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The fully colored levers were plastic.
You know, you don’t have to use the rings–you can use the dayglo Goody bands if that helps (nothing is more vividly colored than those!), or paint your lever handles with nail polish, which I’ve seen done before. Ray Pool used to use some kind of bookbinding tape, but I think you need to live in a place like NYC to find that, and I’ve also seen people use the bright plastic tape that’s like electrical tape, but that gets nasty pretty quickly.
One of the first drills I do with my little students is finding a specific string without looking, then we work up to finding the lever with eyes closed. They can all do it, sooner or later. You can, too. Try it! The thing to remember is that for any piece, especially for stuff at the level that you’ve mentioned, you don’t need to know where *every* lever is, just the one you need for that piece.
>I have seen the rings though. Do they help alot?
Yes! You can also use Goody Ouchless Mini-hairbands if you can find suitable colors these days. But those dots are useless when you need to find a lever in in a hurry, partly because they are on the side of the lever where it’s hard to see.
You should take out measures with tricky changes and work those by themselves till you don’t realize that you’ve moved the lever. You want to get to the point where you say, “Did I move that?” and look up and see that you did. If you don’t practice them enough, they won’t stick, and for some people it takes a lot of practice.
There’s no obvious harp reason for your trouble–levers on a thorm should be easily reachable for most people, while some harps are so tall that it can be really a long way to go for bass levers. Lovelands aren’t the most desirable levers, but they’re okay, so you should be able to do this if you set your mind to it.
I would say the fact that you have so much trouble doing just right hand means you need to do just left hand till you are certain of where you want the changes, then move to doing just right hand, if you’re a hands-separately practicer. (I’m a big believer in this, but not everyone is.)
>My my… how the pot has been stirred. : /
What do you mean? I just said that where I am, this is not the case. I would presume that in areas where brides still wear big lace dresses and yearn for the Victorian thing that it would be different.
I would have to say that I do think anyone whose interest is primarily classical should have full levers, but the Ravenna 34 with full levers is still less than $2000. Frankly, in this market it might be possible to pick up a much more top of the line harp for that kind of money, if you take your time and search around. The used lever harp market is even more over-saturated than the used pedal harp market right now.
I’m sorry, that’s just not realistic advice for many people, Patricia. Where on earth is this person supposed to buy a pedal harp on a budget of two grand? Even renting a pedal harp is going to eat up his entire harp budget in two years or less. In that time he could be learning basic technique and there’s a heck of a lot of classical music that is playable with levers.
Well, I play my own arrangement. I think that octave jump for the sharp in Dewey’s arrangement is just weird sounding. Most pedal harp versions and most of the organists I hear also skip the chromatic section, incidentally.
I have to admit, though, to bring this back on topic, that if money were no object I would love, love, love to have a lever harp that looks something like the Eliza Ridgely harp, for all that my brides wouldn’t be impressed.
I’m not sure you understood me, Geri. I’m saying that the most basic looking lever harp is suitable these days, because brides don’t care what a harp looks like, except that most of mine would opt for simple over ornate now, if given a choice.
I *never* gig on a pedal harp, haven’t for years. The 11 gets an outing once a year, on Christmas Eve, to give it a thrill. 🙂
There are innumerable transcriptions of the Moldau theme, including many for lever harp, but yes, I agree with Patricia that if you thinking of the Janacek transcription, you can forget it without a pedal harp and lot of study.
Do you look at the lever changes as being part of the music (i.e., having to happen in EXACTLY the same spot each time, just like a note)? When you practice hands separately, do you still do the levers regardless of which hand you’re working on? Can you see your levers–I mean easily find the lever that you want? It helps a lot to mark the F and C levers. Dusty Strings makes little colored rubber rings to put over the handles of the Fs and Cs so that you can see where you are more easily. Almost all harp stores carry them.
Well, I think it has to do with the whole aesthetic that’s been hot for the past ten years or so: a house that looks like a kitchen or an ikea-furnished dorm room, a kitchen that looks like the back end of a restaurant, little color and no ornamentation in clothing: the kids who are reaching bride age now grew up in a world where to be trendy is to be stark. Completely the opposite of the whole 80s thing of color, pattern, embroidery, lace, etc.
Gotcha, although:
>As long as it looks and sounds like a pedal harp, most people are happy
I have to say where I live this is not the case–clients who come to my house, where there is a style 11 sitting in the living room, usually say, “You’re not going to bring THAT, are you?” Currently my brides prefer the look of a lever harp by about 50 to 1, an interesting change from ten or fifteen years ago.
As a matter of fact, I recently recommended someone who’s very much a gown-and-gold-harp kind of gal for a job I couldn’t do, and the client looked at her website and called me back to ask for another recommendation, because “we could see she’s just too fancy for our little party.”
> Eb, Bb and a couple of Ab, a couple of A naturals and a G#
But you can do all those with your levers with E-flat tuning. Does he want G-double sharp at some time or something like that which would require retuning the harp instead of setting those levers? The examples he gave in the article also included that scale, but the lever/pedal changes he talked about were all attainable with regular Eb tuning and lever changes, like Bb to B natural and so on.
