So Why Amplify at All?
An Introduction

How many perfect venues or halls are there in your area where your Celtic harp music sounds great and your skills are heard at their best? These sites generate new and repeat income or audiences. How often can you play these sites before you “saturate” these markets? Outside of wedding services and church recitals that may be the current limit of your income opportunities locally. If your area is rich in these opportunities, great! However, if you are like most harpists, to make an income, you have to stretch your playing into some quite unsuitable situations where you are not really heard well and neither yourself (and more importantly!) nor your customer are completely satisfied. Paid moving wallpaper at a noisy reception does not aggressively create repeat business.

Alison and I have made the decision to own our own sound system and this has created many more opportunities.

We have yet to find a too noisy or difficult environment where she has not been able to make a really positive impact using an amplified harp. (I lie! We once withdrew from an extremely noisy school fair where out of control 10 year olds were noisily hurtling into everything and everybody. Absolutely zero ambience!) With amplification we follow the event noise levels both up and down as things unfold. The harp is always heard in the background with sound levels neither too soft nor loud for the current goings on. The result, ecstatic clients, admiring watchers many of whom will consider you for their own events.

If they can hear you, they will hire you. They will buy your CDs too!

We do lots of gigs where we trade sound for a free booth and sell CDs to turn a dollar. Anywhere where you might find your target audience is where you can play when you are amplified. Such as…. Flower and Garden Shows, Women’s Health and Wellness shows, some Trade shows, Bridal Shows, Craft and Christmas Fairs, Agricultural Markets. We go anywhere women over 40 and men over 50 congregate. We have netted $2000 selling CDs in a weekend at a Garden Show. We have pocketed over $600 at a 1½-hour vegetable farmer’s market plus we were paid well to be there! When Alison returns to annual events she often negotiates “Alison Vardy” as a headliner in that event’s advertising or has a fee based on the positive results from her previous amplified performance. Always being heard is a form of advertising that you cannot get in any other way; it builds opportunities and creates admirers. The CD sales are really just gravy. If you can be heard well you have attraction, they will buy your product. If it is difficult to hear, you will be ignored by all except the converted few.

Remember most people listen to music from stereos and TVs and they are used to, no they expect to hear music without strain or effort. There is a large potential audience who normally do not listen nor know what to expect from live acoustic music. Making your music more audible and more easily accessible for them increases your attractiveness and effect many fold.

That is especially true for harp concerts. I have watched professional folk harpists straining to keep the volumes up, overusing “tension” in their pieces in an attempt to maintain audience appeal in a somewhat acoustically hostile, large environment. Lost are the subtle dynamics, the flowing pieces, and the gentle nuances. Using amplification, concert volume levels are brought up to the critical point where it still sounds natural in the room and the harp is very easily heard. The audience is literally enveloped and bathed in harp. This allows a harpist to use any repertoire, technique or dynamic they wish. The effect is dramatic and often very emotional.

Guess what? Audience appreciation is high and “word of mouth” becomes your best advertising. It pays to buy a sound system rather than have a generic unfocussed advertising budget. Use amplification and some other technologies as leverage, as advertising. If used well they can truly speed up a career with success and recognition at both the local and regional level.

Amplification will not make a poorly skilled harpist sound great. There is nowhere to hide for both you and your audience. Amplification will make a good harpist or a harpist who understands their limits well sound great.

Very bad amplification will make any harpist, even the greatest, sound dog aaawwwwfffullll!!!! I repeat awful! Learn to hear the differences between good and bad amplification. Learn how to avoid using other people’s bad sound systems. Learn how to use this leverage. It is a skill used mostly with the ear and with a slight amount of technical knowledge.

So whether you wish to own an amplification system or use somebody else’s, I hope the essays on these pages will help.

I will add your knowledge and experience to the “mix” if it can add to the effectiveness of these articles. The rest of the Harp Amplification Series is available here.

Stephen Vardy
Harpsound Audio
[email protected]