G/o, that's odd, we did it for FIVE YEARS with no 'harp trouble at all. Tuned up, tuned down..... Also have swapped strings that were not supposed to go for the notes specified when the string set was getting a bit thin. No ill effects.

Arnie, I am sure not suggesting to retune it just for one song. What I tried to convey was that it is one option if Bm is the most-used key she wants to play in, and then you'd probably leave it tuned that way.

What it really depends upon is the singing key; if a singer can only cover most tunes' range in a particular key, then of course it's worth it to stay in the alternate tuning. (The late Rick Fielding BTW agreed with me on that point.) I believe there is a name for this retuning approach in the array of Italian musical terms (something like "scordiatura") that my husband heard about for violinists. Fiddle strings are far more fragile that autoharps, so if they do it, that ought to tell us something.


I'm also highly skeptical of the "just swap in a new chord bar" idea. Rick modified a harp to do that, but it wasn't simple. I have a Chromaharp made to do it, and with that you swap in and out a whole set for the key you want to play in, with one trayfull of chord bars. You could set up the trays however you wanted, but it was designed to do it. Most autoharps' chord bars are not so easy to get at that you could just zip in a chord bar.


The 21-bar harps (at least the Schmidts 21's) are especially hard to work on because the teeth the chord bars ride up and down upon are fragile plastic and single teeth easily break off when being worked on. When my husband works on mine, we always make sure to have extra chord-bar holders for just that reason. It's not just him-- pro repairers have encountered the same issue. I'd love a set in stainless, but the sizing of the 21-bar harp would make that an expensive thing to machine as a DIY.

Also on a 21-bar the chord bars are much thinner, but still the set takes up so much of the 'harp top that playing on the far ends of the bar set gives a very poor sound. Those far ends are the seldom-used chords-- the ones you would most likely to want to re-purpose to place the Bm. If you choose to do that eventually-- I did-- be sure to place the Bm as far in from the edge as you can stand to lose another chord-bar. Mine is 2 or 3 in from the outside edge of the chord bar set, and still sounds muddy, but then I seldom use it.

Another idea would be that in the spot where the Bm occurs, she could pinch-play a beat or two where the melody or a harmony for that phrase occurs. I do not play melody, so I'm not sure where that pinch would neeed to be.

It's hard to maintain a strum pattern if you are skipping a phrase entirely, so she might want to try that alternate-chord approach I described above.

~Susan