Amplifying Your Harp

Many times you may be in a situation where your performance needs to be amplified to be heard. Today it is easier than ever to amplify your harp and get a good reproduction of the sound of your instrument. You can decide to have a very simple set-up, appropriate for many performance environments, or a more complex set-up which will allow you the greatest amount of flexibility. 

Definitions (in order of use)

• Pickup - A device (piezo, transducer, microphone etc.) attached directly to your harp so that it picks up the sound most effectively.

• Jack - the metallic hole on the side or back of the harp. The jack is sometimes called a "1/4 inch jack."

• Cable - a cord that carries an electrical signal.

• Preamp - can be either internal or external. Takes the entire existing signal from the pickup and makes it louder. Some preamps do this uniformly and some have built-in equalizers.

• Equalizer - a piece of equipment, ranging from tiny to quite large, which has sliders that allow the different sections of a signal (high, midrange and low) to be individually identified and adjusted in volume. An equalizer is commonly called an "EQ."

• Compressor - in a noisy environment, when you have your preamp and amplifier turned up, a compressor will automatically clip off any high brittle sounds or low rumbly wolf tones which sometimes come from over-amplification of a harp.

• Amplifier - a box containing electrical circuitry (volume, tone) and speakers. An amplifier makes the incoming sound much louder and sends it out, through speakers, to your audience. An amplifier is commonly called an "amp."

Pickups vs Microphones

 A microphone will give you the best sound production if you (1) purchase the highest quality mic, (2) have it operated by an experienced sound technician who is specifically experienced with harp amplification and (3) the sound technician is operating a good quality mixer.  If you don't have someone like that following you around then forget the microphone for your harp. Even if you try to set-up a mic yourself, in advance, you are inviting feedback squeals, exterior room noises and generally poor amplification. You want to have the sound for your harp under your control.

Pickups today are generally very good and will give consistent results. Less expensive pickups (usually round disc types) will tend to be somewhat bright in tone. More expensive pickups (usually rectangular) will produce warmer fuller tone. Having the pickup located in the proper location on the harp will also make a big difference (see below).  Through decades of amplifying thousands of harps we have found that a single pickup, located correctly will give a balanced sound to the harp which is similar to what your ear hears in a quiet room. We have found multiple pickups to require significantly more adjustment because they overbalance the high and the midrange. If you are purchasing a Rees Harp, we recommend the Rees Pro Pickup, available both installed and separately.

Pickup Location

First, let's discuss frequencies and the sensitivity of the human ear. Humans hear high frequencies better than low frequencies. In a band situation the lead guitar player can get by with a 100 watt amplifier but the bass player needs a 250 watt amp just to "stay even." Since the human ear can't hear bass frequencies as well, the bass needs to have much more amplification than the guitar player in order to sound balanced to the audience. A pedal harpist will notice that when playing the lowest octave on their harp those strings are barely audible compared to the other octaves. Again, those lower octaves are harder for the human to hear. Another interesting fact, if the harpist could play two and a half steps lower than the pedal harp actually extends, the human ear could not distinguish if that note is out of tune, sharp or flat, in most cases. We simply lose the ability to distinguish pitch! 

Harps made with pickups on every string or a series of pickups up the soundboard treat all the strings the same but, as we have revealed, the ear doesn't hear it that way.  So, for these harps,  volume controls and EQs are a necessity in order to make adjustments. At Rees Harps we both design our harps and place our pickups with the biological realities of the human ear in mind. For amplification, we use a single pickup strategically placed. This is not something new we just stumbled across. Having built thousands of harps over nearly fifty years we have brought an enormous amount of experience to bear and have found an optimal solution.

We place a single pickup half way between the last octave of the harp and half way from the midrib (where the strings are attached) and  the side of the harp. It is a simple formula but it works wonderfully. This allows for a strong bass response, which the human ear needs, and then graduates evenly up the soundboard with no problem picking up the highs that vibrate throughout the soundboard and ultimately producing a balanced volume. It is also easy to make minor EQ adjustments, if needed, because one only needs to adjust the highs or lows instead of dealing with troublesome midranges which sound techs can tell you requires an art in itself. It works and it is simple.