Harp Notes

Strings and Things

January 2005

Annie was assembled in to full Harp Shape for the New Year. She looked wonderful, and friends who saw her in this state heaped great amounts of compliments on her ~ I think this turned her head slightly and set a trend! *laugh*

After a few days, T began to string her, which amounted to about 3 hours of fiddly work and a lot of light-hearted grumbling. A great tip gleaned from those lovely people at Harplist was to dab a tiny drop of superglue onto the knot. This helps hold the knot in a virgin string ~ which in its natural state wants to straighten out immediately! As soon as the string is brought under tension the knot tightens up and is held against the back of the soundboard. The superglue probably cracks under the strain at this point, but no matter, as its work here was done . . .

I left all the lengths on the strings in case there were any breakages, and although they got in the way as I tuned Annie each day (sometimes twice a day if I had time) I'm happy I did. Only a couple were long enough for a second length of string, had they snapped any higher than at the soundboard.

Bad Hair Day!

It took about 3 weeks regular tuning before the strings held their notes. At first Annie was regularly a tone out, but after a while that reduced to half a tone and eventually the electronic tuner showed that Annie had only a slight tendency to being flat. It was around now that T announced it was a good time to attach the levers.

Now, Mick Saunders had included 26 appropriately coloured levers when he sent Annie to me and they had lain in their bag for this moment. We read through the accompanying information and T began to work out the logistics of attaching the bits of metal and plastic to Annie's finely curved neck. However, T then made a dreadful discovery! The small bridge pins had gone into the wood of the neck too far. This meant that the string wasn't elevated high enough from the wood and therefore the small plastic lever couldn't actually make contact with it. Without this contact the levers couldn't actually do what they were meant to i.e. alter the tone of the note.

When we measured the bridge pins, we found that they were standing proud of the neck only 6mm and not the recommended 9mm. Mick did suggest pulling them out slightly, but T didn't feel happy about doing that ~ 3mm is such a tiny amount and difficult to judge accurately enough each time.

I decided to do a bit more research (after breathing deeply and promising myself not to cry!). I had heard of Truitt, Loveland and Camac levers, all of which had various design features that made different harpers/ists sing their praises. All these levers are available but would need to be imported, either from America or France. However I wanted to keep my original idea intact, which was to support UK luthiers. This meant only one option.

Peter Brough lives on the other side of Dartmoor and is a friend of my harp teacher. I tentatively emailed him enquiring about levers and received a lovely email in return. Whilst his levers are expensive, they are bronze cast and beautiful. I did some workings out and with the cost of import tax and exchange rates, they compared very favourably with the other lever makers. Plus, as an added bonus Peter even offered to fit the levers for me. Needless to say, T was relieved and offered to pay for that added expense immediately. All that was left to do was to send the original levers back to Mick who merely credited my account ~ always useful for when I need replacement strings!