And the battle continues

I'm making progress on What If.

Kind of.

Well, okay, slow progress.

I've been plucking away for about two hours and have succeeded in nailing down a few more chords. The reason those chords are taking so long is that I have to flip a lever right at the transition between the chorus and the next verse. Yay key changes. Trying to work them in is kind of playing Simon on the highest difficulty level but harder.

My musical nemesis

Repetition. When I'm learning a new song, it's unavoidable. As I mentioned some time ago, I pretty much fail at reading sheet music, so the only way I can really learn is by ear. And the only way to really learn something by ear is to listen to it. Many, many times. And then when I can figure out the fingering, to divvy it up into little sections and play each phrase. Many, many times. When I'm learning a new song, my life becomes the musical equivalent of Groundhog Day.

At the moment I am about halfway through What If by Emilie Autumn, a pretty, flowy kind of tune. I'm veering between the version by this harpist on YouTube (although she's playing pedal, which somewhat screws things up), and the recorded version, twisting my face into bizarre expressions as I struggle to hear the exact notes the piano is playing underneath the layers of strings and vocals. I tell myself that it will be worth it when I can play the full song smoothly. This is what I tell myself as my (bleeding, broken) fingers clamber up that stupid broken A chord for the umpteenth time.

I have already stated that repetition is the best way for me to learn. Unfortunately, the idea of anything repeating endlessly drives me crazy. Stairs. Wallpaper patterns. Carousels. Songs...

So, even though it's in the name of learning a song well, the sound of my own fingers playing the same chords over and over gives me the feeling of being in a recurring nightmare. I must be a masochist, though, because if I'm impatient to learn the song I keep at it, and at it, convinced that just one more repetition will make it perfect.

This must be how people go crazy...

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.