Do you look at the lever changes as being part of the music (i.e., having to happen in EXACTLY the same spot each time, just like a note)? When you practice hands separately, do you still do the levers regardless of which hand you’re working on? Can you see your levers–I mean easily find the lever that you want? It helps a lot to mark the F and C levers. Dusty Strings makes little colored rubber rings to put over the handles of the Fs and Cs so that you can see where you are more easily. Almost all harp stores carry them.

Hello Elaine,

I found a great little book titled “Lever Drill – An approach to those crazy levers!” by Denise Grupp-Verbon.

I have a lot of trouble with lever flipping too, I think part of my problem is that I don’t see the lever colors clearly enough to locate them quickly and smoothly. I have seen lever covers in pictures that cover the entire lever, but I don’t know if they’re currently available or not.

I think they were for Camac levers, or possibly Performance levers. The rings are not too helpful for me on my newish Camac levers with the bands of color at the top of the little handles.

The fully colored levers were plastic.

You know, you don’t have to use the rings–you can use the dayglo Goody bands if that helps (nothing is more vividly colored than those!), or paint your lever handles with nail polish, which I’ve seen done before. Ray Pool used to use some kind of bookbinding tape, but I think you need to live in a place like NYC to find that, and I’ve also seen people use the bright plastic tape that’s like electrical tape, but that gets nasty pretty quickly.

One of the first drills I do with my little students is finding a specific string without looking, then we work up to finding the lever with eyes closed. They can all do it, sooner or later. You can, too. Try it! The thing to remember is that for any piece, especially for stuff at the level that you’ve mentioned, you don’t need to know where *every* lever is, just the one you need for that piece.

Another thing that occurs to me: if the levers have the old style notation of “F# III” or Sylvia Woods’s notation of “high C#”, mark the lever changes in on the staff so you know right away which note they mean.

There actually are several good books for flipping levers:

• Clever Levers
  Harmonic exercises for advanced lever harpists
  by Ray Pool (http://raypool.com/harmony.html)

• Lever Drill by Denise Grupp-Verdon (http://www.folkharp.com/product/tri-kart-800)

• Levers Up, Thumbs Up by Kathy Bundock Moore (http://www.folkharp.com/product/thumbrest-size-3)