For the interest of you potential harpies: I had my first harp for about 6 years and could barely make much music with it. I had no-one else to talk to about it and knew no teachers in the area. I was afraid to just sit and play around with it - other people would sit down to it and just play glisses and pick out tunes, and that would amaze me. But also, the process of tuning it took such a long time that by the time I had tuned it up I had lost the motivation to have a go at it.

Finally in about 1986 I met and became good friends with an American woman who was living here in Oz for a few years and who had been playing for quite a while. I finally moved from not playing it to starting to finally get somewhere with it. She also introduced me to an electronic tuner - a relationship which has endured to this day, because it meant that the tuning up process was quick and easy and I could get into playing and practising with the minimum of delay.

The next breakthrough was in 1988 when a group of people I know were sitting around at a Folk Festival lamenting the fact that there were no sessions around for beginners, so we resolved that the following Tuesday evening we would start one. I kept going for 10 years, and I still wander along there every now and then.

The sessions took me from absolute beginner to being able to play accompaniment chords and arpeggios for lots of folk music. I picked up the process mainly by playing the same chords that the guitarist played (by watching the chords he played and playing the same one - it helped having learnt a bit of guitar previously) and also by following his rhythmical style which he changed for each song. He is basically a "3 chord wonder" but it helped me enormously because I could learn the basics of accompaniment by joining in to the session and using his guitar playing as a guide.

Now I am working on the process of being capable and confident (not achieved yet) at playing the melody and chords/accompaniment together. I am probably not as bad as I think I am, but it is a fairly plodding process at the moment.

I can highly recommend Lesley Nelson's Contemplator site

      Contemplator site for some wonderful harp-friendly tunes, especially the O'Carolan tunes - 17th Century Irish harper whose tunes are beautiful. Also check out Barry Taylor's tunes on that site. He makes the loveliest arrangements of tunes that I have heard on the 'Net.

If you have music notation software then you can download the midi files and then load them into the software, see the music notation as they are played, and print it out, as well as mess around with arrangements and transpose it, etc.

I use

      Noteworthy because you can try it out with a free demo and even print out with the demo version. I paid for it because it is a good basic music notation programme (usual disclaimers: no connection with company, etc) and I use it a lot for learning tunes.

Sorry, this has become a bit of a rave - but I just thought I'd share some of the things I went through to actually get to the stage of saying that I "can play" the harp.

Helen