In the late 70s, Rick Rubart was a young singer / songwriter / guitarist working in folk clubs in the Detroit area when he heard his first harp on the recording of Robin Williamson. Captured by the wonderful sound of the harp Casbella on the album, Rick then and there went out to become a harpist. But how do you get a harp if you are a hungry artist with no extra money for new instruments? Solution: create your own. Riku was about six months working in a small work area in his apartment to make a very reliable first instrument to learn to play. Thirty years later and 1,100 harps, at the age of 52, Rick Rubart, unfortunately, became only a modest harpist, but fortunately for the world of the harp, he is today one of the best builders on the stage.
Being a device of any type requires a great sensitivity to sound and an irresistible desire to create objects with your own hands. Early on, Rick had both qualities. He grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, a member of the musical family that will gather every Sunday after the church at the grandmother and play the old classics of the Vaudeville era, for example, the pavements of New York and a bicycle built for two. Rick's father and older brother were running guitars, and his mother played the piano. “She was a real talent in the family,” Rick recalls. “She could see how to read notes and play by ear. She played it all: from Chopin and Copeland to Rhapsody in Blue and Boogie Woogie. She has no official instructions, but I have some musical genes. My dad showed me how to play the guitar.
As for the craft side of the equation, Rick remembers how he always built something in childhood. Model airplanes and boats were a favorite pastime, as the Rube-Goldberg cardboard-type constructions were developed that could deposit the coin in a bank in the most complicated way. Later the store in high school turned out to be particularly useful and aroused interest in the tree and its properties throughout life.
Rick should have ever sold this first harp during one of those inevitable worst times that any working musician applies to, but this created an opportunity to build a new harp, which we hope will sound even better than the first. Throughout the early period of his career, he collected one or two harps at a time, and then thought about what he could change to improve the sound. In the early years, the goal was not to make a living, but rather to learn the craft and discover the secrets of the tool.
In 1977, Rick moved to Ann Harbor-Michigan, where he worked as an industrial electrician in the automotive industry. Most of his free time was devoted to creating the harp. “I lived near the Sterns Instrument Museum, and the curator allowed me to go into the back rooms to look at the old harps in my collections. Harp - but they fell apart and lay on pieces on the shelves, waiting for some time in the future, when they could be rebuilt, as they cut the tops and supported them. “It was a great foundation for my future education.”
Four years later, Rick, now married, moved to Denver, Colorado, where he has lived since then. He set the pattern of working time, gathered around the city and built a harp. In the late 1980s, the music retailer suggested that there was a small niche in the market for small harps, so Rick developed a 22-stringed instrument that was very successful. Over the years, he created and sold more than 700 of these available harps, but larger harps remained his real passion.
Currently, he pays all his attention to his design of Merlin, a 36-string harp in which Rick's legs are the pinnacle of his life. Merlin's design and development took a decade of experimentation and hard work. “The harp is a complex puzzle piece that should work in perfect harmony,” he explains. “If you change any one element - the length of the string scale, for example, all other elements are also affected. You need to continue building new harps to test your ideas. ” All this requires a lot of time and patience. "
In Merlin, there is a joint steel back of a hard maple tree, a birch-layer tree of the aircraft and a system of core bars in the column, which allows the harp to be stronger, but not too heavy. But what really distinguishes Merlin is the unique system of spacers inside the instrument, made of synthetic material, which, unlike wood, does not lose strength for many years. The racks release most of the tremendous tension (about 1100 pounds), which the strings affect the deck, allowing it to move more freely and produce a stronger, more saturated sound.
I recently interviewed Rick to learn more about this unique harp.
Ken: Why do you use plywood instead of a solid top ate?
Rick. The traditional solid tip of the spruce will swell and shrink by half an inch or more, which inevitably causes cracking. The special plywood plate that I use is pretty amazing. Five sheets of solid birch are laminated together, forming a strong resin panel one eighth inch thick. It does not crack and creates a fantastic tone. I still use traditional graduation methods — I thin areas above to improve, to increase vibration. I get better sound than spruce tree boards. By the way, there is a good discussion of this topic, which you can check on musikit.com.
Ken: You're one of the few builders using fluorocarbon strings.
Rick: Yes. I think Cortier was the first, and I jumped on the bandwagon at an early stage. I am convinced that everyone will end up using them. The string is 20% denser than nylon. This is great for midrange strings. I use nylon on the first octave and a half, then fluorocarbon to six bass strings, which are wound with steel. Unfortunately, you cannot simply slam the organorgans on any harp and expect a big improvement — you need to create a tool to maximize what fluorocarbons can do. It took me a lot of experimentation to get it right.
Ken: I noticed that Merlin has three sound holes instead of the usual four.
Rick: You must be very careful about the number of square inches that you dedicate to sound holes. For example, a cello can fill a concert hall, and f-holes - a small part of the total surface area of the deck. For a better bass response, I don't want the sound to just flow out. Instead, I want the sound to be captured instantly — to ripen inside the box before it is released. I found that I can help achieve this by eliminating the lowest sound hole. I have a special access plate in the base that you can remove to get to the bass strings when you need to change them.
Ken: What led you to add unusual racks to your Merlin model?
Rick: Harp is a cruel instrument. All these strings are trying to break the right board. Unlike the violin, which is dynamically balanced and swinging over the centuries, the harp is unbalanced and has a reliably short lifespan. If you make the upper thickness to withstand the tension of the string, you violate its ability to vibrate. If you make it too thin, it will simply fall apart. Thus, the traditional solution is to finish the upper part — which means to cut it thinner for triple strings and gradually make it thicker to bass strings. Wood braces are also added to make the bass end stronger. I spent countless hours trying to improve my exhaust system to give the best sound. But there is always an inherent conflict in the harp between making the sound panel strong resist the tension of the string and make it glow so that it vibrates well, and the projects are effectively reflected.
For a long time it seemed to me that I took my harps into the framework of what traditional methods were doing and tried to invent something new. Once I saw a video that the famous frame of the Tacoma-Ninrose bridge collapses under a strong wind, and the road floats as if it were a carpet. I stared at the crooked cables and the wavy deck and felt that this was telling me something. Sometimes I realized that I wanted to counteract the tension of a string with curved struts, as the suspension bridge resists gravity with curved suspension cables. In Merlin, these racks resist string tension, relieving most of the voltage at the bass end of the deck, which allows for much more free oscillations. You get a significant improvement in the quality of the bass notes, and the harp has a longer service life.
Ken: Merlin has exceptional projection. I heard that he can stand in front of the orchestra even without electronic amplification.
Rick: I received this feedback from several of my clients. You know, good projection has been my goal for decades, but I really want it to be full expressiveness in the entire dynamic range. I want my harp to convey as much as possible, no matter what the player feels inside. And I want it to be in the hands of as many players as possible. I, of course, keep my harps free from expensive ornamentation so that they can remain accessible. I work as a musician all my life, and I create for other musicians.
All I ever tried to do was to make a harp, which I would have bought myself, even if the cost was not the subject. Merlin is my favorite harp. I solved the riddle to my satisfaction. Now I just want to make them a lot, send them to the world and save for myself.
