The pluck?
Eileen Gogan writes:
Help! I’m about to restring this autoharp, it has 25 strings but could only find sets of 32, I’ve only started to learn to read music, so some of the notation is a mystery to me, any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated…
Anyone?
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erm, don’t.
If you don’t know what you are doing you could damage a musical instrument and then it won’t work again, ever
I’m very much an autoharp novice but I think it’ll be a divil to restring – can you tune it as is? Add some WD40 around the tuning peg to see if it will turn.
There’s a good Facebook group called Omnichord Heaven where you’ll get good tips on restringing but if it was me, I’d wait until the madness passes and you can get it to an decent tuner.
Not too sure about the WD40 – wouldn’t it make the peg too liable to turn?
I’d suggest to Nick to hold off on tuning it himself and have some mate that plays guitar / banjo (or even autoharp) etc. do it for him. There’s an electronic tuner attached which should make it easy?
It depends on how rusted it is. I have an autoharp that was so badly rusted that I had to WD40 it and then use a crescent wrench. But it might loosen the pegs too much I suppose.
It’s trickier to restring than a guitar because you have to take off the chord bars and because there are so many fecking strings. And if the felting has degraded, it’s a nightmare.
Oh no not WD40! That could render the pegs unusable
I recommend asking on this reddit group (sorry, BS) which is all about them: https://www.reddit.com/r/autoharp/
I could offer advice; but there’d be strings attached.
No expert either, but I’d relish the challenge these days. From the packs it looks like you’ve got the note and it’s string position…working L to R.
The tuners look like they need a key to turn them, but perhaps a small spanner would suffice. I wonder do the strings come with a ball- end, ( no, not bellend) like steel strings for a guitar.