The Dusty Blog

The Somerset Folk Harp Festival is coming right up, and you won't have a better opportunity to try lots of different harps in one location! If you're curious to know what Dusty harps we'll be bringing, read on.

If you have been casting around for the perfect opportunity to visit Seattle and hang out with a fun crowd of folk harpists, Harp Seattle could be just the thing! Dusty Strings’ three-day folk harp festival, which has happened in previous years under the name of “The Harp Symposium,” features local, national and international harpists presenting workshops on a variety of subjects, as well as a couple of fantastic concert lineups.

We documented parts of the building process when we made our first orphan harp, and we thought it would be fun to show you a little of what goes into making a harp!

What does it take to launch a new harp model? A creative and resourceful research and development team, careful planning, a lot of testing and problem-solving, and a few measly little Very Important Details…

If you can make it to Parsippany, NJ at the end of July, we highly recommend checking out the 2014 Somerset Folk Harp Festival. (It's named that because it used to be held in Somerset.) It is a four-day conference, running from Thursday, July 31st through Sunday, August 3rd, and we’re pretty sure it's currently the largest gathering of folk harp presenters, performers and exhibitors on the east coast (and possibly even in the whole U.S.).

People often ask us what kind of music can be played on a hammered dulcimer, and the short answer is that you can play pretty much anything. The longer answer is that it does depend a lot on the range and chromatic capability of your particular instrument. So what better way to give you a taste of the grand possibilities than to show you a few videos of people playing our largest chromatic hammered dulcimer in a variety of styles!

The AHS conference is a giant celebration of harps, harpists and harp music, and it’s an infectiously fun atmosphere to be in the middle of. This is its 41st year and it’s being held in New Orleans with lots of jazzy Southern flair.

This is the final post in our harp amplification series, which covers the details of connecting everything together. If you can make it through all of them, you should have a pretty complete (if basic) picture of what you’ll need to get the sound from your harp out to the ears in the back row.

This is the third post in our harp amplification for beginners series. (We tried to make it the last one but it just got too long, so we split it up.) The first post talked about the differences between microphones and pickups, and the second post explained the details of the Dusty Harp Pickup. This one and the next one will get you familiar with the equipment that actually amplifies the sound that is captured by your microphone or pickup, as well as the stuff that connects it all together.

How do you give someone a pickup recommendation for their harp when you’ve tried just about every pickup out there and none of them have been all that satisfying? For us, the answer was to go to work developing our own. We thought there must be a way to get a more focused, even and natural sound from a harp pickup, and after much engineering and experimentation, we felt like we achieved it.