You and your harp are the perfect Valentine’s love story. You met your harp, fell in love and the rest is history. When I talk about harp happiness here on the podcast and elsewhere, I’m talking about that love connection you have with your harp - that magical feeling that you began with and about continuing that feeling, deepening it, nourishing it, helping it flourish. 

 Of course, sometimes harp happiness has its bad days, those days when the joy just isn’t there. Those moments of frustration are the bumpy part of a harpist’s journey, and today’s podcast is about one of the major bumps in the road for all of us harpists: playing chords. We want our chords to sound lush and lovely but sometimes they just come out like a disorganized cluster of random notes. 

There are so many ingredients to playing a lovely-sounding chord.You must place multiple fingers quickly and accurately on the strings and then play them either at exactly the same time or with a beautifully modulated roll, and if just one finger sounds too loud or too soft, the entire effect is ruined. 

If you find playing chords challenging, you are not alone. In fact, harpists who have very little trouble with most of the music they want to play, still often find chord passages difficult. And there’s nothing worse than having a stumbling block like that slow the rest of your progress down.  Now, if you’ve been playing the harp a long time, you may not remember how hard it was to learn how to play chords. But maybe you teach as I do and are faced with the challenge of helping your students through this difficult stage. 

Whatever your challenge may be with chords, I’m going to make things a little easier for you on today’s show. I’ll talk about the reasons that chords are difficult. And once you know why they are so hard, you can work on the skills you need to develop so you can play them more easily. I will talk about the three basic elements you need to practice, share some of my very favorite quick fixes with you PLUS I will give you a free worksheet with drills you can use to make your chords as lush and lovely as you want them to be.

Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode: 

• Chord Reading and Placing Drills PDF
• How to Play Four Note Chords Without Finger Fumbles
• Harpmastery.com

Get involved in the show! Send your questions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected]

LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-039