Venus Paragon question!

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Nor could they have weighed that much less, as they had a lot of wood in the column.

[Stephanie Bennett]

FWIW, I own 2 Venus Paragons and neither has discs on the LOWEST 2 strings. They DO however have discs on the HIGHEST string, 00G (which my LH harps don’t). That doesn’t mean however, that Venus never built one with discs on all 47 strings. Or perhaps they just intended to. They tweaked the designs here & there. My newer Paragon is significantly wider at the extended soundboard than my older one.

[balfour-knight]

Thanks, Stephanie! Harp builders are like car makers, always changing to keep up with the times, ha, ha!

[carl-swanson]

The reason that there are never any discs on the lowest strings(2 on concert grands, 1 on semi-grand models) is that those last strings are right over the main action, which takes the up and down movement of the pedal rods and divides it between the natural and sharp chains. There just isn’t any room for the parts needed to put discs on those strings. But I also think that the swing of the vibrating string down there is so large that it would cause a lot of buzzing problems.

[balfour-knight]

Thanks, Carl!

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Carl, who makes your heavy-gauge wire strings for you? I use Bow Brand heavy-gauge gut strings, and they are superb. I used to use heavy-gauge nylon strings from Pirastro, but now they only have medium-gauge, which are hard to keep in tune.

[balfour-knight]

When I restrung my Camac Atlantide Prestige, I used Bow Brand concert standard tarnish-resistant bass wires. My harp sounds superb with these strings, and they do not hit each other at the mid-point when plucked HARD! The harp was originally strung with Italian Galli bass wires, which were great sounding, but they tarnished badly in our damp summer weather here in the mountains of NC. I only had to update the regulation of 4 or 5 discs, 1 natural and the others sharps, and very minimally, on the new 12 bass wires. The Camac mechanism stays where you set it, so only the normal changes in the wooden structure of the harp causes anything to go out of regulation. On my former L&H 85’s, the high discs could sometimes slip, which was very annoying after a regulation.

[Author]

Posts