Hello everybody on HIVE and especially those of the Music Community! I am writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa. The two hobbies I tend to post the most about on HIVE are my music and song writing (usually performed these days with fellow HIVER @clairemobey – please follow her!) and surfing.
Now usually when I get up on stage to play my/our own music or some covers, my main instruments are guitar, vocals, harmonica (played simultaneously on a rack) and, more recently, stomp-box. I’m trying to plan around at least one live song performance that uses a loop pedal as well.
However, I do love to mess around at home with other interesting sounds on whatever zany instrument I can find… or even make.
Because of this, I thought I should take a 3-pronged approach to writing about music on HIVE:
- My own songs and the gigs I perform with @clairemobey. For example: see @jasperdick/music-live-video-a-new
- Other South African musicians that I think the world should be listening to. For example, see @jasperdick/music-another-south-african-talent-0ae27f8bad5c
- A third topic to open my mind and think about what could be achieved on stage in the future – maybe with the help of the loop pedal, or possibly even without it: “INSTRUMENTS SO WACKY YOU DON’T HAVE TO PLAY THEM WELL TO IMPRESS PEOPLE.” – I wrote my first post on this topic just the other day, but people seem to be enjoying it, please see here: @jasperdick/music-live-video-wacky-instruments
Today I would like to post again on the third topic – here is an instrument you don’t have to play well at all, but you really don’t see them often anymore, and so they always seem to make people look twice!
PART 2 – Grandpa’s old Autoharp
Well, here it is – Grandpa’s old autoharp – currently looking very dusty with a few strings broken! The fact that it is called a Chroma harp suggests to me that you also get simpler ones with only enough strings and chord options for a single key to play in? I’ve never actually seen another autoharp in person, so who knows!
My grandfather passed away when I was 4 years old. I have been told that he was very musical and used to entertain people with folk songs all the time and had many instruments. I have noticed that my father is actually pretty musical too with great natural rhythm and taste in music, but he spent his life focusing on rock-climbing and never practised his guitar beyond the basics, which he lovingly taught me a few years after grandfather passed away. It wasn’t long before I was playing better than poor old Dad!
My widowed grandmother continued to live alone in her family home in Durban for many years after my grandfather died, and I do have many fond memories of getting to tinkle away on xylophones or whatever other noisy thing I could find when I got to visit! As my grandmother reached about 90 years of age, it was time to move her to an old age home and pack up her old house. The autoharp was found, and I was the lucky grandson to receive it even though some of my cousins are also musical! Perhaps they got all the other instruments that would have been there!
Dear old gran lived to nearly 102 years old, and never lost her sharp mind (she had been a maths teacher and one of the first women in South Africa allowed to study maths at university level), and I used to love it when she jokingly referred to how she had to look after the other “old ducks” that turned out to be 10-15 years younger than her!
So how does an autoharp work?
Well, there are enough strings to tune all 12 notes for a couple of octaves! These strings are very old (and some have broken) and the tuning bolts are super stiff – I’ve tried oiling them a bit but no help – I think the next thing to try is to make a tuning key with a long handle for extra torque/leverage to give me the strength I need to change the tuning in small enough cranks! It would be great to find a new set of strings too – but who knows how I would achieve that!
And then there’s all these buttons you can press down, set not just to a single note, but to a full chord made up of 3 or even 4 notes – how do these buttons work?
Here’s the answer! Pressing the Gmaj button will mute all of the strings except G, B and D that make up the Gmaj chord. So, the G, B and D strings will vibrate and ring out the Gmaj chord, while the other strings will just make the muted scratchy sound that is so characteristic of this instrument!
Now the autoharp is an old-fashioned folk instrument. If you scour Youtube you should be able to find footage of Johnny Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, playing one very well! How about this one:
However, the only modern artist I have ever heard play one is Cat Power, on her beautiful cover of “Sea of Love” – many of you might recognise this by the song that plays during the powerful scenes in the movie JUNO where Juno has finally given birth and allowed the baby to be adopted… the song starts at about 26 seconds into this video of the scene:
My wife Julia and I loved that song so much, that we actually chose it as the song for her to walk down the aisle to on our wedding day… so I associate it with this most happy moment in my life:
My soon-to-be wife walking down the aisle towards me to the special autoharp song…
So without any further ado… here is my cover of that Cat Power cover, on grandpa’s old autoharp:
I hope you enjoyed! What weird and wacky instrument will I find for you next time?
THE END