Unlocking Musical Freedom: The Art of “Faking It”

When I first created the “Fake It!” training and said I was going to share “the musical shorthand of fake books and lead sheets,” I could almost feel people wondering what they’d gotten themselves into.

They were expecting a technical session. What they got was an adventure — one of those journeys that starts out about music and ends up being about freedom.

This is the welcome banner to the Fake It! Webinar Optin Page.

The Liberation of “Faking It”

What I love about “faking” is that it’s not about pretending. It’s about creating. When you open a fake book, all you see is a melody line and a sprinkling of chord symbols (or sometimes a downpour of them). But that’s it. It’s an outline.

The “Fake It” training was all about turning that outline into a playable piece of music with a beginning, middle and end.

Before the training even started, a lot of the participants had already gone through my 5-Day “Improv Now!” Challenge. Little did they know, they were creating one piece of the full-arrangement puzzle.

To start out the “Fake It!” training, I reviewed and walked through the steps of the 5-Day “Improv Now” Challenge many of them had just finished. But this time I started playing it different ways: moody, jazzy, classical, playful — the same basic music – but sounding very different. I could see faces start to light up in the Zoom windows.

While reviewing the steps of the 5-Day “Improv Now” Challenge.

Next I took them to see the new “Wireframe” tool I’ve built in Hip Harp Academy. It takes you through the process of combining what they learned in the Challenge with a simple tune to build an arrangement with a beginning, middle and end.

I showed how you can choose the elements of your particular arrangement, like choosing from a menu: a simple intro, a simple melody, the improv prompt they’d learned in the Challenge, and a fun technique called the Kerfuffle for the ending.

By using the wireframe tool, you could see how they fit together to create that satisfying Beginning-Middle-End experience. They could also see that switching out components would create a different sounding arrangement based on the same process.

The WireFrame tool in Hip Harp Academy.

To experience that, we all played through the process together, once, twice … and I held my breath. Could they see the endless possibility of what they were doing? Were they experiencing it literally in their own hands?

Suddenly the chat exploded:

ANNE: With this approach you can play INSTANTLY!”

HEIDI: “Fun!! It’s purely creative and relaxed as opposed to hitting the correct notes”

Now, I’ve been teaching this framework for 10 years and saying “It’s Instant Arrangement” and I don’t think anyone believed me … but finally I had a way to lead them to experience it, to experience how it’s possible for them.

The question is: will people actually DO it? Years ago my therapist looked at me with great sadness and said, “I never understood why people discover what works – and then they stop doing it.”

Soooooo … the next step is to put it into a new context.

From Foundation to Functionality

Now that they could see the possibility, I laid out this pathway:

Foundation > Functionality > Fluency > Flexibility … Freedom. It’s the path I identified that Academy members take. But there are two twists: Or rather a twist and an untwist.

The Untwist

The untwist is that as soon as people have Foundation and basic Functionality, they seem to immediately inject some new attempt at greater complexity or creativity, which undermines them ever getting to Fluency and Flexibility – and undermines their experiencing the Freedom of the technical facility they have NOW. It’s almost as if curiosity and creativity undermine the possibility of fluency.

It’s not just my students. I see this same tendency in ME!

It’s as if we’re learning a language, and instead of having conversations using the words we know, we keep trying to make ONE single conversation more interesting by putting in bigger and bigger words we can barely articulate.

That’s not freedom. It’s a strange combination of curiosity and a compulsion to improve and thus prove the value of what we’re doing.

The Positive Twist

But there’s a positive twist: freedom can happen anywhere in that progression – even when you are just learning the foundational ideas. You don’t have to wait until you “get good enough.” As long as you respect the value of your own technical level, and listen to the beauty of the instrument and not the voices of critique in your head, you can feel the freedom any time you use the process – whether you’re a fledgling player or a professional.

The preview of what the Fake Book looks like.

From Functionality to Fluency

And as the piece de resistance reveals the new Hip Harp Academy Fake Book. With dozens of ‘starter tunes’ – all of them written in the same key (C, of course) – it’s a portal to infinite musical possibility that gives access to harpists of any level.

When people realized that a fake book could actually be a gateway to creativity, you could feel the relief and excitement in the air. The chat exploded:

HEIDI: “Even if just playing for myself, this is so much more expressive and fulfilling.”

DIANE: “In the time it takes to learn someone else’s arrangement, you can learn many more pieces that have your own personal flair..”

That’s what this process invites: not perfection, but transformation.

But what if it all sounds the same???

Then came my favorite moment, courtesy of Karla Arndt, who shared in the chat: “I’m worried everything I play will end up sounding the same.”

I could have hugged her: “Karla, you just set me up perfectly for what’s next.”

I stepped behind my harp and played the same tune, shifting from jazz to classical, from melancholy to jubilant, all flowing from the same simple lead sheet, following the same process.

Playing “You Are My Sunshine” as an example on how get fluency by going thru the wireframe. 

There was silence and then a sense of “Ohhhhhhh… I get it …”

LEANNE: “A simple tune can become a world — a life — in a song.”

This process I’ve distilled in the Wireframe is the same process jazz players use, the same process improvising Baroque musicians used.

We’re just applying it to ANY kind of music.

The process is simple. The possibilities are infinite.

At the end of the session, I asked everyone to sum up what they were taking away in three words – more or less

Helen typed: UNLOCKED.

It was a perfect summary. That’s it. That’s what I want for every person I connect with – whether they’re a musician performing a piece of mine, a harpist, learning improv from me, or an audience member in one of my concerts — to feel unlocked, to step into the world of infinite possibility – the world of connection to themselves, the music, the instrument – and the experience of being alive.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts about the “Fake It!” training – the M&M Exercise and Stir-Fry Music.

Harpists Who Dare

Ready to liberate yourself from the notes on the page?