(In practicality, this is difficult because most pedal harp strings are only labeled by octave and note, so it takes extra research to find out the actual diameter. Make sense? Pedal harp and lever harp strings can be interchangeable as long as you pay close attention to the diameter and material and not to the note the string is labeled with. If you were in a pinch, you could probably find a clear string from higher up in a pedal gut set (maybe the 3rd octave G) and use it in the 4th octave D position on your lever harp because it would be the diameter you need. This means it doesn’t have to be pulled as tight to get up to pitch, and the tension is therefore lower. Assuming that you have a lever harp and a pedal harp with the same string lengths and that both are strung with their respective gut sets, the D string on the lever harp is going to be thinner than the same note on the pedal harp. Let’s take the 4th octave D (or the D above middle C) for an example. As Biagio Sancetta put it so eloquently in a Harp Column discussion, “Farmers do not raise ‘pedal harp cows’ in one pasture and ‘lever harp cows’ in another.” The strings are the same materials the difference in tension comes from which diameters of strings you put in which positions on the harp. Misconception #1: Pedal harp strings are fundamentally different from lever harp stringsĪctually, the difference between pedal harp strings and lever harp strings, whether gut or nylon, is not as mysterious as it seems. Because it has a more heavily-braced soundboard, it requires more string power to move the soundboard and produce sound. If you take a set of strings designed for a lever harp and you put them on a pedal harp, you probably won’t get much sound out of the harp. It is simply not designed to withstand so much tension, and the strings could quite literally pull the harp apart. If you take a set of strings intended for a pedal harp and you put them on a lever harp, you could cause serious damage to the harp. String tension is felt by the harp itself in terms of how much pull there is on the neck and the soundboard, and this is the really important piece to be aware of in order to keep your harp safe. String tension is felt by the harp player in terms of how hard a string needs to be pulled in order to produce a good sound, or alternatively, how much pull a string can take before it starts to sound distorted. For the purposes of this piece, though, when we say “lever harp,” we mean the more lightly-built type and not the pre-pedal type.) (There are exceptions! Some lever harps, like the Lyon and Healy Prelude and Troubadour, are built to sound and feel more like pedal harps, and thus have the same heavily-reinforced construction and high-tension strings. As such, they have lighter wooden bracing and thinner soundboards. Lever harps are often lighter (both in terms of weight and degree of reinforcement), and are designed for medium- or light-tension strings that don’t need to be pulled as hard to make a sound. Though you see mostly wood from the outside, many actually have metal ribs on the inside that are helping to keep the body from collapsing under the pull of the strings on the soundboard. We’re not going to get into all the reasons why, but when talking about strings, it helps to understand that a pedal harp’s design and materials are what allow it to support high-tension pedal harp strings. Pedal harps in general are more heavily-built and reinforced than lever harps are. The Basics: Harp construction and string tension There’s also a lot of mystery surrounding harp strings and string tension, so we’d like to explain some of the basic concepts and hopefully clear up a few common misconceptions. The short answer is yes, you probably can, but there are some important things to take into consideration so that you don’t hurt your harp.