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Nylon strings don’t wear quickly, which means they often outlive a decent sound long before they’ve broken. Wire strings can get dirty and tarnished-looking but still sound fine (maybe my skin chemistry darkens the metal more).
If I’m doing a major string change, I’ll try to stagger them out a few at a time across the harp to keep the tension even, and once those have had a couple days to settle, change a few more, rather than remove a cluster of strings at once from the same area on the harp.
My New Year’s resolution (I just made it this instant) is to keep a chart listing all my strings and when I last changed each, to see how old strings are, which ones break the most, and be able to plan changes and replacement purchases accordingly.
Unless it can tune the harp and change a string for me while I make a sandwich, or at least help with loading, it doesn’t have all the features I’d want.
Actually I was hoping to somehow score a movie role when a wandering producer stopped in from the cold, or at least a date with Patrick Dempsey when he happened to be in town and wandered in from the cold, but yeah, touching people is nice too I guess.
A novel set in Italy, either “Farewall to Arms” or “Where Angels Fear to Tread” as I read them both the same year and remember this from one of them, has a scene at the opera where the crowd yells and cheers throughout, and fans throw flowers at the singer during her aria and regularly burst into raucous
This thread reminds me of one of my favorite Frasier episodes.
If the sound becomes too far removed from the physical instrument, as I’d accuse a MIDI harp of, I think you might as well just use a keyboard. I once was at an outdoor concert with a harpist using an amp to sound just like an electric piano to play and sing r&b, and the whole time I thought “If you’d just brought a keyboard, you’d sound the same and wouldn’t have needed a van for this gig.” Except I suppose “mediocre R&B keyboard” doesn’t sound nearly as good in the press kit as “R&B electric harpist.”
Camac pedal harps use aircraft cables instead of rods, but I don’t think there’s a substantial cost savings there, not compared to
A Dampit could be useful to help with drying out during a power outage when your electric humidifier isn’t working. If you’re not familiar with Dampits, an internet search should take you right to their page and where to buy them. Many music stores that sell string instrument supplies have them.
Otherwise, I’d think a harp’s
If nothing else, I bet this thread will have a lot of pedal harp shoppers looking underneath to try to check out the rivets.
I had a teacher whose hardwoods had a very distrinct light/dark grain pattern, and strings disappeared when holding the harp at certain angles.
If people generally start conservatory at 17-18, then 21 isn’t too old
from an age standpoint, if you’re otherwise ready for it. There seem to
be a lot of harpists, including professionals, who come to it a little
later in life compared to say violinists who usually start as young
children, though frequently they had other musical training before
taking up the harp. The bigger question is not just raw talent to succeed or current proficiency to gain admission (and there are always programs where the main requiment is the ability to write a tuition check or sign a student loan promissory note), but willingness to really go through the kind of heavy, full-time obsession with the instrument that classical conservatories require.In many ways a classical conservatory training is like training for the
Olympics. You must spend hours and hours each day repeating tasks that
most people can do adequately until you reach and exceed perfection at those
tasks. Lots of people can run in a way that gets them from A to B in a
reasonable time, and lots even run miles at a time for fun. However,
training for hours a day so that you’re one of a handful of the fastest
runners of the planet’s 5 billion inhabitants requires grueling effort
for hours a day, every single day, to perfect one’s ability to do this
completely simple act. Did you hear Michael Phelps talk about how much
he practices when he’s training?Oh, here’s a real example: there was this sweet old lady who’d bake cookies who was in charge of scheduling practice rooms for everybody taking a performance class, either for a major or as an elective. As an elective piano and voice student, I got two hours a day total for piano and voice. Music majors got six hours a day scheduled for their main instrument, and most of them practiced much more than that. Their instrument/voice was treated as a 9 credit hour course, where a normal full time college student schedule was 15-17 hours, so over half of their course work was practicing, lessons, and master classes. And then there will be required ensemble, at least an hour a day. It is mandatory that somebody who sits within five feet of you have hygiene issues.
Plucking a harp string in a reasonably pleasant manner isn’t a
physically difficult thing. My neighbor did it fairly well the first
time he touched my harp and he might have even played a harmonic. My
four-year-old niece sat on my lap and successfully plucked a string. But
conservatory training isn’t just learning to play the instrumentMaybe you need to start adding a clause for original compositions where there is an extra fee if you need to rewrite the harp part, to be determined at your sole discretion.
And you get original compositions with at least X days to review or you reserve the right to cancel and keep the deposit. Make them initial that one.
And, and you own rights to any parts you write.
I missed my calling as an agent.
