Who knew?!  Yes, March is National Noodle Month, and with the return to Daylight Saving Time, we’ll need it!

I always warn you about the time changes.  Especially those of you that live far from the equator where you gain or lose multiple minutes of daylight each day.  The imposed time change is hard on people, and we are no exception.

But you’re in luck!  If you’re playing along with the four week composition challenge, you’ve now established noodling at every practice session.  That noodling might just help save your practicing while you adjust to the new weird daylight that isn’t happening when it is supposed to.

Because…

• you can noodle when you are tired. 
• there’s no right in noodling.  And possibly more importantly
• there is also no wrong in noodling either! 

It’s just the thing for when your brain and your hands are just not up to working together.  Or working at all.  Perhaps best of all – noodling is still playing, so it totally counts as practice!

One of the first things I learned as a fledgling harper was the pentatonic improvisation.  I typically share it with my students in their first or second lesson (they might use a different verb than share – a verb like impose or coerce!). 

If you’re not familiar with pentatonic improv, the pentatonic scale has five notes (from the Greek – penta (five) and tonic (note)).  On the piano (if you’re so inclined) the black keys make a lovely, easy to find pentatonic scale.  On the harp, set yourself to the C major scale and PLAY ONLY THE WHITE STRINGS!  This will give you a lovely pentatonic scale from which to easily work.* 

Go ahead, give it a try.  I’ll wait.

What you’ll notice about a pentatonic scale is that there’s no “ugly”.  You truly cannot make a bad noise if you stay in the scale (that is, play only the white strings).  Everything you play within the scale sounds pretty good.

Isn’t that freeing?  Now you can noodle with abandon, regardless of how tired you are, because nothing, literally NOTHING you play will sound bad!

And because nothing will sound terrible, you have no reason not to click your recorder on while you noodle.  After all, you have a delete button so if there’s nothing inspired, no loss.  And you have a record button, so if you listen later and hear amazing – you’ll be able to reconstruct those musical thoughts and build them into a composition (or just keep them as something to amuse yourself).

All that from a little noodling when you’re too tired to practice!  Give it a try – and see if having a fun, easy poke around the harp doesn’t maybe give you a little energy boost.  Maybe even enough energy to practice when you’re tired. 

Keep noodling even after you’ve adapted to the time change – it’s a great addition to your practice and it’ll get you used to collecting your thoughts!

* of course there are other pentatonic scales on the harp (or the piano) but the ones I’ve presented here are so easy that you’ll have a scale that requires no effort to find.  If you prefer something other than the G major pentatonic scale, go for it!