Hip Harp Academy: How’s the Experience According to Carol Booth

For me, when I started, I had to pick, I think I came in a summer harp jam. It was in COVID and I was going to be bereft if you weren’t keeping doing hip -hop. So I came in a summer harp jam and I had to pick one of the classes and go through it, you know, properly, because that gave me something to hang on to.

It’s something I felt I was able to do. I think it was whatever it was at that stage at the main class. So I did that properly, most of it. And then I realised you don’t have to do all that. But starting by doing one of the classes and, you know, ticking off that I’d done it was helpful for me.

I mean, the very first piece of homework I did, I think, was a drawing. I had no concept of what that had to do with harp. But I got it after I did the homework. And I’m, you know, being a goal -driven oriented sort of A -type personality, putting in the homework helped me feel like I was getting something out of it.

And I was blown away by how kind people are with their feedback, you know, and how helpful and how things I didn’t think would be useful have been incredibly useful. Like that homework I now look back and realise was about the pattern of an introduction, a melody, a cadenza or an improv, and then back to the melody and then to an ending.

Now it’s in my head, more or less, I can play it like I can do that in improv anytime I did the picture. It sticks in my head. That’s what you do. So when I’m playing out in hospital, and I’m out of my depths and floundering, I remember that pattern.

And so the idea that people are going to pick out what actually works is really helpful. The other thing was that when I got a harp buddy, that pushed us both along. So it being in the same moderately the same time zone, she’s in New Zealand, and us being moderately the same level, I went out and bought an amp because she had the amp and my amp’s beautiful.