I started playing the piano and harmonica when I was about 5 years old and then the cello at age 7, which led on to a formal musical education which included a music scholarship to my senior school.

 

After I finished school I did not play much, other than the harmonica, for many years, partly because the cello is not a portable instrument but also partly because I was always looking for an instrument that could produce more than one tone at any one time.  

 

In 2010 I injured my left hand and was unable to play the cello and I even found the piano difficult. I then watched “Walk the Line” with Johnny Cash and June Carter and saw the Autoharp being played. I thought I could manage this instrument, but knew very little about it. My wife and I went out and bought one a few days later.

 

I soon realized that this instrument is capable of producing, not only the chording that it was originally designed for, but also a picked melody part. I started picking arpeggios and then moved on to full scales and found different ways of accompanying the scales with chords.

 

As I have said to many people, the Autoharp is a very simple instrument to play, maybe one of the easiest, in its basic form, but it is quite hard to master the technique of picking and chording combined. I have had children of five years old playing a simple tune such as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, in about ten minutes, by taking the words and writing a simple three chord sequence for them. 

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Having said this, one of the reasons I have derived so much enjoyment from it is that there is always more to discover and more to perfect. I now own quite a collection of Autoharps, some of them historical instruments that are not really playable and some of them set up in different ways to produce different styles of music.