Construction
The Paraguayan harp is constructed in three parts which are never glued or attached in fixed form; the head (also called the neck) the arm and the body. Characterized by a long cone shaped sound box constructed in three parts with face attached and with a flat oval base and two to three sound oval holes on the backside ranging 3-4 inches in diameter each. It has two legs on the bottom which are 4 inches long. The Paraguayan Harp weighs approximately 8 pounds and is carried via the “arm” the center pole which creates tension between the sound box and the “head”.
It is constructed of lightweight cedar imported from the United States (the same thickness used in guitars.) The thin face, from which the strings are strung and pegged in place, is made of a very fine grade pine imported from Japan. Closely spaced high tension strings with 640 pound tensile strength hold the harp components together. No glue is used between head, arm and body.
Traditionally, in harps older than 50 years, the strings were made of cat gut tightly twisted. However, modern harps made within the last 50 years are strung with nylon strings imported mostly from the United States. The harmonic curve encompasses four ranges from brilliant at top to clear to soft to muted. The head is made mostly from native Palo Santo wood imported from Brazil. The strings are strung up through the center of the head, a defining feature distinguishing Paraguayan Harps from other South American Harps, whose strings are strung on the side of the head. Tuning Pegs were traditionally hand carved, but newer harps employ guitar levers. High end harps use sharping levers imported from the United States, which raise the tone of the affected string by a half step, allowing the harp to be played in a variety of keys.
The strings are made from single strand imported nylon of varying dimension in the high octaves and double wrapped nylon in the lower octaves. The harps range from 4+ to nearly 8 octaves depending on the maker. There are 34, 36, 38, 40 and 42, 46 strings, depending on the maker. Each maker creates a proprietary and immediately recognizable variant to the exterior hand carvings or lack thereof on the head and body sides as well as the quantity of strings. Harps from other parts of the world universally use red to denote C strings and blue to denote F strings, but placement of the red or blue strings and what note (high C or F) they represent varies among Paraguayan harp makers. Dedicated players play only their variant of tuned string color codes, thereby creating two schools of harps, those with the red C and the ones with the blue C.
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