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Are you ready to study pedal harp? If so, the petit sizes are there for the new harp student, and I am sure someone would buy it once you outgrow it.
Anyway, the Nancy Rae Lever Harp was made by John Pratt’s brother Carl. Carl does not seem to have a Web site, from what I have read just now in search results.
Blevins also has a line of five or six cross-strung harps (their names all begin with “X”) in a range of sizes. For most of them a sound file is available so you can hear them in advance. They have one of Gothic style in stock with free shipping and case, for about $2300. Its range starts at F below Tenor C.
(There’s a cheapo out there, too. If you get one of those, order replacement strings, too, so you can restring it immediately. If it breaks down, they’ll replace it no charge if you send them photos of the failure. )
The comparison of different soundbox sizes to the violin/viol family members kind of falls apart. The violoncello and the double bass do not have the top end of the violin, while a 34-string harp can go just as high as a 26, maybe even higher.
A harp that barely radiates sound in its lowest octave (when the strings are plucked near the midpoint) is not as good as one that radiates perceptible sound in that same range. And who knows how the sound was picked up in those YouTube clips?
When I visited Harp Connection to to try a Ravenna 26 and was also allowed to try a FH26 and a Triplett therapy harp, I also tried one of the Wm Rees harps on display by the door — I forget what color — and it sounded a lot like the Triplett. I don’t want to give up that much for the high degree of portability.
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After I went through that decision process myself, my final choice was to get the best so I’d never need to replace it. So I made a call to Dwight Blevins and talked about a Melody 26. That was April, and it is expected to be ready in July.
Back in January I tried a Ravenna 26 and a FH26, as well as a Triplett therapy harp. Blevins had no Melody 26 built, so I’m making a leap of faith that when complete mine will have a low end like my Caitlin cross-strung and overall tone like my James Cox gothic.
That has been my dilemma to. In January I visited Harp Connection and tried two Dusty Strings instruments: a Ravenna 26 and a FH2, as well as a Triplett therapy harp. Finally I have decided to accept the likely biased judgement of Cindy Blevins, in addition to the online recording she made of the Melody 26, and have ordered a fully levered cherry one to be made. It will be my only lever harp, because once it arrives and I stabilize the tuning, I plan to put my rugged-but-feeble-toned EMS Hailey on consignment at a local music store.
The Melody’s soundbox appears as big as that of my Mid-East Caitlin, so I’m assuming it will also be as rich in the low end.
Tony,
At the root of this uncertainty is that we don’t know what harmonic or partial of the string’s vibration the tuner is listening to. When I use TuneLab Pro on a piano (or my Markwood-strung Caitlin) an indicator on the screen lets me know exactly what partial I am tuning. With my Korg CA-30, OTOH, I have to assume it is listening to the fundamental, and the sweetness of an interval depends less on the ratio of the fundamentals of the two strings and more on the beats between their coincident partials.The simplest way to explain coincident partials is to consider an octave. When you tune by ear, you set the harmonic (2nd partial) of the lower string equal in frequency to the fundamental (1st partial) of the upper string, but when you use the electronic tuner you might be setting the fundamentals of the two strings at a 2:1 frequency ratio. If the harmonic was always exactly twice the frequency of the fundamental, this wouldn’t matter, and with the lower inharmonicity of harp strings it doesn’t, much.
With your harp and an inexpensive electronic tuner you can research it yourself. Tune, say, C5 with the electronic tuner. Next, play the harmonic of C5. Does the tuner read it as C4 in tune or C4 slightly sharp? Note the amount of sharpness, in case you would like to try tuning your C4 that much sharp to assess its effect on the sound of the C5-C4 octave.
In another thread you asked about where ot find a Paraguayan harp. This link, obtained from Harp Mall, is still good:
http://www.paraguayanharps.com/
Good luck
Deb, the pan pipes are the ancestor of the organ, but how are they are any closer in ancestry to the keyed bridge harps than the harp, which evolved from the bow, itself originally a hunting weapon? I don’t see how an aerophone evolved or descended into a chordophone. Bones not hollow enough to give a good tone may first have been percussion instruments.
OTOH, keyboards and playing actions themselves likely did evolve from the organ. To quote a famous organ tutorial recording:
“Thousands of years ago the organ had its beginning in a primitive
flute, or whistle, fashioned from a hollow stick. Flutes were set
side-by-side, panpipe fashion, so that a melody could be played. A
hollow skin was added as wind reservoir, and the result was an organ,
for this complicated instrument is little more than an assortment of
pipes, a supply of air, and keyboards for control. … The organ is the oldest of keyboard instruments.”Remember, Zen, that all the major makers of lever harps have a model that bottoms at Tenor C. It’s not uncommon to self teach harp and invest cautiously in an instrument to play around on, just in case.
A Meghan with all “hard nylon” strings won’t live up to its potential, modest as that already is. There’s so much you need to do with a Mid-East or EMS to turn it into a musical instrument, they are really meant for people who would have kit-built their harp but had not the work space.
My Caitlin introduced me to X-strungs, and Mid-East replaced it when the soundboard cracked. The replacement needed restringing right out of the box, and a properly scaled set of strings from Markwood added 25% to the total cost of the harp. How many musicians would feel at ease with a soundboard slowly failing and occasionally needing to be brushed with wood glue?
The EMSs are sturdy and robustly constructed, but at the cost of volume of sound. After restringing my Hailey to raise the tension 12% I finally get acceptable sound out of it.
But if the harp is what you want to study, you’ll tire of all that fiddling. Play a real harp, like those recommended here, and there won’t be that change of mind about it mentioned in message 10.
If you want a cheap off-brand harp, you have to put some effort and money into making it playable. The Mid-East instruments come with inadequate strings, but Markwood Heavenly Strings can sell you a set that will make an all-show HSO actually sound like something. Next, you need to figure out how to regulate the levers and get them to work properly. No guarantees on true tone from sharped strings.
I’d recommend a Dusty Strings Ravenna or searching the Blevins website for one to your liking.Guram, in the future you may want to keep in mind that Harp Column magazine is read by harpists who play in major orchestras around the world, and this forum is part of it.
When I was a teen-aged boy I liked keyboards, especially the organ. The harp looked so basic — the one I saw in a folk trio, that is. The player, a young woman, let me try it and later I kit-built my own, a manly thing to do, I suppose. Never had any gender issues with it. Robert Maxwell who wrote “The Broadcaster” and “Ebb Tide”, was a harpist. You may want to view the YouTube clip of Harper Tasche explaining his harp song, “Just You” to see the possibilities of a harp in a relationship.
Your extended soundboard results in a more bulbous soundbox: more resonant cavity volume. The sound slots provide enough coupling to the outside air to damp and broaden resonances, so it should not be favoring any particular tones through air column or cavity resonance. Soundboard shape should also have been designed to not emphasize any vibrational frequencies.
