It’s one thing to talk about focus, and another thing entirely to find it. You can practice with focus and perform with focus, but what if you don’t really have something specific to focus on? How long can you create focus for yourself?

Focus, motivation, drive, inspiration. They are all slightly different manifestations of the same important element in music study: energy.

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This blog post is the second in a three-part series of case studies that will show you how to bring more focus – and more harp happiness – into your practice and playing every day.

In last week’s post, Agatha learned how to stay more focused during her practice time and reduce the mental clutter that was preventing her from doing her best work.

In this week’s...

Wouldn't it be great if you could make your practice more productive, more rewarding and more enjoyable? If you could magnify the results you got each time you practice?

It's possible - with focus.

Just like a magnifying glass can focus the sun's rays, you can focus your energies in your practice to get the kind of results you want.

This blog post is the first in a series of case studies that...

You move that pile of music and there it is, underneath everything: your metronome. It stares mutely at you, reproachfully. You feel a brief pang of guilt, but you push it aside, telling yourself that the metronome is really too annoying and you’ll use it another time.

But your metronome is calling to you from under that pile of music. And if you would listen, you would hear it telling...

Has your practice become just another chore? Are you just doing time?

You know you need to practice, but it just isn’t interesting. Or maybe you’re not seeing any progress, so you soldier on, getting more frustrated by the day. Or maybe you don’t know what to do in your practice, so you play a few things through and call it done.

I have news for you. Practice may be a daily...

Practice, practice, practice; the story of the musician’s life. And we hope that by devoting many hours to practice, we will be able to perform when it counts. But we should be able to do more than just hope.

Preparing for performance, whether it’s a lesson or a recital, is a matter of practicing in three very different ways, and these three vignettes about a kick, an arrow and a...

Can you hear me now?

Do you struggle to make your music speak? Are your hands so full of the notes that there doesn’t seem to be time to think about the music? Perhaps you know your music should communicate something, but you’re not exactly sure what it should say or even how to go about making it speak. Or maybe you’re trying, but it doesn’t feel like you’re doing...

We musicians are a dedicated bunch. While we may not fit the romantic image of the musician starving and sacrificing all for Busker singing and playing guitar inside a rubbish binhis art, we all make big sacrifices every day in order to play music, whether we are professionals, students or amateurs.

Consider this. You’ve bought an instrument (or two or three), paid for lessons, and spent...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about why you should write less fingering in your music. I started getting quite a number of questions and some nervous reaction to the post, so I’d like to post this followup to clarify some of those questions..

Some people seemed to think I was advocating not writing in fingering at all, which is not what I meant. I do write fingering in my...

What?! Forget the fingering?!

 We harpists need our fingering so that we can play smoothly and musically, and so our practice will be efficient. Those fingering marks are essential for us, right? Not really, or at least, not as much as you think.

Consider this paint by number illustration. Those numbers in the picture show us which color to put where. When we follow the numbers, we can see...