It is often said that the levers for a harp are really nothing but frets, but when one sees frets on a guitar or mandolin (or any other commonly fretted instrument) they have an entirely different look and many far different properties.

One of the primary differences, of course, is that for commonly fretted instruments, all the vibrating lengths of the strings (the distance from the bridge to the nut) are the same. This in conjunction with designing the strings to have relatively close diameters and similar tensions allows using the same formula for halfsteps for each of the strings. This is usually related to the 12th root of 2 with something of a correction factor added to compensate for the increased tension (and thus the frequency) in the string from depressing it against the fingerboard and creating a vibration node at the next fret*. This factor can only be the same for each string because of their identical vibrating lengths and similar construction and open string tension. For the above reasons, placing frets on the commonly fretted instruments is significantly more simple than on the harp.

Special problems for fretting harps

On the modern folk harp, each string is not only a different length, but may be any one of several constructions with variations in materials of wound strings, variations in core and winding diameters, and then variations in diameters of monofilament strings. Add to this that conscientious harpmakers will design their strings to maintain at least a similar tension to length ratio of the strings. With so many variables it would be totally impractical and probably impossible to determine a given formula for predicting the correct placement of sharpening levers for each string. Also, small variations in the construction, materials and string pressure equilibrium conditions of the harp would also influence correct placement of the levers. One very unfortunate misconception that has gained wide belief is that over time the vibrating length of the strings change even after the harp has come to pressure equilibrium requiring the levers to be retuned from time to time. THIS ACTUALLY HAS NO BASIS IN FACT WHATSOEVER. Later in this paper I will suggest a means by which anybody can prove this for themselves. It involves developing a practice I wish all harpers would develop, asking not the engineer or harpmaker, but to ASK YOUR HARP. It is amazing what your harp can and will tell you through the medium of tape measures and/or electronic tuners.

The Tunable Blade Lever

Many years ago, when I was building the first harp I personally designed, and also, the first harp that I levered, and when I was using a modified form of the Caswell blade lever. The modification I had made to the lever was to have threaded the shank, and thus minimizing its tunability but significantly improving its durability. In these two things I was exceedingly successful. I thought to make things easy for myself by using the same fret placement factors as my guitar. That didn't work at all, and I found the levers all too sharp, but not consistently so. Since I was making the harp for my daughter, and since most were close enough or could be made to be close enough for her use, she kept that harp for several years until she sold it to Bobbie-Jo Curley as her first harp. This turned out to be fortunate since I was able to keep track of that harp. I learned a great deal from carefully following the intonation of each lever over a period of about 10 years. Surprisingly, they did not change in their intonation so long as I kept the shank of each lever in a fixed position.

Let us take a look at one of the typical blade levers from circa 1980

Typical Blade lever of the 1970's/80's

Two things are immediately apparent. First, that the shaft is not threaded in any way and thus can not be secured in any given position. The holes drilled for these levers allowed the shafts to be forced in rather tightly, but both rotatable, and moved in and out of the hole. The second thing to be noticed is that the blade itself is severely tapered from one end to the other. It can easily be seen that as the blade is pushed further into the hole drilled in the harmonic curve for it, the less the string will be displaced thus reducing the tension on the string lowering the intonation of the sharpened note. Of course, pulling the shaft out a ways will increase the displacement of the string increasing the tension on the string and raising the intonation of the sharpened note.

This of course was a very primitive attempt to make the sharpening levers tunable. I had threaded the shanks of all the levers I had purchased from Caswell and so could screw them out and in, but if not screwed in and out they kept the same intonation. I soon found out why the shanks were left unthreaded by their maker. The reason was that as I got to the shorter strings, the broad end of the blade ran into the bridge pin and it couldn't be screwed in far enough to even displace the string. Also, even bringing the blades down to the minimum deflection of the strings was insufficient to lower the intonation of the levers of the first harp that I levered.

There was a much larger problem with those levers also. Since the shank was unthreaded it relied wholly on the wood pressure to keep it positioned. Of course, the more it was used, the more the wood just plane wore out specially on the Fs, Cs and Gs. At this point, the lever would certainly not stay in tune and eventually would become so loose that they began falling out. Once that occurred, there was just no way to repair them. They were a disaster. I have a term for "adjustable" mechanisms which are not well thought out ahead of time I call them the SLIPPY/SLIDY syndrome of engineering. The old tunable blade levers did have two marvelous features and hose were their simplicity and their ruggedness. There were no moving parts to wear out, come loose or buzz. Unfortunately, that was not a saving grace.

I believe in my engineering courses in college, every professor extolled the virtues of simplicity. One former engineer for the San Francisco water department made a worldwide name for himself by satirizing American engineering. And also saying something like "There is no limit to the American engineers capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results. You would know him better by his cartoons and his name, Rube Goldberg.

The Woldsong Fret

Being most reluctant to place such problem plagued mechanisms on any harp I build, I gave very careful consideration to what could be done to avoid all the problems of the original blade lever.
That consideration led me to realize that the greatest problem with the old blade levers was that they were made to be tunable, and I convinced myself by careful consideration and by way of the harps themselves that Tunability was totally un-necessary.

Then it was totally necessary to re-design the blade in such a way that the shank would be threaded with reasonably course machine screw threads that would not easily strip out the pre tapped wood, and all but totally delete the taper of the blade. The next step was to develop a method by which they could be installed in such a way that the accuracy of their intonation could be demonstrably maintained within certain guaranteed limits, and that that accuracy would be maintained throughout the life of the harp (which are guaranteed for 10 years)

Woldsong fret

Now I make a distinction. If a device for achieving sharps on a harp is tunable, I am quite content to always refer to it as a lever. However since such devices as I use are permanently installed, and demonstrably as trouble free* as any fret oh a guitar or banjo when properly installed in the first place, and will never require "regulation"** then they really do have the same care free characteristics as any other the frets and so I have thus named them.

* I have yet to discover any problem that any purchaser of a Woldsong harp has had with any fret that I have ever installed. Too, I have a constant offer of $100.00 to the first person who can demonstrate on the harps side by side any advantage any flip up lever has over a Woldsong fret. (If a fret is not used for several months, it may get a little tight and require re-waxing with a good floor paste wax. They are originally installed using Minwax Paste finishing wax) and I recommend that the frets be removed only one at a time for any purpose since they may be precision sized for that string only.) The guarantee does not apply to the top three strings on the harp.

One final note on Woldsong frets. One advantage they have in being faster than flip up levers
is that they retain the nearly exact (within 3-5 cents) from the point where they first contact the string
to where they are at a 90* angle to the string. There is no stop point to which you must go, and no kind of stopping device. you need turn them only to a point where they are firmly in contact with the string. This saves even more arm motion than the already superfluous motion in the use of flip up levers.

**I have letters from Woldsong harp users that use their frets constantly in playing from classical music to jazz and who have Woldsong harps dating back to the early 1990's whose frets are still well within the guaranteed intonation. (+/- 13 cents)

Do Harps Really Continue to Change shape

Throughout Their Entire Life Span?

I have a 2 ½ hour DVD I give away* entitled “The Harp is the Authority” wherein I demonstrate a technique through careful measurement how to prove for yourself and to once and for all show the fallaciousness of this belief. In the accompanying booklet I describe one or two other ways this idea can be put to rest, and I’ll give another one right here which derives from an incident that occurred while I was attending a harp conference last year.

While attending that conference, I stopped by the booths of a harpmaker for whom I do have significant respect to ask why he persists in using tunable levers. It turned out that the actual maker was not in attendance at this time, but the lady demonstrating the harps said that “yes, their harps did change shape over their entire lifetime because they were made of such light materials”. I had to put my instantaneous tempting responses in check.

The first was to perhaps ask if Mr. (deleted) had developed a method of instilling so much life into his instruments that they actually breathed both in and out? Or perhaps another question: if she warned all of her customers that her harps had only a life expectancy of a couple of years. As for the first question I might have asked, if the harp always changed in the direction of the proverbial 800 lb gorilla, then the harp would always continue to go sharp, and soon exceed the flatenable range of the tunable lever. Ergo, the harp’s change must be both back and forth.

All harpmakers build a gorilla into their instruments. In my own harps, that gorilla is fromabout 700 lbs up to nearly 1300 lbs depending on the harp model. I am, of course, referring to the tension of the strings pulling up on the soundboard. That tension is always in the samedirection and any movement must by force be upward on the harp soundboard. If the harp is going to change shape, it must do so in accordance with that tension.

The cohesion of both glue and wood fibers is finite. If the harp is forever changing in shape (and by force in the same direction) certainly the pliability and thus cohesion of either the glue or wood fibers must eventually be overcome, and it takes little imagination to foresee the results of that.To the best of my knowledge, there must always be , in some way, to build strength into the soundboard so that, though, the tension is forever there, the shape comes to an equilibrium of structural strength and string tension…….ergo all change of harp shape equalize out.

I have written a paper complete with photographs which I give away* describing how I engineer my harps. In that 13 page description I do address how I protect the soundboard from the string tension leaving out only one piece of proprietary information that is for entierely other purposes. I do wish that all harpmaklers would be as open as I am about how they go about designing and constructing their instruments. It would make it much easier for the purchaser to select on quality rather than on just talking heads. Look and listen and compare the harps is the key to choosing the most suitable instrument!

· It is necessary for me to make a $2.00 charge to cover postage and bubble protected envelopes for the mailings

So Why Do Most Harpmakers Continue

To use flip up levers

A very obvious and fair question does now arise. If harps by force come to stabilize (this in my experience comes about, in at most two to three weeks while kept at concert pitch) why then should harp builders ever install tunable levers that simply vibrate themselves out of tune and are prone to all the Rube Goldberg faults and failures of the overly engineered flip up levers.

A few years ago, while giving a technical session at a very large harp convention on the west coast, wherein I had invited as many attendees as I could to be sure to bring their own harps to my session. Since I was going to be talking about the harps themselves serving as the very best authorities, and how to ask the harps themselves questions, and I thought that to make as many actual harp comparisons as possible. Of course, I did bring a couple of my own instruments to be put to each and every test I had proposed. I had even asked Dave Thormahlen to both attend and take part. Of course any harpmaker attending would have been welcome. But since Dave was the technical writer for the FHJ and had published two completely inane suggestions on how I positioned my levers and/or bent their shanks after installation.

He most definitely did not come up with another inane suggestion. Rather, near the end of my presentation, he asked me how long it took to accurately place my frets on say a 36 string harp. I replied, about 6 to 8 hours to which Dave admitted that that would be too expensive for any harpmaker to devote that much time. As I recall, he said his time for installing and tuning such a harp would be about 90 minutes.

Let me digress slightly here and say that two “guesses” about how I go about accurately installing the Woldsong frets are first; that I mathematically calculate ahead of time exactly where the frets would need be placed. I thoroughly agree that this method would not work, not because of the suggestion by the author of this inanity that I could not make the harp sufficiently the same every time, but because I doubt that I would ever be able to predict or control the bellying out of the soundboard. (Note that I always state the necessity of bringing the harps to tension equilibrium prior to placing the frets).

The second is that I install the frets in approximate positions then bend the shanks till they are in tune. I offered the author of this bunch of silliness $100.00 for every bent shank he could find on any of my harps, if he would give me $1.00 for every straight shank there was. He wisely bypassed that offer.

I do not take Dave’s objection to using or at least offering his customers frets to which he expressed no quarrel with the supremacy they showed in all of the tests demonstrated that day, nor did he take he following in to consideration.

It is very obvious that there is absolutely no way to patent the very simple frets that I use, and I have never made any attempt to do so. Too, since that came up that one time, I have come across other ways of going about placing and installing them to the point where the time is now cut by about 30%. The cost of these “lost wax” cast frets is probably about 1/5 that of the overly engineered levers. Thus the difference in price of installation is significantly diminished for the advantage of giving the customer a demonstrably superior product.

I believe that the reason most harpmakers do not use frets as I do is that they have absolutely no idea how to go about installing them with the same accuracy and ruggedness I achieve, and are either unwilling or have insufficient imagination in how to develop a method for doing so.

Flip up levers

During a recent harp convention wherein I was giving a lecture on how to ask questions
of harps, I had invited one of the more prominent harpmakers to attend, and he was good enough to do so. In the portion of that lecture on comparing the various sharpening devices I showed a very quick easy way to compare any tonal qualities affected by the various sharpening devices.
*I of course was demonstrating on one of my harps that had been built circa 1992 and was thus 14 years old. All the attendees were encouraged to compare their various sharpening devices with one another and with mine, and also discuss how frequently it was necessary for the "regulation" of intonation.
Near the end of the lecture, the invited harpmaker asked me how long it takes me to lever a
36 string harp (such as I was using for my demonstration). I replied that I informally allocate 10 to 12 hours for that job. This harpmakers response was that that was far too time consuming and expensive* for most harpmakers, and he claimed he could lever a 36 string harp in approximately an hour and a half. (considering 90 minutes to install 36 levers is allotting only 2 1/2 minutes per lever. This gentleman maintained that harp production shops could not economically spend the time necessary for the installation of true fret. By this I understood that it was necessary for profit and time considerations that the levers be installed is some approximate position then tuned. And this says to me that the primary consideration in the engineering of at least all the levers of which I am aware that they be made tunable as a consideration for the harpmaker and the harper was given a distant second consideration in engineering the levers.

Bravely forging ahead with two totally incorrect concepts; first the total problem with the old blade lever was the blade itself, and secondly and worse. the concept that it was necessary to maintain
tunability, thus first discarding the two great values of the blade levers, namely their simplicity and ruggedness. They then put forth their efforts to maintain the true problem of the old blade levers the slippy slidy shank and thinly attempting to disguise that problem with slippy slidy slots which even though pressure fit still go out of tune. (For any movable device that is subjected to vibration, if it is not securely LOCKED into place, vibration will win, and the device will move driving the lever out of tune and requiring "REGULATION". In all that I have seen, the levers are held in place by a screw with very fine threads (fortunately machine screw threads) that if tightened too much will most probably strip the threads in the wood and you're right back to where you were with the smooth shanked blade lever.

Two typical flip up levers

(note the screw holes of both are not holes at all, but slippy slidy slots akin to the smooth shanks of the old fashioned blade levers, and consequently have many of the same faults as the old blade levers)

To make matters worse, at least in some designs with the retaining screw getting a bit loose, or a small bump occurring, the lever can get out of alignment. Too, the flip up mechanism though I'm sure in most if not all cases is well designed with the most advanced materials, they are still very small very delicate and fragile. Even such similar mechanisms as light switches which are much larger and more ruggedly constructed occasionally fail, If a harper extensively uses the levers, these too will fail and being much small and far more delicate, probably far more rapidly than light switches.

Of course if the harper does not regularly use the levers, never or rarely plays accidentals or avoids playing multiple accidental changes at the same time,and perhaps only uses them when tuning their harp to F, B flat or E flat, then uses the levers to place the harp in C then the harper will only be plagued by need of "REGULATION", then there is absolutely no need to care what kinds of levers are put on your harp, anything will do.

Some words on the problems of flip up levers, and these are in the words of probably the most knowledgeable harpbuilder there is on levers are the words of William Rees's most instructive website article.

When seeking to purchase a new harp, don't ask talking heads, ask the harps. Comparing harps side by side and using simple means of testing will tell you more than all the harpers that are already committed to harps they have played or own. The harps themselves are the authorities and they will never misguide you.

A couple of final comments that I would like to make. When that prominent harpbuilder told me that it would be financially impractical to take the time I take to install my frets, I didn't take that as the total underlying reason. I really believe that after hearing (and reading) several inane guesses as to my method of installing them accurately, I have come to the conclusion that (at least those who made those guesses) have not a clue as to how I do it and know full well that their guesswork would have little chance of success. Actually I think the method is very obvious (specially if one reads my claims about one of their features).

My background is in Chemical/Mechanical engineering. In my academic studies, and years as an independent consultant, two of the most common and atrocious mistakes that can be made in engineering are first, to engineer specifically for simplicity of manufacture without regard to the final usrer, and secondly to introduce unwarranted complexity to a final design. In my opinion, every tunable lever designed is wholly at fault for both of these errors.

To those few who contend that I am a new face in the harpbuilding world, as far as I know only
two makers have been consistently in business longer than myself. They are Sandpiper harps and Triplett harps (who has me beat by a couple of months) I built my first harp circa 1980. In the time following that, I have designed and built every piece of every harp I ever have made, and done the entire assembly job on every harp myself. The only thing I have not done is the finish on the soundboards. I make harps for the final user and the creative love. I take absolutely no shortcuts for any reason. I can take this attitude because I conceive and design for the musician who is going to play the instrument. Anything else, to me is not fair to the musician, and thus total folly.