Find the red string first
A harp has no frets, no dots and no fingerboard — just a wall of strings that all look alike. So harps are colour-coded, and the code is nearly universal: every C string is red and every F string is blue or black. That is not decoration. It is the whole navigation system of the instrument, and it is the first thing anyone is taught: you never count strings up from the bottom, you find a red one and read outward from it.
The colours here are the real ones. On the 34-string harp there are five red strings — C2, C3, C4, C5 and C6 — and middle C is the third of them, string 15. Turn the number labels off with the Labels menu and try to keep your place; the colours alone are enough, which is exactly what they are for on the real thing.
The lever is the instrument
A lever harp carries a small metal lever above each string. Engaged, it grips the string against a fret near the top and shortens it, and the string sounds one semitone higher than it was tuned to. Flip it back and the string returns to its tuned pitch. That is the entire mechanism, and it is the difference between a harp and a lyre.
It comes with one hard constraint: a lever can only raise. There is no lever position that flattens a string, because there is no way to make a string longer than it is. Everything else about how a lever harp is set up follows from that one limitation.
Which is why it is tuned in E♭
If levers only raise, then the tuning has to start low enough that raising gets you somewhere useful. Tune a harp in C major and the only keys you can reach are sharp ones — G, D, A, E — and the flat keys are gone for good, because nothing on the instrument can turn a B into a B♭. Tune the same harp in E♭ major, three flats, and raising levers walks you up through seven keys.
So the strings on this page are tuned in E♭, exactly as a lever harp leaves the workshop — and the page opens with the E, A and B levers up, which is what puts it in C major. That is not a compromise; it is where most lever harps sit when nobody is playing them. Choose E♭ major · all levers down from the Key menu to hear the instrument as it is actually tuned, and watch every lever on the board drop at once.
| Key | Levers up | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| E♭ major | none | The tuning itself — E♭, A♭ and B♭ strings sounding as tuned. |
| B♭ major | A | Every A♭ string becomes A. |
| F major | A, E | And every E♭ becomes E. One flat left: B♭. |
| C major | A, E, B | No flats, no sharps. Where this page starts. |
| G major | A, E, B, F | Every F string becomes F♯. |
| D major | A, E, B, F, C | And every C becomes C♯ — the red strings, sharpened. |
| A major | A, E, B, F, C, G | Three sharps. Six of the seven letters have moved. |
There is a pattern in that table worth seeing, because it is how harpists remember it rather than a coincidence: each key up is one more lever family, and it is always the fourth degree of the key you are in. In E♭, the fourth is A♭ — raise it and you are in B♭. In B♭ the fourth is E♭ — raise it and you are in F. Keep going and the flats run out, then the sharps arrive in the same order. Nothing in the table above was typed in by hand: it is that one rule, applied seven times.
Three sizes, one range
Harps grow downward. A bigger instrument in a maker’s line adds bass strings beneath a treble that stays where it was, which is why all three sizes here share the same top string and differ only in how far down they reach.
| Size | Range in C major | Middle C | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22-string | A3–A6 | string 3 | Lap size. Three octaves, and no bass to speak of. |
| 26-string | D3–A6 | string 7 | The usual first full-height harp — three and a half octaves, and portable. |
| 34-string | C2–A6 | string 15 | The floor harp. Four and a half octaves, and the one the repertoire assumes. |
One honest caveat, because it is the sort of thing this site would rather state than gloss over: the 34-string range above is the standard one, and the two smaller sizes here are the top 22 and top 26 strings of it. Real makers vary by a string or two at the bottom of the small sizes, and yours may start a note or two either side of these. If it does, the harp tuner will read whatever is actually in front of you — it listens rather than assumes.
The glissando
Drag across the strings. That sound — a whole handful of notes left ringing at once — is what a harp is for, and it is the one gesture that no other instrument on this site does as well, because nothing else has thirty-four open strings and a five-second bass.
It is also why the harp sounds different from the lyre here even though both are plucked strings over a wooden frame. A lyre string is a metre of nylon over a box you can hold in your lap and is gone in about a second; a harp string is longer, tighter, and stretched over a soundboard as tall as the player, so the notes pile up on each other instead of clearing. Harpists spend as much technique on stopping strings — a flat hand laid across them — as on sounding them, which is a problem a lyre player never has to think about.
Every note here is synthesised, not sampled: a delay line one period long that loses a little on each lap, which is what a plucked string physically is. Nothing downloads, and the first note sounds in the frame you tapped.
Reading the numbers
The numbers on the strings are scale degrees — 1 is the tonic of whatever key the levers are in, a dot above means one octave up, a dot below means one octave down. It is the notation kalimba and lyre tabs are written in, and it is why the song library below is shared between all of them: a tab is a shape rather than a set of letters, so it plays on any of these instruments that has the notes.
Switch to Letters in the Labels menu and the strings name themselves the way the tuning does: A♭ rather than G♯ with the levers down, because a harp tuned in E♭ has an A♭ string and calling it G♯ would disagree with every lever chart ever printed — and with our own harp tuner, which names the same note the same way.
Frequently asked questions
What does a lever on a harp actually do?
It raises that one string by a semitone, and nothing else. Engaged, the lever grips the string against a small fret near the top and shortens it; the string then sounds a semitone higher than it was tuned to. Because it can only shorten a string, a lever can only ever raise — there is no lever position that flattens a note. That single fact is why lever harps are tuned in E♭ rather than C, and why a harpist changes key by flipping a handful of levers rather than by retuning.
Why is the harp tuned in E♭ when it plays in C?
Because levers only raise. Tuned in E♭ major — three flats — with every lever down, the instrument can be lifted into B♭, F, C, G, D and A by engaging levers: seven keys from one tuning. Tune the same harp in C instead and every key you can reach is a sharp key, and the flat keys are gone for good. So the strings here are tuned in E♭, and the page opens with the E, A and B levers up, which is what puts it in C major — the state most lever harps sit in between pieces. If you are setting up a real one, the harp tuner has the full routine, and the rule that matters is: tune with every lever down.
Why are some strings red and some blue?
They are the landmarks. Every C string is red and every F string is blue or black, on essentially every harp made, and that colouring is the entire navigation system of the instrument — with thirty-four strings and nothing to fret, you do not count up from the bottom, you find the red string and read from it. On the 34-string harp here, middle C is the red string 15, the third red string up. Turn the number labels off and the colours are still enough to play by, which is the point of them.
How do I change key?
Two ways, and they are the same thing. Pick a key from the menu and every lever it needs moves at once, which is what a harpist does between pieces. Or flip levers one at a time on the strings themselves — and when the set you have flipped happens to be a key, the readout says so: raise the three flat strings from E♭ and it will tell you that you have arrived in C major, because you have. Raising a single string for one accidental in one bar is also completely normal, and the page will simply say the levers are set by hand.
What is the difference between this and a lyre?
Levers, pins and size. A lyre is one fixed diatonic scale, almost always C major, with no levers at all — changing key means turning every pin with a wrench. A lever harp carries a lever above each string, is tuned in E♭, and moves between seven keys mid-piece. The frames differ too: a lyre uses straight zither pins held by friction in the wood, and a harp uses tapered pins in a curved neck. If what you have is a small frame with seven to nineteen strings and no levers, the virtual lyre is the closer instrument — and the lyre tuner the right page for tuning it.
Which size should I pick?
The 34-string if you want the full instrument: four and a half octaves from C2 up to A6, the range a floor harp gives you and the one every song in the library fits comfortably. The 26 is the usual first full-height harp — three and a half octaves, light enough to carry. The 22 is lap-sized, three octaves, and is offered twenty of the twenty-one songs because one melody steps below its bottom string. All three here are slices of the same range, sharing the same top: a bigger harp adds bass under the treble rather than moving it.
Does it sound like a real harp?
It is synthesised rather than recorded, and modelled on the physics rather than sampled: a delay line one period long that loses a little energy on each lap, which is what a plucked string actually is. That is why a note darkens as it fades without anything fading it. The harp model rings roughly two and a half times as long as the lyre on this site at the same pitch, over a body that radiates the bottom of the range, because a harp string is longer, tighter and stretched over a soundboard as tall as the player. The one number not taken from the instrument is the five-second ceiling on the bass: a real bottom C rings for closer to ten, and the cap is a memory budget so that a glissando down thirty-four strings stays comfortable on a phone.