Prevent Mistakes With This Powerful Practice Hack

One of the most common struggles harp students have is they’ll practice for hours and hours, but still keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Oftentimes, that’s because they’re hyperfocused on their fingers, and they forget to make use of a powerful strategy for playing the harp that relies on the mind.

Today I’m going to show you what this strategy is and why it’s so powerful, how you can start to use it without even touching your harp, and how to combine it with your regular practice sessions every day so that you can perform smoothly instead of stopping for mistakes.

What Is the Strategy?

First I need to explain something that no one really talks about when it comes to learning an instrument. But without understanding this, it becomes extremely difficult to make meaningful progress.

Learning an instrument can be broken into two components: comprehension and execution.

Comprehension means understanding the material intellectually — knowing what you’re supposed to be doing, why, and how.

Execution is actually performing a skill.

So for example, if I want to play a scale, first I need to know: what is a scale? What notes do I need to play? How do I need to set my levers or pedals before I begin? What fingerings should I use? I need to know how to play crossovers and crossunders, and I also need to be aware of technical adjustments I might need to make to my hand position, finger action, what my elbow and wrist are doing.

That’s all comprehension.

The execution is then putting all of that into practice and actually playing the scale.

The problem that most harpists run into without realizing is that because the execution is the outcome that we can see and hear and measure, we get so absorbed by what our fingers are doing that we become focused solely on doing and stop thinking.

We put all of our attention on execution and ignore comprehension.

It would be like if I was trying to learn a new language and I learned how to pronounce all the letters phonetically, but I don’t actually know what any of the words mean or how the grammar structure works.

Then if I wanted to give a speech in this language, I would basically memorize a bunch of random sounds.

But if I have no context for the sounds I’m making and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, it’s going to feel very hard, because it’s all arbitrary and I have no sense of what’s coming next.

Each syllable becomes its own struggle instead of a natural part of a word or a sentence.

Not to mention my speech will be riddled with errors and probably sound like nonsense to a native speaker.

So very simply, the practice strategy I’m about to teach you is to leave space to get your mind involved and really understand what it is you’re trying to play.

It sounds obvious, but very few students actually know how to do it properly.

Understanding the Music

So next let’s talk about how you can actually start to do this without even touching your harp - but it’s still going change the way you play.

If you want to learn a piece of music, you need to know the music well.

To start with, you need to know what it’s supposed to sound like. If possible, find a recording of what you’re trying to play and listen to it.

The goal is to familiarize yourself with how the music goes.

Ideally, you should be able to hum the melody to yourself for the whole song.

If you play by ear, then you should be able to do that from memory.

But it’s also extremely important for those learning from sheet music as well. It’s very difficult to play something when you don’t know what sound you’re expecting to come out of your harp.

Once you feel like you know how it sounds, listen again and follow along with your eyes on the sheet music, even if you plan to memorize later.

This starts to build a connection between what you see and what you hear so that it becomes easier to interpret the written sheet music when you play later.

And it also really helps if you tend to get lost in the sheet music when you play and forget your place, because you start to learn: when the song sounds like this, I look here.

The sheet music starts to become a map you know your way around rather than an endless sea of black.

I also really recommend making markings on your sheet music in places that you want to be able to find quickly. That could be the start of a new phrase, where the music starts to do something different, or a spot that you know you want to look at while you’re playing. Use colour so it jumps out from the page.

Once you feel like you know what the piece sounds like and can follow along visually while listening, try looking through the sheet music without the recording and see if you can imagine in your head what the piece will sound like at that point on the page.

I’m not saying that you should have perfect pitch or something like that; the point is to connect your memory of the sound to what it looks like on the page.

This is a great way to build a deeper overall understanding of your piece, but now let’s zoom in on the details.

What you want to do next is take a look at your sheet music and look for patterns. Try to add any context you can to the notes on the page to make them less random.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to get started:

• Is there any material that repeats somewhere else in the song?

• Is there any material that’s not quite the same but has similarities to elsewhere in the piece?

• Are there any notes that seem to appear more often than the others?

• Are there any patterns or shapes in the notes that you recognize? That could be something like triad shapes if you’re familiar with those, or common 2-note chords like 3rds or 6ths, or left-hand patterns in a 1-5-8 shape.

Make any observations that come to mind. Any context you can add to the music deepens your comprehension and helps your mind communicate with your body how to execute the piece.

If you have a good roadmap of where you’re trying to go, you’re much more likely to actually get there and play what you want without making a mistake.

Application in Practice

Now that’s all well and good, but we all took up the harp so that we can play, not just stare at our music!

So next I’m going to show how to use this mental practice hack while practicing and playing normally.

And it’s really simple.

All you need to do is pause every so often, look at your music, and think through what you’re trying to play.

Let’s say you’re trying to practice four measures of the song you’re learning.

As you’re working on this section, you play it several times, trying to play it through correctly.

And that’s a good place to start, but let’s work in our practice hack and use the mind and not just the fingers.

First of all, between each repetition, pause and reflect on what you just played.

And I’m not looking for a judgment here - “that was bad” is not helpful and doesn’t really engage your comprehension and understanding of the material.

Instead, make note of what was correct and what wasn’t correct. And for anything that wasn’t correct, think about what you want to happen instead.

For example:
“I played most of the notes right, but right here I played a D instead of an E, so next time I want to watch my second finger when I replace it to make sure it lands on the right string.”

That’s a much more helpful reflection that helps you know what to focus on next.

If you don’t know if you played correctly or not, that means you need to pay more attention to what you’re doing and actually listen to yourself as you play.

Way too often, I see students play something wrong, immediately stop, and go right into the next repetition. A lot of the time they’re not really sure what they did wrong, and they are even less sure what they need to change. So they just keep guessing over and over in quick succession without even glancing at their music until it sounds right.

But they haven’t even really learned anything from all of that because their brain hasn’t had time to process any information or figure out what lessons it was supposed to take away from that.

And so I really want to drive this point home:
If you don’t even know what the right thing is, how on earth are you supposed to do it?

Between each repetition, just ask yourself,
“What happened that time?”
And describe it back to yourself.

You can even write that question on a post-it note and stick it to your music stand so you don’t forget.

Because this one tiny change is the difference between making progress and not.

One Last Strategy for Stubborn Passages

Lastly, I’m going to show one last way you can apply this strategy to your practice, which is especially helpful if you feel like you just can’t get something right no matter how many times you try.

If you’ve been repeating a section, reflecting on it, and it just doesn’t seem to be working (or if you feel like you’re getting worse) pause and look through the music with your eyes and imagine yourself playing.

Think through it.

Make note of what notes you’ll need to play, where you’ll need to place your fingers, when the hands play together or separately, and places you usually forget what you need to do next.

After you’ve thought through it, play again.

If you do this every few repetitions, you’ll have a lot more success when you put your fingers back on the strings.

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