Scales are the biggest proving ground of your technique and musicianship. While you may have been playing scales since you first started playing music, that doesn’t mean that scales are only for beginners.

Well-played scales demonstrate:

A thorough understanding of keys.
Technical facility and agility.
A repertoire of articulation and dynamics.

For us harpists, scales can seem rather dull to prac...

Have you ever had a useless music lesson? Maybe you had a good lesson and then went home and were bewildered as to how to find the momentum you had in your lesson. Or as a teacher, have you had a great and productive time with a student only to find the next week she made no progress or perhaps even regressed?

I love the lessons when the student and I work hard as a team to get through a difficul...

This is part two in a four-part series of posts designed to help you solve difficulties you may come across in your everyday practice. With a repertoire of techniques at your disposal, you can learn to solve nearly any practice difficulty. If you are not already a subscriber to HarpMastery, you can email me to receive the other posts in this series by email.

This...

This is part one in a four-part series of posts designed to help you solve difficulties you may come across in your everyday practice. With a repertoire of techniques at your disposal, you can learn to solve nearly any practice difficulty. This post shows you ways to pull a passage up to tempo when inching the metronome up isn’t getting the results you want.

Solution #1: Practice Hands Separate...

The crescendo (and its counterpart, the diminuendo or decrescendo) is one of the first expressive tools we musicians learn. But has your crescendo lost its “wow factor?” Here are some quick reminders of what to do, what NOT to do, and a few practice techniques.

First, what NOT to do. I can almost guarantee that you have been guilty of one of these. We all have.

What NOT to do:

1. Don’t let a cr...

This time of year we all do too much playing. We play every holiday party and concert we can, to put away some money for the leaner months. This makes for a nice fat bank account and some seriously over-worked fingers, not to mention backs, shoulders and brains.

But what if you still need to practice for some of those concerts? Or if your technique is suffering...

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Tired of exercises and etudes? In a holiday mood? Try these pieces to lift your spirits and your technique at the same time!All the music is available on the usual harp music sites, with the exception of my arrangement of “Still, Still, Still,” which you will find here. All the easy and intermediate music is playable on lever or pedal harp, exce...

Hands separately! Those words are in every one of my lesson assignment books starting when I was four years old. It was the way my teachers showed me how to practice carefully and attentively. As I got older, my teachers assumed that I had a complete repertoire of practice techniques, including hands separate practice. I regret to say I didn’t always use the techniques I knew.

Part of my job as...

It sounds delightful, boosting your technique in just five minutes with no stress. When you think of any of the famous exercise or etude books that you may have studied, one image probably comes to mind: a dark page full of ink representing a lot of notes, notes in finger-bending combinations to be performed at lightning speed. And though I know that I’m a better h...