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Hi, Kay. Thanks for asking, but no, sorry, I don’t bother to publish what I do on the pedal harp–it just doesn’t seem necessary, since it’s so much easier to figure things out when you don’t have the restrictions imposed by levers.
Most of the time you can just play the original or the composer’s own keyboard reduction of a piece, or one of the many, many piano arrangements available.
There’s also a largish harp store in Bruges that carries the complete camac line, but I don’t have the contact info at hand.
Actually, you can have a harp foamed and crated (this is how the pedal harp companies ship these days) and that’s really preferable to an old fashioned trunk, but I wouldn’t ship the harp unless you plan to be there a long, long time (years). There are several harp stores in Belgium and the Netherlands, both of which are convenient for Luxembourg (nothing is far in Benelux):
OTJA Harpcenter
Bennebroekerlaan 35a
2121 GR Benenbroek
THE NETHERLANDS
and
VIEGAS HARP
Jan Bolstraat 23
2800 Mechelen
BELGIUM
and
http://www.crescendo-music.com/
for starters. I’d talk them about rentals.
>When you fix your strings, as Barbara suggested, make sure you back those pins out enough.
Yes, for future reference this is very important on a dusty, since their tuning pins are threaded. You always need to unwind them before putting on a new string. That may well be where you first went astray. Glad you got things working again.
Meant to say that adjusting the bridge pins in and out is one way of regulating a lever harp, so moving those will always have an effect on the regulation.
If you put your strings up properly they shouldn’t have suddenly begun buzzing against the levers. It was your messing with the bridge pins that wrecked your regulation. You will need to get the strings on correctly (probably you left too much winding on them, would be my guess), and then put the pins back where they were.
I would presume that as a student allowed to use the school harp you must be taking lessons from a teacher there. Have you just asked about whether there’s a way to increase time or, if the harp is just present in the room but not used, to move it into another room when other instruments are being taught there?
In any case, if you have a teacher, he or she can answer your question about the lever harp far better than we can, since that’s the person who knows what repertoire you’re playing and at what level.
There are many different ways to flip a lever, but which is best depends on you, your harp, its levers and how you all fit together as far as size. The single most important thing is to practice lever changing the way you would pedals: always in the same spot in the music and it takes a bit of work till it becomes something you don’t think about. If you move a lever at different spots each time, it will never get into your muscle memory.
There are many different ways to flip a lever, but which is best depends on you, your harp, its levers and how you all fit together as far as size. The single most important thing is to practice lever changing the way you would pedals: always in the same spot in the music and it takes a bit of work till it becomes something you don’t think about. If you move a lever at different spots each time, it will never get into your muscle memory.
There are many different ways to flip a lever, but which is best depends on you, your harp, its levers and how you all fit together as far as size. The single most important thing is to practice lever changing the way you would pedals: always in the same spot in the music and it takes a bit of work till it becomes something you don’t think about. If you move a lever at different spots each time, it will never get into your muscle memory.
Well, really all you can do is to bump up the octave. You may find that sometimes it sounds better if you take the entire phrase in the bass up the octave (if it doesn’t collide with the melody) rather than just the particular note that lies below the range.
Moving the whole piece up an octave is also sometimes possible, although some things may sound plinky when you do that.
You really have to decide on a piece by piece basis.
Lowering the tuning on part of the harp is probably not the answer, IMHO.
