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Sure, a flute can be just as expensive. You can pay $50,000 for a flute if you want to.
However, when you are just starting out, don’t know if it is for you, and have to convince a parent to pay for a flute, you can easily get a half way decent used flute for a couple of hundred dollars.
You are going to be very hard pressed to find a decent quality lever harp, used or not, for under a couple thousand.
A couple of thousand is a bit steep to pay for an instrument for a beginner. People typically don’t think about spending that kind of money on an instrument until acquiring some proficiency on it.
And although pianos can cost a lot, you can get an electronic keyboard with weighted keys for a few hundred to start on.
Then if you don’t live in an urban area you may not have a teacher near by.
And on top of that, again due to both cost and lack of teachers, it isn’t typically offered in school music programs as an option. When I was in school if you wanted to play violin, of viola, or flute, or percussion you could join band and learn. If you wanted to play harp in the school band you had to have your own teacher outside of school because the school music teacher couldn’t teach harp.
As for harp in rock, pop, etc… its out there. Deborah Henson-Conant does pop, blues and jazz on harp. No shortage of jazz players out there. And it shows up in more R&B and pop music these days. Glee sometimes has a harpist playing back up for the kids.
Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of harpists aren’t taught to play this kind of music. It is more than just playing the notes. Harpists are often taught to play in a certain way. Mainly classical or folk music. Give a classical guitarist an electric guitar and ask them to play Hendrix and chances are he or she isn’t going to do a very good job of it even if they have much more technical proficiency than the average rock guitarist. Same goes with harp. The difference is that there are lots of guitarists being taught “rock” guitar specifically. There aren’t too many teachers teaching “rock” harp. (I have told the story here before of the
I agree. I have never heard of a harp ending up sounding completely different, or getting worse as it ages.
I think that if you start with a good sounding harp you, at the least, end up over time with a good sounding harp.
But you can also end up with, and I think often do end up with, a really good or great sounding harp.
If what you start with sounds good I think it reasonable to expect that it will always sound good and end up sounding even better down the line.
A few months ago one of the harpists from the local symphony tried out my Lyon and Healy and she confirmed my (perhaps biased) opinion that despite it being a very young harp it sound really nice. That made me feel very good because I believe that it will only get better from here.
What Barbara said.
I made the mistake of getting a harp first. It took me all of a month of lessons before I ended up getting a different harp. I could have saved myself both money and time if I had gotten the teacher first and had her help me pick a harp in the first place.
I still have that second harp. Although I have others now that one is still a great harp and I still play it.
There is nothing wrong with writing at the keyboard, so long as you actually understand the differences between keyboard instruments and harps, recognize that what sounds good on a keyboard won’t necessarily sound good on a harp, and actually hear it played on a harp before you
My teacher was about the same height as you and she played a Lyon and Healy style 23 concert grand. Your height should not prevent you from playing any size harp you want.
You probably will eventually want to expand your repertoire beyond the Sylvia Woods Books. They are excellent books and I have almost all of them. But eventually you are going to want to play something not in them, or you are going to want to expand on what she wrote, or do your own arrangements.
Or you may eventually decide you want to play something other than Celtic music.
In any of those cases you will be very happy to have as many strings as you can get.
I don’t ever recall anyone complaining that they had too many strings, only not enough.
Of my lever harps I have a 34 string acoustic and a 30 string electric. I love my electric harp, but I often find myself wishing it went lower.
34 – 36 strings seems a good range. Less than that and I think that you will eventually wish you had something with more strings.
I agree that a condenser doesn’t need to be as close. The problem with condensers is two fold.
One is that they need phantom power, so you either need a separate phantom power source or you need a sound board that provides phantom power. Not too hard to overcome, but an additional expense.
The other is that they are much more delicate.
Knock over a mic stand with a SM57 on it and you
If you want a good overview of amplification, the options available, with tons of pointers and definitions and explanations of how things work so that you can best figure out the correct solutions to your playing situations then I highly recommend Deborah Henson-Conant’s The Gurls Guide to Amplification.
It isn’t an overly technical or in depth explanation. It is a basic overview, but that will give you a good basic understanding of what different pieces of equipment you might want, what they do and how they are used. You will be able to walk into a music store and know what to ask and be able to understand what the people trying to help you are talking about.
There are more in depth books out there, but the thing about this one is that it deals specifically with harp amplification and so includes some of Deborah’s explanations of harp specific problems she has faced and how she and her sound people have overcome them.
If you are going to go the route of putting a transducer in the harp I like the ones by Fishman.
However I personally think the best sound comes from using a decent, well positioned mic. I think they get a much better natural sound. For live performance a decent dynamic mic is good. The Shure SM57 is pretty much a music industry standard. They sound good, are affordable, and are almost impossible to damage.
Oh, and to clarify, I recommend these as pedal harp makers.
You said that you were not looking for a Celtic harp, but you didn’t specify if you generally meant lever harps by that, or just lever harps in a Celtic style.
Pedal harps tend to actually be made from the same kind of wood, and the finish is typically a veneer.
Lever harps of different makes tend to come in various woods, and yes, the wood can effect the sound.
For lever harps the names you generally can’t go wrong with are:
Triplett
Dusty Strings
Pilgrim
Kortier
Fisher
Camac
WM Rees
Blevins
Mountain Glenn
Again, these are far from the only great lever harp makers, and both Salvi and Lyon & Healy make what, in my opinion, are good lever harps that are actually an incredible value when you compare price to quality (and I own a Lyon & Healy lever harp myself, along with a Camac), but the one’s above are, in my personal opinion and experience (having played or heard played harps by all these makers) among the best.
In my opinion you can’t go wrong with:
Lyon & Healy
Salvi
Camac
Swanson
Venus
Pilgrim
There are certainly other excellent harp makers out there, and individual harps and models of harps from these makers can all be different. They all have their unique qualities, but I have either played on or heard played harps by all of these makers and they are all impressive in my opinion.
I don’t think that there is any commercially available. There are several compositions by different composers with this same title, it is not an uncommon name, but I don’t think that DHC’s version is published anywhere.
I would suggest contacting her and asking her if she has anything available that isn’t actually fully published yet. You never know. It is easy to contact her through her website: hipharp.com
