First and Second Practices

Yesterday was my first practice and I just finished my second practice. The memorizing of the cord bars I did while I was waiting for the harp to come really seems to have paid off. I was able to find the right cords in a short amount of time. To my surprise, I found I could not remember the first song in my Hymnbook, “The Morning Breaks”. So I’ve started learning on the second song, “The Spirit of God”. But here’s the kicker, all I’m practicing is pressing the cords and strumming with my thumb, and no picks. The reason is that I don’t have a tuner. This is good practice as far as focusing me on the chord bars, but it isn’t very satisfying from a sound point of view.

I talked with the “Autoharp Store” on the phone yesterday when I noticed no response from my email. The lady I talked to said that they probably forgot to put the tuner in. So she’s going to send me one with a smaller hex key for the fine tuner. Hmm, maybe my local “Acoustic Music” store would have a tuner I could rent for a while…

Anyway, since I’m focusing on chord bars I’ve run into a bit of a puzzle. By a VERY bizarre set of circumstances the flash player I’ve been trying to get to install for so long from Adobe’s site was successfully installed through another site with no problems. So now I’m able to view YouTube. FINALLY I’ve been able to view this autoharp clip that keeps coming up on the “autoharp” Google search. This led me to a bunch of other clips. One of which talked about how to hold the harp. He said that you hold it with the strings vertical. I’ve been holding the harp with the string horizontally, similar to the way you hold a guitar. I used to hold my old 15 bar harp the way this guy suggested, but it always seemed awkward trying to find a good finger arrangement on the chord bars. Each of the two ways means comfortable access to the chord bars is different. So taking my 21 bar harp as an example, each method works like this:

Strings Vertical
Your three fingers lay access each chord button by row. I’m not sure this puts each chord near each other. If you had a custom chord bar arrangement like most of the people in the YouTube clips seemed to have, I could see everything where you would expect it by row. But I’m not sure that’s true with the factory chord bar arrangement.

Strings Horizontal
Your three fingers lay across each chord bar by column. Looking at the chord bars, the buttons in each row are offset to the right from the row above them. This makes them really comfortable for access by column because, by its nature, you can’t hold the harp with the strings exactly horizontal. So it is held at an angle that makes each column line up nicely with your ring finger on the first row and your middle finger on the second row and your pointer finger on the last row. Then you just move your three fingers up and down the row. I’m not sure how this works for custom chord bar arrangements, but it seems to work well with the factory settings, very well on my first two practices, which isn’t saying much. The only setback I can see is that it seems to put a lot more effort on your ring finger.

Now I’m not totally alone on this horizontal method. I met a very good autoharp player in Nottingham England who plays this way, and I saw a page some where on the web of a guy talking about installing his guitar strap on his harp so it would sit this way. Also, one advantage I could see is that if you did do some customizing of the bars, you could just rearrange them without needing new buttons or felt.

I fell into using the horizontal method on my first practice. On the second practice I took some time to try it on some of the other songs in the book besides the one I’ve been practicing. There were two songs of the several I tried that caused my fingers to have a bit of a stretch to the next button. But even then the button after that was always near by.

All this love of the horizontal method may change when my thumb brushes past tuned strings with a pick on, or after I have more experience. But for right now, it feels really good. On Monday’s practice I’ll try using the vertical method and see what happens.

Oh, remember that first song in the Hymnbook I couldn’t remember? I went to the lds.org web site to see if I could find a recording of it to remind me. At this link, http://www.lds.org/cm/display/0,17631,4996-1,00.html they have a link to the “Interactive Church Music Player”. A very cool little page! Not only does it allow you to look for any music in the Hymnbook or the Children’s Hymnbook, but it also allows you to play the song and print out the actual music in different keys! Unfortunately it doesn’t print the music out with the chords. And for right now, it doesn’t help me because they are not simplified. Now even if you’re not interested in LDS hymns, there’s quite a few old standards in the LDS hymn book, like “Onward Christian Soldiers” that you could print out in different keys if you needed the music for private use.