Hannah Harris

Hi Reader! A short letter from me today due to gigs and yesterday being the 4th of July (cue holiday brain mode). But I did want to take an opportunity to share three conversations I've had with some fantastic women in the Irish traditional music space over the past few months in case you haven't had a chance to tune in yet! Liz Knowles has a knack for making practicing your instrument fun. Basically think of the last time you went down a rabbit hole researching something you were curious...

Hi Reader! We had a really enjoyable session on Wednesday this week with a mix of the usual suspects and a couple of people visiting from out of town -- always a favorite combo! It was a bit shorter and earlier than usual due to the World Cup (despite our rousing rendition of Scotland the Brave at the end of the session, I'm afraid it didn't do the trick. But a big congrats to Brazil!). And there was a time and the not too distant past when it would bother me if a pub can't decide if it's a...

Hi Reader! Tell me if you've been in these shoes before. You open up a tune book like the O'Neill's collection (which has 1000 tunes in it if you're not familiar), and think "okay now I'm going to learn every single one of these tunes." After all, if you trained in the Suzuki method or another violin method that relied on progressing through a series of books, isn't that what we're used to? Learn every tune in the book, and then we can move on to the next level. It's certainly how I used to...

Hi Reader! Another Find your Lilt episode is on its way to your earbuds tomorrow (I'm releasing new episodes twice a month on the 15th and last day of the month). If you're not already friends with my guest, I think you're going to want to be by the end of the discussion! From my early days of teaching Irish fiddle, I've thought about how valuable it would be to have a method book that applies technical training to the Irish fiddle style -- much like etudes in the classical world. So my ears...

Hi Reader! This question came up in my inbox this week around how important speed actually is. In my Tune Library videos, I start every tutorial playing the tune "up to speed" and then breaking it down into phrases before playing the whole tune at a slow, then medium pace. But one of my members (rightly) questioned this speed -- how much of a benchmark is it to say you've learned a tune? When I play a tune "up to speed", I'm not aiming to crank out every reel at 105bpm (beats-per-minute). I...

Hi Reader! Last Tuesday I got an opportunity to do some volunteer work at a local farm. We were planting cabbages for about four hours, and when I say "many hands make light work" I mean it! We were a team of about 10 and we managed to plant 10,865 cabbages all in a morning. When our coordinator told us the number, I was honestly staggered. And very motivated to do this again! The team had the whole strategy worked out. One farmer drove the tractor which poked holes in the ground and watered...

Hi Reader, Raise your hand if you love lists! In doing a quick scan of my office desk, I see no less than six different lists spread across the table. Three of them are task based, one is a brain dump of guiding questions to bring up in a podcast interview I'm conducting later today, and others are savings and expense tracking. You may or may not be as obsessed with lists as I am (my partner, Bear, makes it a point to not like them though you know I call attention to it any time he puts...