How often do you clean your room?
That might seem like a bit of a strange way to start talking about tuning a harp. But, stay with me, and you’ll see where I’m headed.
If you spend your week carelessly throwing dirty clothes on the floor, leaving shoes piled up in a corner and dumping the day’s mail unopened on your dresser, then two things will happen. A massive great problem will develop, and it will take a lot of time and energy to fix it.
However, if you hang clothes up after wearing them, put your shoes away, and sort through your mail each day, then these small, regualar tasks will seem like nothing at all.
Tuning a harp is just like tidying your room.
If you leave your harp for several days (a week, MORE!?) then you will have a seriously unhappy harp. Every string will be out of tune somehow, which will make it harder to figure out where ‘in tune’ is. The string condition will suffer for not being kept at a constant pitch, and the strings will be more likely to deteriorate and break.
Even with an electronic tuner, you will be spending a long time trying to get the harp back in tune. And because you aren’t regularly improving your tuning skills, it will take longer to complete the whole business of tuning.
It will seem as long, drawn out and painful as having to spend the afternoon cleaning your room.
But if you are constantly tuning every time you play, then loads of good things will happen:
· Regular tuning takes less time, as the harp is already basically in tune to begin with.
· You will become quicker and more proficient at the actual process of tuning.
· You will also be training your ear to learn to appreciate what an in tune harp sounds like, and making it easier for you to pick when a note is out of tune.
· Your harp will always sound its beautiful best!
Make it a practice to tune one set of strings before you start playing e.g. go through and tune all the C strings. Then, after you have played a little, take a quick break and tune all the D strings. If you notice an A string is out of tune while you are playing, stop and retune not just that string, but all the other A strings as well. Do this every time you play and you will find it takes very little time because your harp will always basically be in tune.