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Pull loop B over the end of the anchor. Knots used to drive me crazy. I always had anchors slipping out trying to get the string end in place to tune up. Then when I got my last harp from Lyon & Healy I noticed that was how they did the knots. I tried it and haven’t had a problem since.
And Tacey is right. My Camac harp has wooden toggles and they aren’t an inherent problem.
I use an airturn foot switch. I almost went with the page flip, which is cheaper, but with the air turn you can position the foot switches which you can’t do with the pageflip.
The Pilgrim Clarsach is a great harp. It was originally designed for Derek Bell, the late harpist from the Chieftains. He was a classically trained harpist who wanted a harp with Celtic character but strung with the concert spacing and tension he was used to. The Pilgrim Clarsach was the result.
If you want to know what it sounds like you can listen to almost any Chieftains album past the very first few and that is the harp you will hear.
They are much harder to come by in the US than in Europe, but if I had the chance to pick one up at a halfway decent price I wouldn’t hesitate.
Saul, a tablet isn’t really a computer. At least not in the sense that people seem to think. They don’t suffer the same kinds of problems that, say, a laptop can have. They are extremely reliable.
My iPad, if I start with it fully charged and use it just for sheet music, can last, well, I don’t really know because I have never been able to play that long. On average the life span of the battery is about 10 hours. Starting with a fully charged battery there is virtually no way you can run out of battery in one gig if you are primarily using it for sheet music.
You can turn pages any number of ways. Of course you can turn pages by simply touching the screen, easier than turning an actual paper page. But you can also use a foot switch so you can turn a page with a foot tap as well.
There is nothing wrong with using paper music, but people have been using computers and electronics to make music for a very long time. It isn’t a new or untested thing. After all, half of what makes a synthesizer work is a sound module that is just a computer dedicated to interpreting input from a MIDI controller and translating it to digital information that gets reproduced as sound. I still have an old one from the 80s that takes floppy disks yet still works reliably.
I know people who use computers to handle all sorts of performance needs, from sound mixing to controlling lights.
Not suggesting that anyone needs any of that. Just pointing out that use of computers, electronics and the such as part of a live performance is not new, and not nearly as unreliable as you might think. Not only are there ways to make it work well, but there are plenty of resources to learn how to do that from the people who have been making it all work well for decades now.
If the finances for you work out better to rent then there is nothing wrong with that. I rented a pedal harp for several years. Then I had to move and so I gave up the pedal harp for many more years and had just my lever harp. Then decided I wanted a pedal harp again but this time I bought. While it may take years for the cost of rental to exceed buying, it will eventually, and so you put all that money into renting and then have to shell out even more if you decide later to buy.
Most rent to own deals have a time limit on them that is far shorter than the amount of time that it would take for your rental costs to exceed purchase cost.
Since I knew I would be playing this harp for far longer than it would take for the rental costs to exceed the purchase cost I purchased instead. But I am glad that in the beginning I rented. That gave me the time and experience to know that, indeed, I would be playing this thing for the rest of my life and so purchasing would, in the long run, be the better option.
As far as the limitations, yes, there are limitations. They really aren’t all that limiting at first, and depending on what you want to play they may not be limiting at all. Celtic and folk music, for instance, doesn’t suffer at all from any of the limitations of the lever harp. For more chromatic music, like a lot of Classical, Jazz, Contemporary pop and the like, you start to run into more issues.
However, there is plenty of music in all genres that is playable on lever harp, and more and more arrangers are specifically making arrangements of classical and other more chromatic forms of music that are playable on lever harp. That’s one of the reasons that more and more people are trying out the harp with a lever harp before deciding if they want to play the pedal harp. No matter what music you want to play you can find a fair bit in any genre that you can learn and play on a lever harp.
It’s just that there will definitely be things that you can’t play, so with a lever harp you have to accept that you can’t just go to the music store, pick some sheet music, and you will be able to play it regardless of how chromatic it is.
The flip side of that is that if you do want to play music with a fair bit of chrmaticism and you want to play things that aren’t necessarily very popular, and so can’t find easily find an arrangement already done, it really motivates you to learn and apply that music theory.
What really inspired me to progress with music theory was that period of time between pedal harps where I had only lever harps. I had gotten used to being able to play chromatic music, and now that I had a harp with different limitations I realized that if I wanted to continue to play the kinds of things I liked I would need to get creative and start altering arrangements or come up with my own. Despite a fair number of frustrations along the way I really think it helped me and definitely increased my understanding of music.
Also keep in mind that the pedal harp isn’t without it’s limitations too. All instruments, no matter what it is, has some limitations. They just have different limitations. It’s all about finding the right tool for the right job. But all else being equal it is hard to deny that the limitations of a lever harp are definitely more limiting (at least speaking strictly musically) than those of the pedal harp. The pedal harp has more limitations that have to do with practical issues, like cost of
Indeed, that’s what I would expect at a quickie wedding chapel in Vegas where you can get married by someone dressed like Elvis.
If you are trying to make your wedding even a little classy then nothing does it like live music, be it a harp, organ, piano, string quartet… whatever. To steal and paraphrase from Twain, the difference between live music and canned music is the difference between lighting and the lightningbug.
My advice is not only to play all the harps you are interested in, but ask someone at the harp center to play them for you. Take a seat a bit back away from the harp and listen to what it will sound like to someone listening to you. What you hear in front of the harp and what you hear behind it can have some surprising differences.
“Those are totally different animals and coordination from a pedal harp”
Sorry, but other than the pedals themselves I have to disagree. Having started on lever harp and then switching to pedal harp I can say that it is not anywhere near that difficult. While there are many things I can play on pedal harp that I can’t on lever harp simply due to the specific limitation of the lever harp, there is almost nothing I can play on lever harp that I can’t play on pedal (although some things certainly are easier to play on lever harp). I go back and forth between them all the time as do many others.
Of course there is no reason not to start with a pedal harp if you know that is what you want and can afford it, but considering that the vast majority these days start with lever before learning on pedal, and manage it just fine, is an indication that the jump from one to the other isn’t really all that big of a deal for most. Hand position and technique can be pretty much identical, and you can even get lever harps as big as small pedal harps, so there isn’t even necessarily a size difference to have to worry about.
You just have to learn to use the pedals, and really, even if you start on a pedal harp you are not going to be doing an awful lot with the pedals other than setting the key when you first start learning.
“If you practice on one type of harp, is there a learning curve when switching to another?”
It all depends on the type of harp. There are some harps that are so different from each other that it is like playing two completely different instruments, such as the difference between a pedal harp and a cross strung harp, or a gut strung lever harp and a wire strung lap harp.
On the other hand there are harps that look very different, but are played very similar.
Although you might choose to go with one or the less common kinds of harps, most likely you are going to end up playing either a lever harp or a pedal harp.
It isn’t necessary, but the simple fact is that most people who play pedal harp these days start out with a lever harp. It’s not that the lever harp is any less of an instrument, but it is smaller and less expensive generally. It has some limitations but there are many professionals who are not only magnificent musicians but also specialize in playing lever harp and don’t have any interest in pedal harp.
So the lever harp isn’t necessarily a stepping stone to anything else. It is a destination on it’s own. But we can’t ignore that it is often used as a stepping stone by people who want to play the pedal harp because you can learn your basic technique and a lot of great music on the lever harp and then transfer it fairly easily to the pedal harp.
How easy depends on the individual harps involved.
When it comes to the most common harps, which are the nylon or gut strung single row of string harps the main differences are the size of the harp and the actual strings themselves.
You can go anywhere from a 20 string lap harp to a 47 string concert grand pedal harp (the kind they use in orchestras), and virtually any stop in between.
Smaller harps are typically lever harps. They are strung diatonically (think of playing just the white keys on a piano and ignoring the black keys). In order to get some of those black key notes on harps you need to modify the strings. On a lever harp that is done by flipping levers near the tuning pins that make the pitch of the string go up a half step, so that the string now plays one of those black key notes.
The largest harps are typically pedal harps. Again, same string set up only you have more strings total, and instead of using levers to raise the pitch of the strings you use pedals at the base of the harp to either raise or lower the
“I will probably get shouted down for saying this”
Actually I think that’s a wonderful idea. Of course 24 isn’t too late to learn to play the harp, but if she can’t afford a harp or lessons now then yes, learning to read music, and also learning about music theory, would be a good place to start, and using a keyboard of some kind is always beneficial to both of those endeavors.
I would also recommend that she listen to a lot of music. Not listen in the casual, entertainment kind of way. Really listen to what is going on in the music she likes. Couple that with some basic music theory and you build a decent musical foundation that makes learning to play an instrument, if not easier then more enjoyable. Everything is more enjoyable when you really understand what you are doing.
What’s this ‘air conditioning’ you speak of?
Having lived in various places in the past where the temperature could get high and I didn’t have AC I never had a problem. Keep it out of direct sunlight. Big changes in temp between night and day can mean it going further out of tune, but other than that they can take it.
Like Barbara I scan it. Although I often alter arrangements or add to them, in which case I do that in Finale and export as a PDF. But scanning definitely gives much better results than taking a digital photo.
Tonie,
I tend to load most things using dropbox. It’s basically a free “cloud” service where you can get free space on an online storage server that you can access from anyplace you have an internet connection.
So basically after I make PDF versions of the music I open the dropbox folder on my desktop and just drag and drop them into the correct subfolder. It automatically syncs with the online server copying the new files.
From there I can access them from my iPad (using the dropbox app), my laptop, or any computer with an internet connection using a web browser.
On the iPad I just open the dropbox app, find the subfolder with the file, and use the ‘Open In’ option to open the file in Forscore. It copies the file into forscore and opens it in a few seconds. Once you have copied the file the copy sits on your device so you can access it anytime, even when you don’t have an internet connection.
While that may sound a bit confusing, once you have done it a couple of times it is very, very easy and convenient. It will allow you to open the file in several other apps too, which ever app you prefer (or all of them if you like).
I use this method for loading almost all files, from word documents to photographs.
The other advantage of this is that it creates a backup as well, so if your computer crashes or your hard drive dies you can always recover the files you have stored on dropbox.
The other way is to sync the iPad with your computer using iTunes. In iTunes there is a file sharing feature that allows you to sync files with various apps. This requires you to do a full sync which can take a bit of time depending on how long it has been and how many files, or updates it needs to make, and if it is time to make a back up (always a good idea to do now and then anyway).
Also you can email the file to yourself and open the file from the email directly into forscore.
Once the music is on your computer it really doesn’t take much time at all to get it onto the iPad.
