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Well it sounds like you ended up with a wonderful instrument. I am so glad everything worked out well for you in the end. May you have many years of making beautiful music together.
It was probably a Camac pedal harp. Camac uses carbon fiber tubing for the column that is covered in a thin wood veneer to make it look like the rest of the harp. From what I have read it is actually stronger than wood but much lighter. That and the use of lighter weight alloys for the action plates make Camac harps generally lighter than many other pedal harps.
All I can say reading through this discussion is that I am glad I live in California. No smoking allowed in any restaurant, bar or public buildings at all.
Generally no, you don’t tip the delivery guys unless they do something extra or something particularly difficult. Like if they carry the box up a difficult flight of stairs or have to do some tricky maneuvering to get into your house.
And generally they don’t hang around while you
Also if the base is too heavy it can mess up the balance of the harp when you have it leaning back to play. The harp should be able to rest on your knees without too much pressure, but if the base is too heavy then in order to keep it balanced you have to pull it back too much.
A heavy base makes for good stability when the harp is standing on its own, but not when it is being played.
Camac harps are big and heavy?
If someone likes the tone is a personal and subjective thing, as well as if they care for the technological differences between Camac and most other harps,
I have their book. While it is a good resource I don’t think it would be good for self teaching. What I like about it is that it is mostly a very large amount of wonderful exercises, some great descriptions regarding notation for harp, and it has information and exercises for pedals for pedal harp players.
Some of it requires pedals so some of the content isn’t usable for lever harp.
I have found it a good resource and probably one of the best sets of exercises available, but it really doesn’t have that systematic approach to learning from scratch that seems to be the goal of the other two books. More it seems like a combination method book and exercise book that would be best used by someone with some background on the harp already, or who is working with a teacher.
I think it is an excellent book and have been using it as a reference ever since getting back into playing pedal harp, but I think it is definitely meant as a method book to be used with a teacher and not a self teaching guide.
I used the Sylvia Woods book, but in conjunction with a teacher and other materials. We mostly used it for the exercises. But I do like it. I think that since you have prior music experience you would do fine with it.
Although the music she uses is mostly folk music the approach and technique her book teaches is pretty much the same as you would use for classical. She just uses a lot of traditional folk because it is diatonic and works well on the lever harp.
I have been playing around with iWeb. I used to have a web site but my hosting service went under. I have been trying to redesign my site using iWeb before hosting it someplace else.
In some ways it is a very easy program, but it seems that some things that should be fairly simple are actually hard to figure out. Prior to this I was using Dreamweaver, which is a bit more complex, but the simple things remain simple to do it in.
I doubt I would try to sell anything. That aspect of the music business is just not my thing, although I would like to record some stuff just for friends and family. It just takes so much work.
I recently tried recording just a simple Celtic piece, only about one and a half minutes long. Playing it was no problem but getting the recording to sound the way I want is a different story. I have been working on it for almost a month and I still am not pleased with the results.
Perhaps once I get my recording chops down enough to actually get something presentable in a reasonable amount of time I will think about it.
I will tell you, as much of a joke as it is often meant to be the most requested song I get asked to play is Stairway To Heaven. And although it is often requested as a joke when I actually play it I get the most compliments and positive response.
Another piece that sounds wonderful on harp and is a big crowd pleaser is Clocks by Coldplay. I know two different arrangements of it, one for pedal and one for lever harp. It is a nice piece, lots of younger and hip older folks know it, and it just works so well on
True, if she really wants to quite then that is her decision, and hopefully she will come back to it at some point.
The best I can suggest is to just talk to her about why she wants to quit. Listen to her, and just let her know that it is her decision but that you are sorry because you think she has real potential.
In the end, however, you really don’t know if this is just a rebellion thing or if she really just doesn’t enjoy it. Just because she may be rebelling against some things in her life now that doesn’t mean that every decision she makes is just a matter of rebellion. She may simply not enjoy playing and so wants to explore other things.
In the end it is her decision. You can give her encouragement, and you can give her an ear to listen, but what she really will need is respect for her decisions.
True, if she really wants to quite then that is her decision, and hopefully she will come back to it at some point.
The best I can suggest is to just talk to her about why she wants to quit. Listen to her, and just let her know that it is her decision but that you are sorry because you think she has real potential.
In the end, however, you really don’t know if this is just a rebellion thing or if she really just doesn’t enjoy it. Just because she may be rebelling against some things in her life now that doesn’t mean that every decision she makes is just a matter of rebellion. She may simply not enjoy playing and so wants to explore other things.
In the end it is her decision. You can give her encouragement, and you can give her an ear to listen, but what she really will need is respect for her decisions.
That is true Carl. Ultimately the responsibility for these situations can be spread out down the line up to and including the customer who is willing to accept inferior quality in exchange for lower prices.
People want cheap and they are willing to compromise on quality. Wallmart wouldn’t be able to run smaller stores out of business if people weren’t willing to buy their cheap Chinese made products in order to save some money.
I just mean to say that I can’t lay all the blame on the Chinese. If a company isn’t willing to insist on top quality because they think they can get away with it then hopefully the customers will vote with their wallets by buying from somewhere else, or at least raising a stink when the product doesn’t live up to it’s expectations.
I don’t know how much of Lyon and Healy’s parts are made in China, and I don’t even know if the quality of those parts that are made in China really are inferior or if there are just a few fluke problems that can be accounted for by the simple fact of the law of averages applied to the vast number of harps they produce.
But in the end each individual harp has the Lyon and Healy name on it, and if they put out a product with their name on it that has problems I would hope that people would pay attention. If there really is a problem or not I don’t know, but I do know that if my Lyon and Healy harp suffers from a defect that shouldn’t be there and they can’t explain it or take care of it they will lose my business, just like any other company that didn’t live up the the expectations they themselves build up would.
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