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I’m just about to order a Fishman Loudbox Mini on the recommendation of DHC. I’m still undecided about a pickup though. Fishman makes the (SBT-HP) for harp; but the Big Twin at KK Sound has good reviews and includes two attached piezos.
Then there are the CH-3 Artist and Dualie both designed by Shatten. Argh, choices, why are there so many choices!? This is almost as confusing as choosing the harp itself.
My celtic lever harp only has twenty-nine strings and I find it helps to tune all the F strings, lowest to highest, followed by the Cs, Gs, Ds, As, Es, and Bs in that order. One or two of the Fs, particularly mid-range, might need adjusting in the end but everything else holds.
The circumstance described in the OP is totally familiar. Starting at 438, I intentionally drop the lower octave, and raise the upper octave, a few cents because the harp sounds best that way. My music selections and style of playing may attribute to that.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer Biagio. I’ve only had Lovelands so have no experiential comparison. Are Truitts also easier to use, flip, see?
Be sure to creafully investigate *all* of the costs and conditions of selling it online. Amazon, for example, charges a fairly steep sellers fee and then sets a date of arrival that you must meet even it means spending more on the shipping than you planned. Sheet music might need to be sold in lots to actually make a profit from such an arrangment. Good Luck!
I can ditto Debbie’s comments concerning the OnStage stand, lightweight and fairly sturdy, but the shelf will only support a few sheets or a single folder. It’s not ideal for swiping music across a tablet but works for me because I build a folder for any given function.
With thirty minutes, no more than five minutes of scales, thirds, or fifths in the beginning, and another round to end the session. I play the day’s routine in various keys, raising one set of levers at a time, until the harp is in the key I need for the first piece. Then I repeat that process at the end of the session, lowering one set of levers a round, until they’re all down.
String tension is an enigmatic topic when applied to harps. There’s not an actual “concert” standard and, yes, there are highs, lows, and everything in between. Some sites even describe such phenomenon as “low-to-slightly-medium string tension” whatever that means.
Ideally, you have access to a conference or showroom to actually try a number of instruments. If not, you share my fortune of having to determine these factors through reading and online discussions.
The best method I’ve found for understanding thoughts about string tension online is asking people to relate their comments to harps I’ve played. Reading “lower tension than a Blevins” or “much higher tension than a Stoney End” is far more informative than trying to interpret someone’s idea of “high” or “medium” tension.
I love the low F on the Briar Rose because it rounds out the bass clef and is surprisingly included in several pieces. On the other hand, I’ve yet to encounter a piece that required the G three octaves above middle-C although I do play one that reaches that F. That my preference is playing in lower octaves may colour my choices but I can highly recommend the Stoney End model either way.
Your physical therapist will help if you explain to them exactly what you need. It might even help to take the harp and let them sit and strum a bit to get a feel for the positions you need to achieve and maintain. Some of the exercises might seem a bit random at first but, then, so did baby waving.
You only enter a first and last name, email address, and password to create a Dropbox account at the website. There’s no catch to it. The free account will store 2GB. I have the Windows client on my PC that let’s me copy files, and entire folders, to the Dropbox folder in “My Computer” rather than tediously upload them through the website. Opening the app on the iPad automatically displays all of folders and files and yes the files can be opened at displayed as full screen PDFs. I don’t use ForScore but it seems from the description that you can add PDF scores directly from Dropbox on the iPad.
It’s a great method for storing, carrying, and quickly accessing quite a lot of sheet music. One thing to remember is that all of the files in the account are copied, or synchronized, to the iPad. A gigabyte of music stored in Dropbox will be a gigabyte of data on your iPad.
Hope this helps answer some of your questions.
Have a great time Jeffrey! I was in NOLA for a few days last week wishing the whole time we could attend this event instead. Sadly we have a previous commitment the first weekend of June. Greek Fest was nice; but it didn’t feature DHC in concert.
Stoney End builds four 29-string harps, two gothic, two celtic, each type strung G-to-G or F-to-F. All are sold in a package with full Loveland, Camac, or Truitt levers in the low-to-middle $2000 range. I ordered a Briar Rose last year and am pleased as punch with it. You can see them here:
http://stoneyend.com/floor-harps.php
with a price list available:
http://stoneyend.com/_downloads/stoney%20end%20harp%20price%20list%20Jan,%202013.pdf
Good Luck with your search!
Josh Layne in B.C. offers lessons via Skype:
http://www.joshlayne.com/lessons.htmlAs does Susan Zevenbergen in Colorado:
http://www.myharpsdelight.com/online-harp-lessons.htmlAnd Stephanie Bennett in California:
http://www.harpworld.com/skypeharplessons.htmlThere are others as well but these are ones I’ve seen mentioned in various forums and lists. Having not taken online lessons I can’t vouch for their effectiveness. Good Luck!
I had a pin, G two octaves below middle-C, that was slipping no matter how deeply it was seated in the hole. Per suggestion on another forum, I took it out and wet the inside of the hole slightly with a cotton swab, let it dry overnight, then reinserted the pin the next day. Wood apparently swells a bit when it’s made wet in dry weather (we have natural gas floor furnaces) but doesn’t “retract” fully. In any case it worked and the pin hasn’t slipped since. It cost me a string of course but that was a small price to pay considering that the note was perpetually flat before the repair.
