The Beginning

In the early 1990’s I was frustrated in trying to find more information to learn how to play this 15 bar autoharp I’d been carrying around with me for the previous 13 years. This probably sounds really dumb to you experienced guitar and autoharp players. As near as I can tell from what I’ve read and heard from you, you view the autoharp as such a no brainer to play that you could trip over it in the middle of the night and it would play all verses of “My Wild Irish Rose”. Well, sorry to disappoint, but at that time I just was not getting it. I’m still not sure if I’m getting it, but that’s for later.

My hope of learning it had been renewed when I had just made two important discoveries. I had just found out that there were now affordable, electronic, chromatic tuners out on the market. Then, while playing around on this funky new “World Wide Web” thingy, I found that there were whole bunches of people playing the autoharp already! It wasn’t just an oddity that I just happened to like. So my first step was to look for a teacher. I found lots of them on the web, none of which lived even remotely near my state, let a lone near my home. As hope started slipping away again, I ran across a web ad for the “Autoharp Quarterly”. The ad said something about how one of the goals of the magazine was to promote the Autoharp to others. I thought, that there could be no better way of promoting the instrument than by teaching “know nothing” beginners like me. So they’ll probably have a beginner’s section. With that in mind I subscribed to it for one year.

As I received each issue in the mail I found that the magazine had nothing to do with beginners. It was a way for people who already knew how to play the autoharp to pass on tips and tricks they had learned to other people that already knew how to play. But on the second to the last issue in my subscription, the magazine announced that the last issue was going to start the first of a series of articles on the thoughts and experiences of a new beginner to the autoharp. Now we’re talking! …or so I though.

Finally the anxiously awaited last issue of my subscription arrived. I eagerly opened it up to the beginner article and started reading. Basically it was about a guy who had been playing the guitar for years and just recently decided to see what he could do with this autoharp stuff. GIVE ME A BREAK! This is not a real beginner! Look, I’m a computer programmer. I know that my knowledge of FORTRAN gives me an advantage in learning Visual Basic. My knowledge of C++ gives me an advantage in learning Java and C#. And if you lifetime music folk are totally confused by that analogy, then you know EXACTLY how I was feeling! By the way, I didn’t renew my subscription.

Now it has been another 13 years since then. The web is not so new and there’s a lot more easily accessible music info on it. This and a bunch of other factors have come together to make me think its time to try it again. This time its all or nothing. I’m going to use whatever time and/or money I’ve got to put into it. As I began this latest quest, I started remembering the so-called “beginner’s” article above and thought that since I am a real, cold start, square one, beginner, I should do what that article clamed it was going to do. I have no idea if any one else has already done this. But I’m hoping this blog will do the following:

1. Give me a place where I can talk through problems I run into as I go through this process.
2. Hope that other real beginners might find something helpful.
3. Allow those who already know the autoharp to drop off targeted help they think will be useful.

My current plan is to establish my qualifications as a “Real Beginner”. Then get everyone (especially me) caught up to where I’m at in the latest attempt. Cover what my future plan is, and finally just start telling things as they happen.