Your favorite kind of music to play? favorite pieces?

[deb-l]

Bell’s Carolan arrangements are my favorite too, I can’t seem to play Carolan arranged by anyone else after playing his.

[Ken H.]

Hi Deb,

[Natalya Zarraga]

I consider my style to be pretty diverse. I like to play folk, video game music, rock (classic, progressive, metal, alternative, etc.), musicals, some Latin, and lots of other stuff in between. I’m still new to harp and I like almost all kinds of music so I’m all over the place.

[deb-l]

Natalya, do you learn rock, video game music by ear?

[Natalya Zarraga]

Yeah, for the most part. I’ve also been playing piano for over 7 years, so a lot of songs I knew on the piano I just had to translate and arrange for the harp. Do you mean Japanese anime? Yeah, I’m sure there’s some good songs there too – I’m a huge video game nerd, though, so that takes up more of my time than anime. 😛

I play on a Stoney End Lorraine; it’s fully levered and 29 strings. I absolutely love the warm, aged sound of it (it’s actually about 16 years old!), and having a full set of levers was a necessity for me so I could play with sharps and flats.

[deb-l]

7 years of piano?

[Karen Johns]

Yup, just confirms what I already have thought before- having a piano background is a HUGE advantage when learning harp. You already have the bass clef learned, so sight reading is much easier, and you also have a strong background in chords, plus your hands are already used to going in different directions at the same time! I wish I would have taken piano, I know I would be a lot farther along than I am now.

Well, now that it’s the end of summer I have almost got ‘Summer Rain’ by Frank Voltz down! LOL Had a curve ball thrown at me though- wound up working a LOT more than I planned these past few months (like 50+ hours per week) so not much time left at the end of the day for the harp. At this rate I’ll have my Christmas music learned by Easter!

Karen

[Michael Harwood]

What Metallica pieces are you interested in?

[deb-l]

I was thinking of trying to figure out Nothing Else Matters, it doesn’t seem too hard but will take me some time to figure out, I’m not good at learning by harp by ear.

[Michael Harwood]

I am not terribly good at levers, let alone playing the harp. The lever changes for me are pretty difficult.

[deb-l]

I think the lever changes must be a skill that you build like everything else.

[Natalya Zarraga]

Ah! I love Nothing Else Matters! Metallica is such a great band, one of my favorites in the metal genre. I’ve played it on piano so it wasn’t too difficult to translate to harp. If you can read music, then you can easily find some piano sheet music and just pretend it’s for harp, if you haven’t already, hah. It works fine for me.

Oh, and thank you, Deb, for the compliment about the video. I’m so late to reply, shame on me. I’m happy to report I’ve learned and am working on even more songs, both covers and originals.

And yes, to Karen…piano background helps a LOT. But you can still do just fine without it. 🙂

Lately, I’ve been trying to figure Joanna Newsom’s “Sprout and the Bean.” Beautiful song, methinks.

[jennifer-buehler]

Are you familiar with the Joanna Newsom transcription Project http://jntp.110mb.com/

[kreig-kitts]

I’m not trying to kiss up to my teacher (I don’t even know if she reads these forums), but my favorite things to play are etudes and technical studies. Really, they are. As I practice them I can notice my improvement in different areas, and I like that feeling, and they make so many pieces later much easier to learn. When I run across a hard passage in a non-etude piece I’m playing, I usually try to make a little etude out of it, like taking a complex fingering pattern and repeating it while descending an octave or two, then once I’m comfortable trying it again in its original context and noticing how much easier it is to play. I love playing exercises because the

[Fiana Ni Chonaill]

Heya Im fairyharper and I would just like to make the point that my version was originally done with for singers, that is why it is firstly in D and secondly I dont think it is of any benefit to slow it down because with a song I think it is most important to play it how the singers would sing it.

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