for playing. Square footage for our creative growth and our musical life is a given. We also need to accept that we also need another type of space – time.

It can take a long time to thoroughly learn our music. There is so much to get under our belts – all those notes, fingerings, rhythms, harmonies, rests. The right order, repair points, and just plain ol’ remembering. Yikes!

The answer, of course, lies in giving ourselves enough room (time) to know the music. Because it’s much more than simply getting the notes into your head. How do you do that? Practice time of course, but also by using a strategy called distributed practice.

Distributed practice requires that you have a multilayer view of your practice time. Distributed practice is a more macro level of thinking about your practice time while daily practice is a finer view. Daily practice will be part of building each tune but it’s the summation of all those days over weeks and months that really solidifies the music in you. The other prize in distributed practice is repetition (and lots of it!).

Now, as a champion procrastinator, I’d be the first to tell you that allowing practice to be distributed over time is hard. It’s easy to tell ourselves some variation of: I learn really quickly! Look, I can play it! Christmas is forever away! Been there. Done that. Designed the T-shirt!

But is it really learned? Or are you fumbling along on momentum and luck?. Are you really playing it? Or are you jerking through the sore spots and hoping the left hand is faking it good enough?. Christmas gets earlier every year (at least it doesn’t start until after Halloween!).

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re good and that you have fully learned your music. How do we assess our progress if it’s happening over time? That’s not as easy as watching our daily progress because we have to take the long view – but you can do it. How do you know?

I have a new (to me) metric for growth and progress that I use and figured you might be able to use it too. I look for “ease.” Yes, that’s vague and yet, you know it when you feel it. When you start learning a tune, there is so much to learn (as we mentioned above) that you struggle to keep it all in mind while you work on it. It’s like herding cats – everything is moving, you can’t keep track of where you are, and who knows which one to pick up next!

As you spend more time practicing, you know each of the elements a little better, and (if you’re patient) you’ll realize that your brain isn’t working as hard. It does start to feel easier. Later, it’s easy enough to comfortably play the melody and accompaniment at the same time – with ease. Eventually, it becomes easier to play the tune accurately under pressure (like in a lesson or when performing).

Eventually is the essential word there – because it is the most challenging part of establishing the room to grow. You can’t get there without it eventually coming together in the time space you created. And with time and space, the tunes really do solidify and become easy to play, no matter what else is going on.

Do you notice tunes getting easier as you continue to play? Do you think you could use ease as a metric for progress? Is there something that would be better? You know I want to know what you think – let me know in the comments!

I get it. YouTube is an attractive nuisance. After all, where else can you go to learn all you ever needed to know right now about how to change a tire, make a martini…or play the harp?

I’m not denigrating or disparaging people who are trying to earn a buck/rise to prominence/achieve world domination (by teaching harp?) – it’s a living.

But…

There are limits to what you can learn by watching someone else do something four dimensional in a 2D space. Especially if you get caught up and watch video after video after video… Made worse if the time you spend watching other people play uses up all the time you have for the harp. Then you are not coming out ahead. Because no matter how much you can learn by watching, the real learning is in the doing – you know, the actually touching your harp, p-r-a-c-t-i-c-i-n-g!

I’m not talking here about content for which you have paid, online courses by legitimate professionals, or online lessons. I’m also not talking about short stints of poking around all the offerings – good, bad, and ugly – to get a feel for the wider world. No, I’m talking about all the schlock that’s out there – the stuff by any yahoo with a harp, a phone, and connectivity. Those people embody “you do you”. You, on the other hand? Is watching their videos really the best way to spend the precious little time you have for harp each day?

No. Turn that off and practice the things you are working on. On your real harp, in your real life, at your current real level. You don’t need to play at some weird angle, or hold the harp like it’s falling, or any of the other crazy stuff you see. Because like all the other unfluencers online (in every genre), you’re only seeing the stuff that made the edit – the false glam, the fake ease, and the counterfeit first-take. You know what you don’t see? The hundreds of lessons and the hours of practice behind every second of the video. They have already done the work so that it looks flawless, easy, and common. Online, everything is easy and you can be just like them. And you don’t even need to practice.

Right….

But this the real world. Yes, of course a little inspiration can go a long way. You should definitely have harp heroes that you aspire to be just like – in your own way. And just like every other worthwhile endeavor, then you should turn YouTube off. The answer is not on YouTube, just in you.

Now go practice! ????

Before I embarked on this whacky phase of life as a harp player, I spent most of my time thinking about how people think about their work and how to improve that. Now my poor students have to endure my explanations about what we’re doing and how they might think about it. It’s important to know and understand not just what you’re doing but why.

So what I’m going to share today total makes me crazy. It works but I have no idea why. It just does. It’s a “tip” that might help you learn tunes easier and faster. And who doesn’t want that?

What’s this magic thing?

When you’re trying to learn a tune, there’s a lot to do. And even when you have the tune relatively well learned, you often find yourself stumbling. And if there’s a trouble spot, you will begin to build in a “speed bump” – a place in the tune that frankly scares you – and so you slow down and try to get through it.

If you don’t get that sorted out – and quickly – the tune will always have a speed bump and/or you won’t want to play it because there’s a scary spot. To get past those scary spots, you need a way to learn your way over it! So this week, I’ll share a way to get those smoothed out.

Find a shape at the beginning of a phrase. Place all your fingers as you will be going to do when you’re playing. Squeeze – hard. Definitely distort the strings – yes, squeeze that much. Don’t be wimpy! Then close your fingers – don’t play, just close (all the fingers at once). Place the next shape. Think about the shapes as you place and squeeze and then move to the next. Work in phrases. Think about what you’re doing in each shape. Focus on one hand and then the other (unless the shape of the tune makes that untenable). As the shapes become more familiar, shift your focus to the movement between the shapes. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat more than you think you should. Then repeat again.

Once the placing and moving begins to feel easier (than it had been) then you can shift your attention to playing the shapes. This isn’t the speed round – keep your focus on the shapes and linking them together. You can play and work toward making it musical once you can actually get from shape to shape cleanly and on time. If, as you start playing, you find there are still rough spots or ugly transitions, go back to the place and squeeze and come at it again. Don’t be afraid of repetition (and while you’re repeating – pay attention to what still needs work).

I don’t know why this works – and believe me I have generated multiple hypotheses – but it does. If, after reading this, it’s not clear, send me questions and we’ll see if we can make it clear for you.

When you’re working on a new tune, give this approach a try and let me know how you go – you know I love to hear from you!

One of the most frustrating things when learning a new piece of music is getting it established in your head. Whether you get your music by rote or by reading (or hybrid), we often feel like we should have a tune quickly. But is that really reasonable?

In a word – No.

Learning a tune and learning to play a tune (and I’d argue those are different but related) require repeated exposure. Repeated means – repeats….and lots of them!

You might wonder why you need so much repetition – even if you’re a quick learner. Well, there are two basic reasons – first, because there’s a lot to learn and second because you probably don’t make as many repeats as you think when you practice.

There is a lot to learn, and I find that we typically underestimate how much we need to learn for each piece we take on. While we focus on our fingers, it’s our brains that have the lion’s share of the work here! We need to recognize and recall a lot of stuff. Here are just a few of the things you need to learn for each tune:

> You have to know how the tune sounds

> You have to know where the tune goes

> You have to know where your fingers go

> You have to know the order of the notes of the melody

> You have to know the chord progression of the harmony

> You have to know the notes of the harmony

> You have to know the order of the fingers

> You have to know the rhythm

> You have to know the dynamics

> You have to know the phrasing

> You have to know how this tune relates (or is contrary) to other tunes you already know

> You have to remember all that

And more. Hopefully, that gives you an appreciation for what you’re doing as you learn.

So, then the question is, how many repetitions. Often, we feel like we’re playing something over and over and over and over. And we are. But look at that list again – each of those things is impacting each repetition. So, you can begin to understand why so much repetition is needed.

Let’s start by thinking about what we’re trying to by making those repetitions. We are trying to memorize how the (entire) piece sounds. We also need to perform serial recall of two different lines – the melody and the harmony which more often than not are completely different, yet related. We have to master the motor activity of placing, playing, closing, moving, and doing it again and again. But more importantly, we have to connect all of those things, in the right sequence within the appropriate relative time, while detecting anomalies (aka mistakes) and correcting them. Whew! No wonder it’s hard!

There is no set number of repetitions required (that would be too easy!). One metric is easiness – how easy does it feel to play? Yes, it’s qualitative, but this isn’t rocket science, so it’s ok. When you’re moving along your learning curve, there will come a point when you realize that it is just easier to play – you’re not struggling as much to remember what comes next, your fingers actually feel like you are in control, your brain doesn’t feel like you’re about to combust! You may be more able to play faster or to keep both hands going.

The keys to getting there probably include not counting your reps, but instead focusing on what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about, what you’re not able to do just yet, and how you have done compared to yesterday, the day before, etc.

If it helps you to keep focused on practicing, you can use pennies, beans, or beads to keep track. These tools can be helpful to show yourself that you are actually practicing as much as you think you are. As long as you recognize that time (and number of repetitions) isn’t all that matters – what you do with that time is what matters.

The last thing to keep in mind is repetition has to happen across days and weeks, not just within individual practice sessions. You can’t really learn all that (see the list again) in a single sit down, so don’t think you will! If you feel compelled to have some detail, the next time you learn a new tune, keep track of how much time you practice, over how many days/weeks, and how many repetitions you actually perform each time – it should be fairly eye opening.

What’s your experience with repeats? Let me know … in the comments!