Creating arrangements

Before I had to quit my lessons due to scheduling issues, my teacher was concentrating on teaching me to come up with my own arrangements. In her words, "I can teach you tunes until the cows come home, but this is going to help you more in the long run." While I don't know much, I agree that it's a useful skill, so I thought I'd pass on what I do know in hopes that it might help someone else. (Bear in mind that I learn by ear. I know absolutely nothing about music theory or transcribing sheet music.)

Before you pick a song to arrange: does it have any key changes in it? This is a matter of some concern to me, but probably not so much to those who play pedal. If it does have key changes and you play lever, it doesn't necessarily mean you can't play it, but you might need to do some lever flipping.

Have you picked the song? Good. You'd better really, really like it. Because before you play anything, you're going to listen to it as many times as it takes to get it into your head. The one I'm working on right now is a tune by Scottish harper Catriona McKay, rather mysteriously named "The Swan Lk243." You can hear part of it here.

I usually focus on trying to pick out the melody with my right hand before I think about chords. As for settling on a fingering for a certain phrase, I've discovered the most obvious fingering isn't necessarily the one that will work best. While I like to have the right hand down pretty solid before I figure out what to do with my left, sometimes it's easier to do both at once. For instance, with this song, I'd made a fair amount of progress on the right hand before realizing that it would actually make more sense to have the left hand play part of the melody in certain places--in other words, they overlap a little. So hooray for trial-and-error. Sometimes I think it's easier to translate songs that weren't originally done on harp.

As for the left hand... I haven't much advice to offer. I feel like I never do anything very creative with it, except for throwing in syncopation whenever possible, just because it's fun. Usually I just end up going with variations on whatever chord "sounds right." I should also note that I'm not trying to reproduce exactly what McKay does. For one thing, it wouldn't be an arrangement if I did. And for another, at least for me, it's downright impossible to do. No matter how many times I listen, I just can't quite hear exactly what she's doing, especially with her left hand. The most I can do is make an educated guess. I figure the first time through the tune I'll stick pretty close to how she plays it and maybe figure out some variations for the second run-through.

I probably don't even need to say this, but once you have the basic structure figured out... repetition. Lots of it.