Hi – question about harp glisses, and which notes actually get played

[unknown-user]

Greetings.

When you play a Harp gliss, are all of the notes natural, ie – for an Am harp gliss, are you actually playing A-B-C-D-E-F-G?

More questions to possibly

[carl-swanson]

Are you playing a gliss on a lever or pedal harp? There are infinite variations in the structure of gliss’s, mostly on pedal harp. The gliss should be spelled out. Usually the first octave is written out to show you the position of each note, then the squiggly line follows up to a written out top(or bottom) note.

[unknown-user]

Hi – thanks for the quick response. Yes – a standard orchestral pedal harp. Let’s forget about notation, if you don’t mind; there is no sheet music involved here. This inquiry centers around a harp sample library, which consists of individual notes, and glisses. The glisses sound wrong to me; what is labelled as Am does not sound like Am. Here:

http://www.jeffreyhayat.com/AmHarpGliss.mp3

First is a pre-recorded Am gliss, and then one I created with individual notes.

[Sid Humphreys]

Jeff,

there are several pedals you

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Listen to real harps, not a synthesizer. Software will totally mislead you. We can plays glissandi as scales or as chords. We generally double the tonic and the third to make a chord, sometimes other tones depending what is possible.

[barbara-brundage]

You might want to see if you can get hold of “The Complete Guide to Harp Glissandi” by John Marson (available from lyramusic.com), and also Sylvia Woods has a sort of “cheat sheet” for common glissando spellings.

[Author]

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