How to Play Harp Chords Fast

Playing chords is genuinely one of the hardest things to do on the harp.

I played piano for ten years before I started playing the harp, and I still found chords to be really challenging for years after I started the harp.

Fortunately, in the last ten years I’ve spent teaching people to play the harp, I’ve found some simple strategies that can get your fingers on those chords much faster and make them feel much easier.

1. Learn the Shape

Part of what makes harp chords so challenging is that multiple fingers need to move together at the same time. What can make them really slow is when each finger places individually.

So, what we need to do is learn the shape that those fingers need to open into, and then practice getting into that shape.

Here’s a simple exercise you can do right now:

Step One: Place your fingers on the desired chord. You can do this with a triad, a four-note chord, or any other chord. If you want some chord exercises, you can check out my Fundamental Exercises ebook.

Step Two: Lift your fingers off the strings just a little; about 1 cm or half an inch away. This position hovering beside the strings is what we’ll call ready position.

This is the shape your fingers need to learn!

Step Three: Close your fingers into your hand as if you had just played. Then open back into that ready position shape. You can replace your fingers on the strings to check how close you were.

It’s important that you open into ready position off the strings, pause there, and then place. Do not go straight to the string.

Do this several times until you’re getting the right shape consistently.

Step Four: Drop your hand beside you, and see how quickly you can open, place, and play that chord.

2. The Two-Chord Loop

What about times when you have to play more than one chord in a row? This is really common in music, and it’s the switching between chord shapes that can make it hard to move from chord to chord smoothly.

To overcome this, I like to first practice each chord’s ready position like in the above exercise, and then take two adjacent chords and loop them back and forth, over and over, until your brain yells I GET IT ALREADY!!

First, open into ready position of chord one, place on the strings, and close your fingers without playing (for now). We want to really focus on the motion of the fingers opening out of the hand.

Then move your hand and open into ready position of chord two, place your fingers on the strings, and close without playing.

Move back to chord one’s ready position and place.

Keep going back and forth between these two placements until you feel like you know where they are.

Once you feel like you’re getting the hang of it, instead of closing your fingers without playing, actually play each chord.

Open into ready position, place, play. Move to the next chord. Open into ready position, place, play. And so on.

Again, keep going back and forth between these two chords until you feel like you know where you’re going.

If you have a string of several chords, I recommend doing this with each pair of adjacent chords, and then you can work up to doing three or more in a row.

3. Learn Standard Shapes

Take a close look at your harp music and you’ll find that there are some chord shapes that show up over and over again.

By that, I mean if you look at the spacing of the notes, you’ll start to see patterns where all the notes might be stacked on top of each other like a snowman, or there’s a larger gap between the top two notes or bottom two notes.

If you can get comfortable with these chord shapes, then when they pop up in your music, you’ll already be able to find them quickly because your hand remembers how they feel.

My favourite way to learn these shapes is to practice chord inversions in both three- and four-note chords.

That’s why I included them in the set of exercise books I developed a couple of years ago, which you can check out here if you’d like to see inversions written out in varying keys at beginner to advanced difficulty.

Get more free harp tips like this straight to your inbox by signing up for my email newsletter!