My first harp was a harpsicle:

harpsicleharps.com/harps.htm

They come equipped with strap buttons so you can easily carry them... They don't have sharpening levers, but the same company does make a sharpsicle, if you need that ability...

There are also a number of cheaper harps available on ebay if you search, but I can't vouch for their quality... I've been very happy with my harpsicle, though...

good luck on your quest...
cid

Hi Holi,

It has been a couple of months since your first post, so I hope you have your harp and are making beutiful music on it. If you are still looking, here are my experiences. Like Cid, I usually play other instuments like guitar, mandolin or cittern, whistles, bones, etc., both celtic and other types of music, but I love the harp. I just picked mine up again after letting it sit on a shelf for several months. I always seem to have to relearn it but a new perspective always teaches me more than I learned before.

Numerous harps are available for order online and many music stores now carry them, though I am sure this depends on where you live. I would contact the harp maker personnally before ordering online or through a catalogue.

The harp I have now is a Stony End harp. It was pretty cheap ($300 and an old guitar) used at a music store. It is small enough to carry around and has 22 strings, from G to G - 3 octaves. It has sharping levers on the Cs and Fs So you can play in the keys of C, G, and D. The sharping levers are useful to play harp with others instruments, or to acommodate key changes when stringing together tunes. They also allow you fit tunes onto the harp so that there is room for both melody and accompaniment. Also, some songs use notes that don't fit into a diatonic (do re mi...) scale and sharping levers let you add the notes not prersent in the given key. That being said, I hardly ever use them and just transpose all of my tunes into C and find creative ways to fit in an accompaniment.

It is not my ideal harp but it will do for now. Regrettably, I sold my my first harp. It was a 29 string replica of the Queen Mary harp, wire-strung, made out of cherry wood. The wire strings have a very different tone than the nylon and tend to ring out and sustain. They also tend to break more often. It was about the same size as my present harp, but the closer string spacing of the wire strings allow more strings in the same space. It had no sharping levers - perhaps this is where i developed my reluctance to use sharping levers - medieval and renaissance harps did not use levers. I loved this harp though I never developed the string-damping techniques that are usually recommended for wire-strung harp.

One day I hope to build a harp. Perhaps carve it out of a block of willow the way the old Irish and Scottish harps were made. My first block of willow rotted before I could make a harp out of it, so this is still a dream.

Best of luck to you,
Bob

Another late reply - but harpers have a bit of a rep for not keeping time. (That's why I take my harp to drum circles, not sessions...)

My advice: You've got to, you simply must, try out a number of harps and find which is most appropriate for you.

Your profile says you are in the SF bay area - is that so? Then you might want to check out Lark in the Morning. Or if you care to make the trek down to Los Angeles, Sylvia Wood's Harp Center is the Mecca for harps on the West coast.

www.larkinam.com

harpcenter.com

I said: You've got to, you simply must, try out a number of harps and find which is most appropriate for you.

The thing about harps is that they seem to exhibit a lot more variety from maker to maker and even model to model than any other single instrument: string tension, progressive vs. straight spacing, tone, overall shape. And that's before throwing in huge stuff like nylon vs. wire. It happens that I play a Triplett, nylon with a fairly high tension for a folk harp. My friend Mark had a Raimond with a much lower tension. I could not play his harp at all, it felt like rubber bands to me. Yet when he played the Raimond, it sounded incredibly sweet! (And my harp hurt his hands!)

You said you want a smaller harp for travelling. There are a number of makers in the states. Triplett makes a small travel harp. I like the sound of the small William Rees. Raphael of "Harps of Lorien" is a great guy. And there are others.

I do own a sharpcicle, too. But I only use it to take to a massage class to demo as an example of a small, light, inexpensive harp. It's my big 38-string that I take to play at bedside, though. Then again I'm 6'2" and can simply carry around a harp that size.

If you are a promiscuous instrumentalist, then which harp you get may not matter so much. But it seems to me that a lot of harpers "bond" with their harp, christening them with names and such. That's why I advise getting one that appropriate to you now.

Take care,

-- T