mae-mcallister

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  • Yes, it does. Over the pond, most harps are gut-strung because a) gut is awesome and b) gut strings are mostly manufactured in the UK, nylon ones mostly in the USA. Even though the FH is an American harp, Dusty Strings know their audience and bring gut-strung ones to sell here. It is at lever gut tension, which suits me and the music I like playing just fine.

    In conclusion, gut is epic.

    Mae’s two pence:

    – Gut is more expensive and breaks more often but damn it sounds sooooooo so so good! I have nylon and KF on my little travel harp for durability and convenience, but I would not change the gut on my big one for anything. I only get about two broken strings a month, 90% of which are the top three gut strings (i.e. naughty buggers but fairly cheap and small to replace). Also, most faff is due to having to tune, not replace strings. Gut holds tune fairly well. KF takes ages to settle, and then holds good tune. Nylon tends to stretch a bit. In conclusion, guuuuuuuuuut! Gut is soothing balm to your ears.

    – KF is Not Evil. Equally, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t mess with the string design. I think its unhelpful and misleading to say “never use KF strings” but if you piss around with strings of a different material on your harp just according to what note it says on the label without checking with someone who does know what they’re doing, you need a good hard slap and I’m happy to oblige. Ownership and responsibility for an instrument goes beyond just playing it.

    – I liked the Boulevard, and don’t care for the Ravennas. I know because I’ve played both. Crushes are crushes, but there’s no substitute for playing a harp for real and falling hard in love.

    Maybe that was three pence. What’s the going rate for opinions on the internet these days?

    in reply to: Another life lesson – always have a light #188050

    Off-topic, having now played both a Heartland and the harp in the picture I might venture the slightly sacriligious opinion that Brian’s plays and sounds better than the Heartland:)

    in reply to: Double-strung harp saga #187789

    Ah, yes, video…I’m still basically terrified that I won’t do it any justice :S

    in reply to: Travel Harp #187181

    Just to let you know, I have a 22×2 double-strung Brittany from Stoney End just for this purpose and I cycle around with it no problem. It’s even easier to cycle with than carry as the box then rests on the frame above my rear wheel and so I’m not carrying the weight (which is exactly 5kg, levers and all).

    in reply to: Help! I'm the worst sight-reader ever… #187011

    Hmm. Well, I sight-read my way through that part of my grade 7 exam and it wasn’t atrocious. It wasn’t great either, but you know, I made it. We’ll have to wait and see.

    It can only get better from here…

    in reply to: Double-strung harp saga #187010

    The saga continues…

    …we come to The Installation of the Levers.

    Lessons learnt from this weekend: Firstly, installing levers is every bit as tedious and boring and fiddly and crap as everyone has always said it is; Secondly, in the nicest possible way, Americans and their outdated illogical pain-in-the-ass imperial units can go to hell:)

    So, it being along weekend and me staying at my parents (my dad got lots of tools:), I decided it would be the perfect weekend to make a start. The Stoney End instructions specify the following stages:

    1. Position the lever by hand and mark the point with an awl.
    2. Drill a hole
    3. Use a screw to thread the hole
    4. Screw in the lever with the screw.

    They also specify that you have to start with the largest string but it took us one lever to realise that the exact opposite applies for the RH side of a double-strung.

    What it also doesn’t mention about stage 1 is that it’s impossible to do this with less than 3 hands unless you are very, very good. You cannot hold the lever down and test the string at the same time, because holding the lever down when it’s engaged is HARD. But that’s fine, we had Team Dad and Mae and Mae’s Partner.

    Stage 2 is (relatively) simple, except since the hole is directly underneath the string, you have to hold the string away from the hole by a RIDICULOUSLY large amount. This is especially worrying for the shortest strings, which are about 10cm long. I am so glad I didn’t string the harp with gut, because I swear every single one would have snapped in my face. And again, you cannot drill and hold the string away at the same time without 2 people. But we made it through with no (currently) snapped strings, although a couple of the smaller ones got a bit too friendly with the drill and are a bit scratched.

    Stage 3 is bullsh*t. We barely did 6 levers like this. The screws are not made for threading, they get crazy hot and it is super hard work, especially as the little screwdriver just doesn’t have that kind of leverage on it. Oil didn’t help and it was only a matter of time before one of them sheared. Unfortunately, despite being wise enough to order the drill bit and and ball screwdriver and the spanner from the lever company on the basis that no one here wants to start a huge and potentially expensive imperial tool hunt, I did not order the tap. (“Get everything but the tap. You won’t need it for wood” – Mae’s partner. “I never use a tap for wood” – Mae’s dad. “Use a hex-headed machine screw to tap the hole” – Stoney End instructions). I am telling you now, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, GET THE TAP. DO NOT USE A SCREW.

    So we realise we can’t do this without a tap and it’s Good Friday so all the shops are shutting early and many internet searches and phone calls later we cannot find a SINGLE shop that sells imperial taps. Not. Even. One. If it was a SENSIBLE (i.e metric) tap, there would be a dozen shops within stone’s throw. Wickes only sell imperial taps in sets and even then it didn’t have the right one. And no other shops sell imperial taps. The internet probably does, but no one’s really sure from the on-line specs whether it’s the correct one and most of them are metric anyway and it’s Good Friday so that’s no use anyway. Between the three of us we can only think of one shop that would (Mackays), and it’s near where I live, only we’re not where I live!

    Saturday comes, and no tap. In a last-ditch attempt, Dad remembers that the dad of some family friends has all kinds of randomn tools and luckily they live nearby. We phone him and he invites us to come and have a look and when we get there he pulls out dozens of randomn taps all labelled in different ways and some not at all but glory be, we find a tap that fits…PHEW.

    It turns out when we get home that it’s too small to fit over the levers to wind but a quick think plus an allen key and an electrical connector and we have a longer handle that does.

    Screwing in a tap also requires one to move the strings aside, cue more hands, plus some very stretched strings.

    Stage 4 involves more pulling the string about and generally swearage and fiddles. Quite often we had to widen the slot on the lever through which the screw goes because either the screw wouldn’t quite fit through the hole or because our hole was a tiny bit off and the lever needed to move a bit sideways. One lever has a little semi-circle of metal shaved off the top so that the lever could get a tiny bit closer to the bridge pin. Widening the slot for the string to accommodate thicker strings was the work of a few seconds with the needle file and the easiest thing ever.

    By the end we were taking about 10mins per lever instead of 20/25mins. Even so, we finished last night at 10.37pm, just in the nick of time. Out of 44 levers we only had to re-drill twice (all that stretching of the string plays merry hell with tuning) and you can’t see the holes anyway because the levers cover them up so that’s fine. For two of the levers (one each side) the brackets are too big so the notes are too sharp even though they are right up against the bridge pin (lesson learned) so I will source replacements for those but the hole is drilled and tapped so changing them over shouldn’t be hard.

    Another interesting thing I learned is that it’s all very well for Dusty Strings and their large harps to be all high-and-mighty with their “we aim to have the wrap stop between the bridge pin and the lever because bridge pins ruin wraps” preach (this is true), but when you have a small harp your lever and bridge pin are sometimes so close together they might as well be one entity. The wraps on two of the strings are just slightly too short so that the lever ends up stopping on or near that weird twisty bit at the top. This should improve in time as the strings get tightened, but when I order spares I’ll ask them to make the wraps only half an inch shorter than normal, not one inch shorter (good job most of them are too, or they’d already be curling around the zither pin).

    Anyway, the harp is now levered, phew. Never again.

    http://www.harpcolumn.com/members/mae-mcallister/media/263/

    http://www.harpcolumn.com/members/mae-mcallister/media/264/

    in reply to: Help! I'm the worst sight-reader ever… #186338

    Saul – yes, haha:) I know how to sight-read but not *how* to sight-read:D I know exactly what I need to be able to do but not how to learn to do those things!

    Having said that, something’s now clicked.

    A couple of weeks ago, I was practicing a piece when I had this moment. It was something that an incredible Irish whistle player called Brian Finnegan once told me, about how when you play you should not be thinking about technique and music but about times where you felt some strong emotion, like love or happiness or profound sadness or pride or something and play that through the music instead. Of course he was talking about the whistle, where my technique is already …well, respectable (i.e. obvs. you have to learn how to play an instrument first) and he is the kind of person who says things like that, but I was playing this piece and it just suddenly clicked. I felt super-connected to the music, like I was using it to pour out all my sorrows (I was feeling very miserable and depressed at the time), and everything came out much slower and more heart-felt and all the little mistakes I made didn’t matter to me in the slightest, because the mood was so strong that they didn’t ruin it (when I normally make mistakes I’m thinking, ouch, I just ruined the atmosphere, crap, and that tends to make the rest of my playing worse).

    And then I played my other pieces, and they came out amazing too, and then I thought SOD IT I CAN DO ANYTHING NOW and pulled out some sight-reading and voila, I had made the transition from can’t to can. Not that it was very good, but it existed.

    And now I can do it. I mean, still badly, but it’s now actually improving. It was a combination of three things – improving reading two staves at speed to the point where I could spare time to look at my hands, improving my feel of the harp and spacings to the point where I could spare time to look at the music, and the thing that brought it together which was the belief that I could do it. I was just in that mood, like I could sight-read the shit out of anything and it wouldn’t know what hit it.

    That feeling only lasted for that practice session and I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to recapture it…but now I believe at least that I can do it. It’s like learning to drive – you have to learn to do loads of things at once and all of them are bad but it’s not like you can practice any one thing by itself so you try and do them all at once from the start and you can’t drive and then one day all things have just improved to the point when you just about can.

    Onwards!

    in reply to: Double-strung harp saga #186223

    Update: wound strings have arrived and been installed. C side of harp finally sounds decent! The final string design is n/n wound from 5th C to 3rd B (14 strings), then KF from 3rd C to 2nd C (8 strings). The G side is nylon the whole way. Hooray!

    Next up: Wait for it to settle, then begin The Saga of Installing The Levers, which will allow me to play in keys that are not F.

    Video to follow as soon as I practice something in F on the harp enough to the point when I’m not too embarrassed to play it to y’all.

    in reply to: An Alternate Tuning for Lever Harps #185780

    Hmmm….I’ll have to go back and rewatch that bit.

    I’m confused by your comment on accidentals because while true has absolutely nothing to do with what I was asking/suggesting. Was it just a “for interest” comment?

    Also, what key WAS her harp tuned in???? This is what started it all…

    in reply to: Help! I'm the worst sight-reader ever… #185768

    Tacye – that’s a bunch of useful stuff! Keep it coming. I’ve made a doc of your tips and exercise suggestions and I shall print it off and use it tonight. I think that the way I already think about it is as you describe – sight-sing the notes then play by ear. The issue is that I can’t play by ear without LOOKING. My awareness for what note I’ve just played is also shockingly bad. On harp, you can’t keep holding onto a note once you’ve played it, and once I let go my fingers have only a fuzzy ~5cm wide recollection of where that note was. My interval placing without looking is hit-and-miss too. I will try what you suggest.

    Janis – Hell yes, to everything you said! I never managed to learn fingerings on the F recorders because my transposing was too good. I never learned to read chords on the piano because they’d get recorded in my head the first time round as colours and I’d never have to look again. I can’t sight-read on the harp because I end up remembering everything too well. My partner can’t learn transposing instruments in key because he has perfect pitch. Actually, I think that’s a common one. Lots of people with perfect pitch never learn what intervals and relative keys/notes sound like because they don’t need to, except when they do.

    in reply to: An Alternate Tuning for Lever Harps #185767

    Hahaha this topic exploded overt the weekend:)

    Let me clarify a few things:

    Laurie was not playing in B on the DVD! As you have pointed out, she was playing in normal folk keys:) What I was trying to figure out was what her harp was TUNED in, by what levers were sticking up, i.e. if all levers were disengaged. The reason it caught my attention is because she starts the DVD off in Cm (when she plays that Cm chord), but some of her levers are sticking up…so she can’t be tuned in the normal key Eb, nor F or C which are other common ones. I was trying to guess from how many levers were sticking up in which keys as to what tuning her harp was in, but it was very hard to see so I could be wrong. When she was playing in Cm at the beginning, I though I saw 4 sets of notes sharped, and when she was playing in C later on I thought I saw all the levers sharped, which would support the hypothesis that the harp was tuned in B. I was juts curious as to why someone who plays a lot of folk music would tune their harp into B, it precludes playing in G, D and A, which cover 95% of the tunes I ever play. As I said, it was hard to see, I could be wrong. I vaguely remember her playing something in G too…now that doesn’t make sense…any ideas???

    The key a tune is played in has far, far less to do with its history than where it came from (although there is a bit to that, the original key can often tell you where it came from and on what instrument it was written:) The reason I was giggling had nothing to do with keys, only the claim that the tunes were Scottish:) And not in a mean way – there’s a massive amount of cross pollination between Irish/Scottish and it’s an easy mistake to make as you all point out, it’s just that Drowsy Maggie is like, the number 1 All-Irish tune and so it was very funny. I don’t know what the folk scene is like in the US, over here there’s a clear distinction between Irish/Scottish/English tunes and there are many sessions that are specifically for one and not the others (plenty are free for all too) so you’d get some seriously funny looks if you walked into an Irish session and played e.g. an English tune. There are a bunch of tunes we know that people claim are Irish and they’re in fact Scottish and this is really funny. I can’t properly explain why. It’s something to do with each nation being very proud of their tunes…kind of like, imagine if maple syrup was in origin American and here are all the Canadians going round being proud of it and claiming it as their own…wouldn’t that be kind of funny? It’s similar. I didn’t mean any harm by it.

    Balfour – glad the snow has cleared! I was laughing at your post too..usually G and F are quite similar, friendly keys, poor violinist:D No perfect pitch, but sysnesthesia…I ALWAYS know what keys people are playing in:D

    in reply to: An Alternate Tuning for Lever Harps #185718

    Something interesting…

    Last night I finally got round to watching a present I was given over the holidays – Laurie Riley’s Secrets of the Celtic Harp – and I could help but notice that she had her FH36 tuned into B/C Flat! For a while I was like, “why the HELL would you have your harp tuned like that” (especially if you were playing folk music!) but then I remembered this thread and also that that is how pedal harps are tuned and maybe that makes sense somehow.

    It was actually a really good DVD and up picked up lots of tips for folk technique…but I also couldn’t help sniggering in amused indignation as she stressed at the beginning how important it was to research the history of the tunes and then proceeded to claim that Inisheer and Drowsy Maggie were both Scottish:D

    in reply to: Help! I'm the worst sight-reader ever… #185669

    Balfour – how do you touch/feel the vibrating string without it going “zing”? This could be useful. Annoyingly, the octave spacings on my harp are not constant throughout, the strings get a teeny bit closer together higher up. Grr.

    Janis – hell, if I could play better without looking all my problems would be solved! My playing is much, MUCH worse without looking. Like, fatally worse. To the point where even if I try and learn a new piece by reading, I slip easily into memorizing and playing by looking because it improves my playing a million times more to the point where I can actually play fluidly.

    I feel like I picked THE WORST instrument to try and sight-read properly on. Does no one ever look at their hands when they play the harp? They MUST do, even little glances…no? I’ve been playing blindfolded, it’s not as bad as it was at first but octave jumps in the left hand are totally hit-and-miss. Or, miss-and-miss.

    in reply to: Help! I'm the worst sight-reader ever… #185615

    Janis – I think you’re right! I’ve mis-titled this thread, I guess it’s not my sight-reading per-se that I suck at as I can do that OK, it’s my ability to play without looking which stinks. I will try what you suggested!

    I’ve been looking for advice for teaching/playing as a blind harpist, although I am blessed with good sight the problem I’m having is similar to a few of the challenges that I guess that people with poor sight must face. I can’t find much, though there’s a few things to think about from this blog: http://anne-annemorsehambrocknews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/teachers-corner-teaching-blind-students.html

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