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Hi guys,
Yes, we’ll definitely have to start the HarpColumn Nail Players’ Club! 🙂 Maybe even the monthly newsletter or blog! Lol
Anyways James, welcome to our corner of the harp world! Do you know much about your new harp that you’ll be getting?
Hi James,
We had an interesting thread on this topic recently that you might find helpful: http://www.harpcolumn.com/forums/how-to-play/posts/66039
Hope this answers your questions! 🙂
Btw, I play wire harp and I tried those glue-on nails when one of mine broke. They weren’t terribly useful and I was glad to get my real nails back. It felt weird and never really got the tactile feedback I needed. But just my experience, for what it’s worth.
Forgot to mention… sorry! I’m not sure if Triplett will do add-ons, but it’s worth checking into. I’m happy with my sharping blades. The contact there is Debbie Triplett, she and her husband own the company. She should be able to answer your questions, and if they don’t do that sort of thing, refer you to someone who does. I found her very helpful and knowledgeable.
Good luck! 🙂
Hi Rachael,
I’m not aware of anyone in the northeast that retrofits wire harps with these (I live in Vermont and own a Triplett) but maybe you could contact them and see if it would be feasable to ship your harp out to CA and have them installed. Their website is http://www.triplettharps.com.
If anybody else knows of a builder in our area that does this, I’d be curious to know too! I think most wire harp builders in this region tend to focus on the strictly historic, diatonic instruments – that’s why I went with Triplett’s out on the west coast.
Hope it works out well for you! Who built your harp, btw?
Hi David,
Yes, I think there are some things beyond explanation and it probably doesn’t matter, or need to be scientifically investigated, as long as we receive the spiritual message itself. Which I think you did! 🙂
Many blessings to you this Christmas season!
SherriHi Randal,
Congrats on your new Triplett wire harp! 🙂 I have one and they are lovely instruments. You’ll probably find as the wood ages that its voice matures and it really starts to sing… that happened to mine.
Lyn, your new harp is just a work of art! How I would love though, to have one like that as a wire-strung harp! Thanks for posting the fossil pic… There’s probably a lot of wonderful things like that from nature that builders could start embedding into their instruments to give them more character. Would be a great trend to start!
Best to all! Will be on and off the net… now back to my harp! 🙂
Happy Holidays and stay warm, dry and inside, esp. if you’re here in the US Northeast!
Hi Ellen,
Happy Holidays to you too! Please let us know how you like your new iPad! (but don’t forget your harp! 😉
Have fun,
SherriHi Lyn,
Well, if you put that rug down on the floor so you could (unavoidably) catch glimpses of it through your strings, you’d suddenly be wondering why you couldn’t have passed on this great deal! Haha! Sorry Alison, that’s a Christmas present for somebody out there, just not harpists 🙂 lol Thanks for posting… Wish you had a pic to share!
Hi Ellen,
Don’t worry about the Kindle app! 🙂 My ipad is 58 GB and Kindle is only (!) consuming 77 MB. You can easily fit a ton of books on it. I’ve been doing that with iBooks too. (also they have a very nice selection of free download books in the public domain, classics and such).
Hi Barbara,
That’s true about the cameras… since mine is the first one out, it doesn’t have a built-in camera (but iPad 2 and everything after does), so I used the camera on my iPod and used a bluetooth app to send some sheet music over. They weren’t the greatest images either, but it was an interesting experiment!
By the way, thanks much for your earlier advice on another thread re iPads… I was hesitant about buying one at first but got mine almost a year ago and use it for a ton of things now. It’s a great field recorder like we talked about, but I found a lot of other uses for it I hadn’t anticipated, so it’s a great compliment to my main desktop machine. Really appreciated your guidance there! 🙂
Hi all,
I recently got Notion for typesetting music on my iPad and love it… it comes with sound samples so you can hear how everything’s coming out as you go along (and then I play on my real harp just to make sure I’ve got it right!)
I haven’t looked at forScore yet. I have a scanner attached to my desktop machine and then wifi so I can send to my iPad. Are there scanners w/ apps that connect direct to the iPad?
My iPad is first gen, so I can’t upgrade the OS anymore 🙁 Fortunately there are still a lot of apps out there that run on it. But it seems like a lot of the newer apps require iOS v. 6 or greater lately though.
Yes, that’s true… Forgot to mention that the old Celtic harps were indeed meant to be carried about on horseback, so portability for working harpers was an issue.
Kreig, that was an eye-opener. 🙁 There’s some bad stuff going on in the recording industry too. I just haven’t expanded on it too much here. 5% of all recording engineers are female. I do my own studio work, so I haven’t run into any attitude, but some recording forums I’ve read, I’m assured that it’s alive and well. It’s a very male-dominated industry, from what I understand.
Hi Tony,
That is really a sweet, lovely story! As I read your post I have to think if I’ve ever encountered anything as extraordinary as that. Maybe yes but that might be too long, better for a blog post. Anyway, thanks for sharing. Sometimes you have a chance encounter like that that’s very illuminating and you think back to it again over the years. You probably made an impression on that little boy and perhaps he’ll recall it later on too. 🙂Hi Mae,
You’re right about the old Irish harpers being men…. almost exclusively. The bards carried their wire-strung harps with them onto the battlefield and played for their patrons at the end of the day in the mead hall, but this was decidedly not the occupation of women. I think it’s very ironic that here today as a woman I play the music of the church – Gregorian chant – on an instrument that was almost exclusively the province of men for hundreds of years in Ireland and I am sure had primarily secular music played on it to accompany bardic poetry. 🙂 I’ve been researching this angle recently and it’s been quite interesting reading.
I haven’t looked into the gender split but I would imagine it’s fairly balanced. Ann Heymann is the leading proponent/authority of things wire harp, having devoted a significant portion of her life to researching and uncovering the old playing technique from forgotten manuscripts in Dublin. There are men active in the field as well – Simon Chadwick and Paul Dooley come to mind, the latter for his research and recording work on the ap Huw Welsh manuscript. And there’s some well-known wire harp builders for both historic and modern models as well. Jay Witcher in Maine and Lynne Lewandowski here in VT both build historic harps. I think we’ve got a nice male/female balance in the wire harp world today, considering its long history.
