Autoharp vintage2/26/2024 In private homage to one of Canada's most uniquely evocative voices and finest songwriters. This vintage Oscar Schmidt, has a crisper brighter sound than the more mellow, softer tones of succeeding models.Īnd you keep it in affectionate memory of that young girl Sylvia Fricker Tyson, who played hers, so inspirationally, in that small club, not ten feet away from you. Right showing the ravages of time, a split from a long sojourn in the dry climate of the arctic.īut you never throw them out. Alas, it's a losing battle for the autoharp as a popular instrument. Electronic tuners have made it far easier.īut the autoharp is not seen as a cool instrument by today's young crowd of wannabe musicians To them the autoharp is not nearly loud enough, autoharp players have hair that is far too short, a vocabulary that is far too proper, and also appear to take far too many baths to warrant real rock star status worthy of emulating. Tuning by harmonica, or piano, was better, but it took a lot of time to get the half tone harmonics working properly. ![]() If you did it by ear you would be way out by the time you got to the strings on the other side. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, they gave up, finding it impossible to keep them all in tune. The trouble with the autoharp, for most people, was: too many strings. Other fanatic players just cruised auctions to find throw-away instruments so they could cannibalize the bars which were usually in very good shape since instruments were rarely played for long. Another reason many players instead, reached for their iPods. With time the felts bent, or hardened, and had to be replaced. ![]() The chord bars were made with glued in felt pads, cut to allow only a few strings to sound about a third played for each chord, and two thirds were dampened. The pin block - inside the frame edge, where the pins are screwed in, around the top, is usually of rock maple, mahogany, or spruce. Instruments could have 36 strings and up to 21 bars. In the 1880s it became Americanized as the "Autoharp," a harp that would practically play itself. Zimmerman of Philadelphia took out a patent on it. The "Folkszither" was brought to the US in the 1870s, and Charles F. Karl called the instrument that anyone could play the "Folkszither." It produced amazingly beautiful full chords just by holding down a damper and stroking all the strings with a finger pick. You pressed a damper bar to get a chord and by alternately pushing three buttons you had three chords, enough to play many songs. ![]() So Karl hit on the idea of dampening sets of strings with a muffling system of pads on bars mounted on a bridge, so that only strings related to a chord could sound. ![]() The zither was a multi-string table-top instrument and was hard to play it took two hands to pluck individual strings. The autoharp was actually invented in Germany, in the 1860s, by Karl August Guther, who adapted it from the zither (on which Anton Karas played the fabulous theme for Orson Welles' and Joe Cotton's film, The Third Man in 1949) Left is a vintage workhorse from the 1960s showing all the earmarks that it was heavily used by a devoted folk singer: the bridge assembly for the chords has been moved down to the end, clearing more room to get at high strings over the sound hole, a scratched patch to the lower left of the label, where the player's harmonica mount rubbed extensively on the body, and broken strings from vigorous plucking by an enthusiastic player. The Autoharp is a relatively rare Canadian folk instrument that is, tragically, mostly forgotten these days, by people whose only skill is plugging in iPods and going off to lala land with headsets clamped on.
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