Harp Journals?

[Amanda Barnes]

I don’t have a daily practice journal but am thinking of keeping one myself. Hopefully it will make me more consistent with practicing.

[Rebekka]

I’ve tried keeping a harp practice journal with goals, pieces and exercises I’m working on, but I’m very bad at sticking to any structure (though I love setting up elaborate structures). To keep myself somewhat accountable, I now have a practice tracker on my music stand – a piece of paper with six boxes for every day. For every 5 minutes I practice, I mark one box. Sometimes I add the piece I’ve been working on next to it, and I add when I had a harp lesson that day. I find that this minimalistic structure is very flexible and suits me well. But even this only works for me because it is visible next to my music all the time, otherwise I would forget to use it.

There is also a more elaborate practice tracker/journal pdf in Learning The Harp somewhere. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I’ve seen it…

So in short, my advice is to try out what kind of journal/structure suits you best. You can always change things up so that it’s most helpful to you. 🙂

[Kristen Barry]

I have an Amazon Harp journal I use that is cute and was created by someone in my harp circle, Barbara Montgomery. It has space for daily notes, places for repetoire, strings you have (in case any break) and other stuff I don’t recall. Just search harp journal on Amazon!

[Connie Lo Porto]

Hi Diane, I started a harp journal a bit late and wished I had made notes when I first began. My journal ended up more a note book because there was way too much to notate, Dates, times, music, new things, practice times etc. which didn’t fit my time scheduel and I was getting depressed, so I turned it into a note book, the kind that has sleeves. Each page I put the date what I was working on and where it came from. As my journey started to wander, I also put down new music I wanted and where to get it (instead of buying it) I made notes of you tube tutorials and musicians in the back of the book for future reference. I glued tabs at the beginning of each section for easy finds. Later that binder had sections of warmups, scales, harp notations, techniques as I wasn’t very good at navigating the internet to find things. I made three binders, #1 was what I accomplished that was empty for a few months) #2 what I was working on and two other pieces to grow into and work inbetween, #3 was my where I want to be future binder (hense the reason for the note book) I moved the #2 to #1 and #3 to #2 as I progressed. My note book remains on the desk, I read the day before to jog my memory and start a new page each day.