Strengthening Your Third and Fourth Fingers on the Harp

Do you have a hard time playing your third or fourth finger, and when you do, it ends up sounding messy?

Hey, I’m Samantha, welcome or welcome back to the harp studio, and today I’m going to teach you how to strengthen those fingers using the same tricks I’ve taught my harp students over the past ten years that solve it every time.

1. Check Your Hand Position

The first thing we need to do is check your hand position, because oftentimes, when you’re having trouble playing the third or fourth finger, it’s not actually a lack of strength, but that your hand is set up in a way that makes it hard to get leverage on the finger.

What we want to look at here is the position of your palm relative to your fingers. We want the palm to be kind of centered between the fingers and the thumb so that the fingers curve back in front of themselves, rather than having the palm farther back and the fingers reaching forward, which will also force the fingers to be a bit straighter.

And a straight finger doesn’t have much leverage at all and is a lot harder to play.

Now, if you move your palm forward and suddenly you feel like there’s not enough room for your fingers now that they’re curved, just bring the palm a little more outward from the strings, so they have more room. Your hand should be shaped like you could hold a mug or an orange inside it so that it's nice and round.

2. Make Sure You’re Playing With Good Technique

Now that we’ve got the hand position looking good, we also want to make sure that you’re playing with good technique.

We’ve got these nice curved fingers, and we want to make sure that they stay curved when you go to play the string. If your knuckles collapse, it means the force you’re trying to use to play the string is all ending up in that joint, and not on the actual string, and that’s going to make it a lot harder to play.

If you have trouble keeping them rounded, try gently pushing on a hard surface while keeping the fingers curved, then try to keep that feeling when you go back to the harp. You don’t need to push harder, you just need to train your fingers what it feels like to keep that structure through the finger.

3. Push Into the String, Don’t Pull

The next thing that’s going to help here is thinking of pushing into the string with the tip of the finger, rather than trying to pull the string. You don’t need to force it by squeezing farther back in the fingers, or in your palm or the back of your hand.

Just imagine strength building up in the tip of your fingertip that will push through to the other side of the harp, and then when you close your finger, you’re just releasing it.

4. Simple Strengthening Exercises

Now that we’ve got our hand in a good position and we’re playing properly, here are a few very simple exercises you can practice to build strength and flexibility in your 3rd and 4th fingers so they can play with the same clarity and speed as the other two.

Exercise 1:
Place 1–2–3. Just play the third finger, paying attention to what we just talked about. Keep the finger round, and play from the tip of the finger. Let fingers 4 and 5 move with it if you can, as though all three fingers are inside a mitten. Taking time between notes, just play finger 3 several times.

Exercise 2:
Then we’ll do the same thing with finger 4. Place 1–2–3–4, and play finger 4, replace, and play it again. It’s important to really pay attention to your hand position, to the curve in your knuckles, to making sure you push instead of pull. Let the pinky move together in and out. Repeat several times, cycling your attention to these different things.

Exercise 3:
As one last simple exercise, we’re going to play down from the thumb. Place 1–2–3–4, and play them in order, 1–2–3–4, slowly. Make sure the position and rotation of your palm doesn’t change as you approach the last two fingers. Focus on pushing in to ground those fingers now that the thumb is off the strings.

If you just do these little exercises for a minute or two as part of your warmup each time you play, with just a little bit of time those fingers are going to feel stronger and more confident and more automatic. You’ve got this, so don’t give up!

Keep it up — and happy harping! 🎵

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