Hannah Harris

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...

Hi Reader! I was about one sentence into the original draft for this email early Thursday afternoon when I looked up and saw all my neighbors carrying their pets and a couple of belongings out of the apartment building next to mine. A minute or two later I saw smoke pouring out of the sides and roof of the building. Oh no... You can probably imagine what was racing through my head -- doing a headcount of faces I recognized while hoping that the missing ones weren't at the apartment. Assessing...

Hi Reader! Stick with me on that subject line... Back in my college days, I would be a bundle of nerves before my violin jury at the end of every semester. One of the top tips I got was to eat a banana prior to going in for this exam -- something about potassium helping to support the body and regulate the nervous system. I actually do think it helped me in the middle two years of undergrad (by senior year, I knew fully that I wanted to pursue the Irish music route and it seemed less relevant...

Hi Reader! Earlier this week I recorded a tutorial of Ed Reavy's reel, Maudabawn Chapel, for my Tune Library members. If you've never seen an example of one of these videos, the structure is fairly straightforward: I record the tune up to speed so you know where we're going with it, and then break the tune down into about 2 bar phrases each to teach on repeat. Then we play the tune at a slow and medium pace. As I was going through the B part for Maudabawn Chapel, I made a remark that "this...