When William Close was here for the Season Opening, Randy and I helped take the harp down, and they gave us all the strings. There are made of a special bronze wire I have not yet found a source for.
We would like to build our own "Long Strings Harp", but I want to make two improvements: try and make it a (barely) portable instrument, and get a better amplification device. William is using a microphone inside the sound box, or right next to the board where the strings are attached. I propose to use a magnetic pickup like those used on bass guitars:
We would like to build our own "Long Strings Harp", but I want to make two improvements: try and make it a (barely) portable instrument, and get a better amplification device. William is using a microphone inside the sound box, or right next to the board where the strings are attached. I propose to use a magnetic pickup like those used on bass guitars:
But there are two big differences between a bass guitar and the harp: hte guitar strings are steel and vibrate transversally, whereas the harp strings are non magnetic bronze and vibrate longitudinally.
What I propose to test is to attach one end of a string to a wall, and the other end to a $5 wooden tray from Hobby Lobby using a small steel drill bit stop. The pickup will be thin copper wire wound around a cylindrical magnet made of a bunch of small disk magnets held together by a piece of black shrink tubing:
The steel stop will be glued to the "sound board with epoxy, and the pickup placed about 1/8" to 1/4" from it. The sound board will be strapped to the opposite wall and the string given a much tension as possible. Eventually, I will build a proper resonator box:
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