When I coach performers, I often find they discount their own skills and experience as they try to fit into a mold of what is and isn’t music. That’s also a big challenge in my own creative life, so I love working on it as a coach.

When U.K. harpist Shelley Fairplay came to me, she was in exactly this situation.

Shelley was part of my “Harness Your Muse” program. The goal of the program is to complete a creative project that provides the next big step in an artist’s career. Shelley was shifting from primarily playing background music and performing standard harp repertoire to developing her own solo show.

After working remotely for four months, Shelley came to my studio for intensive one-on-one sessions, with the goal of returning home with a whole (though imperfect) show that she’d start polishing for performance. Two sections of that show were particularly challenging: “Shelley Finds Her Storm (or Beethoven Creates a Conundrum)” and “Darth Vader Meets Doctor Who.”

For the first section, she wanted to recreate her own experience of a Beethoven symphony: a thunderous musical introduction that transformed into a simple shepherd’s prayer. The juxtaposition was essential. She wanted the audience to experience the clouds parting and the storms’s chaos resolving to the simple shepherd’s melody. She could play the shepherd part beautifully. The problem was creating the storm.

Time was running short to find a solution. I suddenly remembered the first “pieces” I’d written on piano. They were about storms and giants who thundered up from deep caves into pouring rain. I “composed” them every day when I was four years old by pounding and tinkling on the piano—creating thunder, giants, and rain—long before I knew what notes or chords were. I just made sounds that evoked those experiences for me. I suggested to Shelley she do the same thing: Create the storm with harp effects.

The result was this: Shelley tells the audience she had wanted to recreate her Beethoven experience for them, but points out she doesn’t have an orchestra, nor is she Beethoven, so she is going to do her best with what she has. Then she attacks the bass end of the harp, rumbling the strings, and filling it out with loud dissonant glisses and soundboard percussion.

It wasn’t music, and it definitely wasn’t Beethoven, but it nailed the experience of a storm. And when the shepherd’s tune rose out of it, the effect that simple melody had on her audience was the same as she’d experienced herself.

Before, she had been racking her brain for how to arrange Beethoven effectively for harp. But all the audience needed was the effect of a storm. The solution she ended up with was emotionally effective and required almost no practice on her part. Shelley shifted her focus from “How do I play a Beethoven symphony effectively on the harp?” to “What is the audience’s emotional experience?” She evoked that same experience she’d had in a very simple way and disarmed any comparison to Beethoven by flat-out telling the audience what she was doing. The humor and simplicity of her solution made it all the more memorable for the audience.

Basically, she stopped trying to be Beethoven and just embraced being Shelley, using the resources and skills she actually has. This is a core principle of effectively translating experience from one medium to another (e.g. translating guitar or bass effects to harp). If you focus on doing what someone else did, with the notes they used, you’re just referencing something that was effective in another medium. Forget how they did it and go straight for the emotional effect it had on you. If you focus on the emotional effect you want, using the natural resources of your own instrument, body, and life, then you make a poetic translation.

Our second challenge was a medley of unusual wedding music requests: “Darth Vader Meets Doctor Who.” In her role as a wedding harpist, one of Shelley’s fortes is her willingness to arrange nearly any piece of music for her clients’ ceremonies, and do it with a straight face. She wanted to recreate her experience of fulfilling unusual requests, ranging from the theme from Doctor Who to the “Darth Vader” theme from Star Wars. Again, she was stuck trying to create the effect via music, and was considering dropping the whole segment. But I knew this would be a part of the show everyone would remember, and I loved that it gave her audience a perspectiveonly she could give. Since I was coaching her on both creativity and business, and weddings are still the bread and butter of her income, I also loved the fact that this piece would plant the idea of Shelley playing for weddings.

The creative solution, again, was all about simply telling the truth. Instead of worrying about crafting a musical setting, Shelley just told her own story through three tiny, funny vignettes of unusual wedding music requests: when she sent brides down the aisle to Dr. Who, the James Bond theme (the groom’s name was Bond), and, yes, Darth Vader (another groom’s choice).

As she described each scene she played the music—music she’d already learned—and as a climax she pointed out how, with just a few note changes, Darth Vader’s theme actually becomes Wagner’s Wedding March, which she played in glorious glissandos to end the medley. How fun is that? People loved it.

There are two takeaways for me here. First, when we try to craft music we often leave ourselves out of the mix. Yet the more we bring our real lives into the music we play, the more we create an experience that only we could create. Second, what’s powerful for an audience is what they experience, not the level of your technical ability or the cleverness of how you’ve crafted the music.

So I have a mission for you, should you choose to accept it: Ask yourself what you truly love in life that seems completely at odds with your music. What are all the different ways you could combine them? What would that look like…and sound like?

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes! •