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If you are gigging or earning money otherwise with your instruments, be sure to discuss that with your insurance company. My insurance company will not cover my harps through my homeowners because I use them to earn money. YMMV, so if yours covers the instruments, just be sure this is clear an outlined in your policy.
From a harp store: don’t buy a harp from us. Rent one and learn to play first and *then* come back to buy a harp from us.
From a harp teacher: If you are having problems with a section, it’s probably because your thumb is too low and your fingers are too high.
From a flute teacher: Don’t “cheat” by simplifying when you practice. The point of practice is improvement and perfection. But when you get to the performance, if you find you need to simplify, go for it. The point of performance is to make beautiful music and make your audience happy.
I have a day job and am not super busy with gigs, but I’ve been using Google Calendar and Google drive.
Here’s how I handle this:
In Google drive, I keep a document for each gig.
In Google calendar, I have two sub-calendars, one private and one public.I have a copy of the public calendar embedded in my webpage/blog, and on the private calendar, I can actually attach the google drive document with all the details about the gig.This means that on my phone, each gig shows up twice, but I can live with that. The public event lists the actual times of the gig, and has a little bit of description for anyone interested in the event. The private calendar includes the link to my google docs page, the actual call time I have to be there, and anything else that the public shouldn’t know, like contact names and numbers.
I don’t know of any books for 12 strings either, and like Allison, I think you will not have enough strings to really play much more than melodies.
Most importantly, learn how to tune the harp and correct hand position. You might want to find a teacher for a few lessons or at least a book that shows this.
I don’t know what your ultimate goals are or how much music you already know, but if it were me, I would work with lead sheets. A lead sheet has the melody of a song written out with the chords to the song above it.
I would first learn the melody with just the right hand. Then I would learn the melody with just the left hand. Then I would learn tof play the melody in the right hand, and use the left hand to only play the note that is the root of the chord that is written- if the chord is a c hord, I would just play the note c with my left hand.
You will probably not have enough strings to even do this all the time, so you will either have to transpose your song to a different key, or learn how to make adjustments in other ways. This is not a disadvantage! You will learn a lot about the harp and about music theory by experimenting to make the music sound nice.
I would also want to get a harp with more strings as soon as I could, so I would start saving up for a good one, and look for a teacher. But I think there are ways you can learn a little on the tiny one. Listen to what you are doing and experiment.
