Qualifications as a Real Beginner

Here’s the sum of my musical knowledge and autoharp experience.

At age six my parents decided that my sister and I needed piano lessons. Here I learned about notes and that each note represents a piano key. Press the key when you see its notes.

Not long after my piano career was over because I wouldn’t practice, I was watching TV with my parents. The show introduced a guy who played a thing called the autoharp. It sounded wonderful to me and I wanted to hear more. Not long after that I was looking through the Sears catalog. (Yes, I’m that old…) In it I saw a wonderful 15 bar Chromoharp. The catalog description talked about how easy it was to learn and play. I thought that that was great! Not only does it sound wonderful, sort of like a harpsichord, and it was EASY! I’m all for easy. So I cajoled my parents into paying the $75 (…told you I was that old.) for it plus the extra for a case. When it came in the mail I immediately pulled it out of the box, grabbed the flat pick and ran it across the strings. That’s when I learned that you don’t want to do that without pressing a chord bar first. The second thing I immediately learned was you should tune the strings first. But how do you tune 36 strings? This was between the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. There were no cheep chromatic tuners. After two visits to the local music store and two broken strings later, I gave up trying to figure out the whole tuning thing, and I carefully placed the harp in its case and in a safe corner of my closet in hopes that one day I’d figure that out.

In the later part of elementary school I learned the recorder followed by the clarinet. In junior high school they had too many clarinet players so I became the one and only base clarinet player. The end of junior high school was also the end of my music career for a while. From it I learned the basics of reading music and that’s about it.

That brings me to the early 1990’s. By now I’m married and I’m still carrying around that same 15 bar harp in its same case to each home we moved into. Due to my eyesight I don’t drive. So I was taking the bus back and forth to work. This night I was riding home reading a book, when the bus driver stopped and said that we were at the end of the line, everyone out. Since I had been reading the book the whole time I had no idea where I was or how to get home. This is where I think the good Lord has been trying to help me out to play. As I was going from bus stop to bus stop asking how to get home it started raining. I noticed a guitar shop and stepped in. That’s when I found out affordable chromatic tuners were available. I bought one on the spot and eventually made my way home. Finally I could tune the thing. Now how do you play it?

This is where the info in “The Beginning” section comes into the story. After that I started buying all the autoharp instruction books I could find. I ended up with too much info. It seemed almost every book had its own idea of where you should start and what you should do from there. Confusion set in until I decided to just pick one book and follow it through. This was the first time the harp was played. About one or two songs into the book I made the mistake of playing for my wife. After I was finished she tried to be polite, but basically said that it was a little loud and twanggy. I replied that I would get better as I played more. She strongly suggested that I wait until I found a teacher to help me because I might be learning bad habits that will mess me up later. (sigh.) As I continued to practice my two songs, I did start to notice more and more that it sounded more like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel than the smooth stuff I had heard. So after a while I packed it away again.

Now I sing in my church choir. But I do that by sitting next to someone who knows what they’re doing. When I see the notes go up I know his voice will go up as well. So I just match his voice. (Pathetic I know.) You see, by now I’ve forgotten what each of the notes on the staff are. My wife left me for some movie producer. (No, I’m not making that up.) When I moved on I left most of the stuff of my pre-divorce life with my x-wife, including my old 15 bar harp. The story would end there except I meet two very lovely sisters in my church that inspired me to make this new, last push. (For you romantics in the audience, forget it, there’s no attachment here, I’m not in their league.) What inspired me is that they have far less time in their lives than I do, and yet they’ve both learned to play the Celtic harp like angels. If they can do that with their schedules I should be able to pull this off with mine. Also I though of my x-father-in-law. While in his 70’s he took up the bagpipes and now plays professionally. Since I no longer have a wife to annoy and most all the information I need seems to be a Google search away, I’m hoping this time I’ll go all the way.