It’s been nearly a week since
my harp arrived! I’ve been practicing
about twice daily, for at least 30 minutes each time. I’ve noticed that at night, my attention starts
to fade, and 30 minutes is about all I can do.
The sound of even a badly played harp starts to put me to sleep ;)
I’ve had quite a few
challenges this week. I’ll begin with the first one today, tuning.
I bought a very
inexpensive tuner on Amazon which had great ratings. So glad that I did because it makes the process simpler and more accurate. If your harp is new, it requires several tunings
daily. From everything I’ve read, this
is important not just for the “health” of your harp, but also for you to
develop your ear for hearing accurate notes.
If your harp is new, it’s kind of crucial to tune often. The strings
have to be tightened not only because they stretch more at first, but also the
wood in the harp has to stretch a bit into position. There’s even a term for
this called “belly up.” The wood in the sound board has to be strong yet thin
enough to rise to the proper position. At this point, the sound should improve,
even on a costly harp that already sounds beautiful. (In fact,
those cheap Pakistani harps mentioned in an earlier post don’t “belly up” well
or at all because the wood is thick and dense.)
So, if you are tuning 26 (or more) strings two or three times daily, you
want a tuner that is easy to use and accurate.
Here are a few
discoveries I made – all of which I should have thought of earlier, but didn’t. Remember that I was
used to playing piano, so my tuning consisted of hiring someone else to do the
work!
1. Where you place the clip-on tuner matters. Consequently, when I
tune the highest strings, I move the tuner closer to the strings I'm tuning. Yes, I believe it matters!
2. When you are trying to
tune quickly, it helps to silence the previously tuned string before proceeding
to the next string. Pretty obvious, but
when you’re trying to get done quickly, those little steps are easy to forget.
3. What strings to tune
first? There are (at least) a couple of
different opinions on this. The easier
one is to start with the low notes and proceed to the higher notes. Supposedly if you start with the high notes,
by the time you get to the larger and longer strings, those high notes will be
out of tune again. This makes sense, but
I didn’t actually try tuning high notes first.
It would be interesting to see if this is true! So for the first couple of days, I tuned low
strings first. Then I read that you
should start at middle C, and then the low C, followed by the other higher C
strings. After C, you move along through
the other notes in similar fashion. I
found that I preferred this method. I
think it was easier to hear if a string was flat, since you are working with that same note but in different octaves.
Also, it was more entertaining!
4. Tuning the levered B strings
was a little different than the other strings.
This is because the B string is actually tuned to A sharp (or B flat). Then
when you engage the lever, the note becomes B.
I decided to tune the string with the lever in the up or off position,
rather than with the lever down. So I
first tuned these strings to A sharp, and then I engaged the lever to check if
the note was actually B. Luckily for me,
all of my levers work properly and don’t need any adjustment. Since my harp only has levers on F, C, G, and
B, this was the only string that I play with the lever engaged. I’m sure that
if you have levers on E and A, for example, you’d want to consider tuning them
to D sharp and G sharp. Kind of wishing
I had levers on E, by the way. I may
write more on this later…
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