You could make a case for the harp guitar being just a modern theorbo with steel strings…
I actually got to play this instrument about half an hour before Andy took delivery of it at the Montréal Guitar Show in, uhh, not sure - 2012?
I have a Teisco hollow-body with the same problem, I figure 60 years of stress on such a thin layer of wood, something’s got to give over time.
Yeah, it’s not the most sturdily built guitar. I have hopes it can be repaired, though. It has a weird rinky-dink, almost cardboard sound that becomes completely awesome when put through fuzz.
So, the woman in the white dress sitting between the singer and the fiddle player is playing the tambura, a three or four stringed instrument that only provides the drone(s). The mridangam will tune its right drumhead to the same Do. The ghatam (clay pot) I think is just stuck with the note it had when they fired the clay…
Two videos featuring my teacher, Prof. Trichy Sankaran - this one on solo mridangam - Trichy Sankaran - Mrdangam Solo excerpt in Adi Tala (Canadian Percussionists Special Presentation) - YouTube
and this showing his abilities in Konnakol, the rhythmic solfege that’s the basis of the entire system of learning rhythm - Prof Trichy Sankaran - Konakol Demonstration - YouTube .
Aha! My gringo take was that was sitar, and I didn’t see how striking a string was providing a droning sound. Very cool!
Spent a very fun evening with a luthier on Thursday night - we did some work on my 1994 Seagull S-6, and I dropped off my tree harp to get some work done. (Like most people, he’d never encountered a tree harp before - my friends Matti and Jurgita specialize in Baltic folk music, and Matti gave me one that he’d made as a present for letting them shoot a video at the place I used to live at in Guelph. It’s a pretty cool instrument to have around, especially as I continue to mess around with exotic modes and unconventional tunings.)
The Seagull is now being kept down a whole tone for vocal reasons, and it matches the 12 string which I’ve always kept down a tone. My electric is now down a minor third, again for vocal reasons - I’m now finding the right balance between heavier gauge strings and enough relief on the truss rod, so they don’t have a flabby tone.
I’d be fascinated to know what y’all consider go-to books (or YouTube videos, I’m not a total primitive) on the subject of guitar tech. My go-to guitar tech here in Toronto closed shop and left town mid-pandemic, and no one seems to know where he got to! I rarely mess with my guitars beyond intonating my bass and electric, and a bit of truss rod adjustment.
Perhaps I ought to get a couple of pawn shop specials to experiment on - as the Car Talk guys say, “You always remember the first one you ruin!”. All of my guitars are precious enough to me that I’d hate to do something that wrecked them.
I start with Dan Erlewine’s book. It’s quite comprehensive. If I read through the steps to do a particular project and am not immediately turned away by the complexity or the cost of a negative outcome, I then watch a couple of YouTube videos (Dan has several but there are millions of good videos) and then get to it.
edit: a good place to start video-wise is our old friend, stewmac.com. Many of those videos are Dan’s but there are plenty of other worthy contributors as well. They don’t seem to lean in too hard on their own products but be aware that in the background, they’d like you to buy their tools.
Aaaand you’ve sent me off to google again! And I came up dry: apparently it’s a thing to put strings on actual trees and call it a “tree harp”. So I googled “Baltic harp” and found this:
Is that a “tree harp?”
No, that’s a kantele, though the instruments are related.
Picture a harp as being a triangle. Now, most concert harps and Celtic harps use one leg of the triangle for the tuners, another leg for the sound board, and the third leg as the structural support. A tree harp has only two legs - one for the tuners, one for the equivalent of the bridge/saddle. What you then do is you find a dead tree that is hollowing out, but still standing. You attache the tree harp with straps, and the hollowed out tree provides both the structural support and the resonance.
Here’s the video that Matti and Jurgita shot - this is my father-in-law’s* old property. Honeypaw - Treeharp Sutartinė Orphans Project - YouTube They’re my favourite kind of ethnomusicologists - for them, it’s all about figuring out how the music was/is played rather than making scholarly points about minutiae that no one can hear.
*He was one of the founders of the school of landscape architecture at University of Guelph, and moved there in 1968. The family bought this property, a severance from a dairy farm, in 1981 - it was ~20 acres, half of which was designated ‘conservation wetlands’. It sloped from the top of the valley down to the Eramosa River. He was in a total Frank Lloyd Wright frame of mind when he built the house - there were to be no intrusions on nature other than the house itself, and the driveway leading up to it. The house was to be invisible from the main road, and vice versa. Some very advanced eco-planning, for the 1980s - maximum passive solar heat, the house set into the hillside for insulation, all the trees below and above the house left intact for maximum soil retention. I lived there from 2019 - 2021, but sadly, my job was to clear it out, fix it up, put it on the market and sell it - I was the only one in the family who wanted to keep it.
My friend has been playing guitar, along with another guy who also plays guitar. I happened to drop by when they were playing and I mentioned I play bass and just like that, I have some folks to play along with. They get together once a week and I’ve made it twice now and it’s a ton of fun (I haven’t really played with others in about 20 years). I now have real motivation to practice since they have a dozen or so songs they already have down so I’m playing catchup.
My biggest issue is I have spent nearly my entire playing career looking at tab in some format (Rocksmith, stuff I’ve put together in TuxGuitar, etc) and I can’t play without looking at the tab. This is fine since there is a shelf I can put printed tab, but I’m trying to learn to play entire songs without having that crutch.
Speaking of guitar tech resources, I need to do a bit of setup on my bass as the low e is buzzy. I’ve done it on my guitars so I assume it will be similar. Time to find some helpful videos.
The only advice I have for this is to play along with a recording while not using the tabs.
OTOH, there’s no shame in having a reference. I used to keep a chord listing to one of the songs my surf band played back in the day next to my set list. There wasn’t a loop to its chord progression, and it was sometimes hard to keep it in my head. So I’d glance at it to refresh my memory before we’d play it. I eventually memorized it after playing it enough, but it was difficult.
I’ve started attempting to play without referencing the tabs. I’ll get there, but it’s harder than I would’ve thought. When I was younger, I did it all the time while I was playing in small groups. I think my musical brain has atrophied while relying on having notes in front of my face.
I just dropped my fourth single today - have a look for Doug MacNaughton “Follow your Silence” wherever you do your streaming.
The Official Video will be out sometime in the next few days, I hope…
I want to see the video – your last posted here was great. Please link when it’s up!
I’m the opposite. I learned to play by ear, though I also have a pretty good understanding of chord theory. (Basically the Nashville notation of chords as they relate to the root key). And I I seem to have a good ear, so I can usually pick up a song very quickly, unless it’s fusion jazz or something like that,
But I wish I had learned to read traditional music notation when I was younger.
Nothing to stop you learning now. What is it about notation that you feel you need to work on?
I’m the opposite - I learned notation in Grade 4, and it’s how I learn most of my music. I work very hard to develop my ear, but it’s the weaker skill for me.
Speed, really. I know where all the notes are on the staff and can work out things from standard notation, just not in real time. Same thing with keyboard playing… like Guitar George, I know all the chords., but I don’t have the developed muscle memory to play most things at tempo.
Mind you, with piano roll view available in DAWs, I just find it easier to work that way; there isn’t quite the incentive…
You’re right, of course. It’s just lazyness on my part…
No, no, no - I’m never going to accuse a fellow musician of laziness! We all work in our own time, based on our own priorities, on the repertoire we find most appealing.
And let’s be frank - notation for guitar music can be a complete pain in the ass! I remember sweating over one of the Giuliani "Rossiniana"s because I was reading from a score that was just notes - no LH or RH fingerings, no Roman numerals for the barres or the LH positions. I finally had to go through and circle all the notes that could be open strings no matter where they were in the bar, and that’s when I figured out the whole thing was way up the neck with the 2nd string open. “Oh, it’s just like the Barrios “Cathedral”!” I eventually exclaimed in joy!
You want to talk about laziness, I started writing “Guitarmony” about 20 years ago - with everything else going on, I don’t even think about adding to it until someone asks a question about notation, and then I go “Oh, yeah, I should get around to writing some more of it. In my copious spare time…” 
I admit it freely though: I should practise more!
Right now I’m rather busy exporting some works in progress from Cakewalk to Reaper, since support for the free version of Cakewalk is going away. Can’t say I’m too surprised about that: I never understood the business model of free Cakewalk? If it seems too good to be true, etc…
What you say about notation for guitar music is a good point; it probably goes double for some other instruments like wind and brass… no hints as to fingering etc. At least we can cheat a bit with a capo on guitar, ha ha!
I regret to tell you that brass and woodwind music is much easier to sight read. I play tuba, euphonium, I’ve been playing bass trombone since the start of the year, and I started learning alto sax when challenged by a friend. There aren’t anywhere near the number of alternate fingerings available in brass (unless you’re in the top octaves on your instrument - even then, not so many!), and there are only a couple on the beginner 2 1/2 octaves on the alto sax.
But the fact that you’re only playing one note at a time, at least until you become John Coltrane, makes it all soooo much easier to read!