No harp maker sells a category called a Celtic harp. Camac’s catalogue has three headings — lever, pedal, electric. Lyon & Healy’s has pedal harps and lever harps. Rees, who build the Harpsicle line, define the term in their own glossary as “a term often used to describe a lever harp”, and that is as official as it gets. “Regular harp” is not a trade term either; it means the tall gold thing in an orchestra, which is a pedal harp. So the question is levers against pedals — except that one older instrument, still built and still played, is also called a Celtic harp, and it is neither.
A Celtic harp is a lever harp — buy one with a lever on every string
Nothing about the shape, the carving or the word on the label decides what the instrument can do. The levers do. A harp with levers on only the C and F strings plays four keys; a harp with a lever on all of them plays eight, which is every key the Irish and Scottish repertoire is written in. That is the whole specification, and it is the one most cheap harps quietly leave out.
Three instruments, two of them called Celtic
| Modern Celtic harp | Wire-strung clarsach | “Regular” harp | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Also sold as | Lever harp, folk harp, Irish harp | Early Irish harp, early Gaelic harp | Pedal harp, concert harp, grand harp |
| Strings | Gut, nylon or fluorocarbon | Brass, sometimes silver in the bass | Gut and steel-wound bass |
| Played with | The pads of the fingers, nails short | The fingernails | The pads of the fingers, nails short |
| Getting the black notes | A lever per string, by hand | Retune, or fret a string against the arm | Seven pedals, three notches each |
| Keys available | Eight, from E flat tuning | One or two, and a retune between them | All fifteen, mid-bar |
| String count | 19–40, usually 22–38 | 19–30 | 44, 46 or 47 |
| Weight | 11 lb at 22 strings, 44 lb at 40 | 4.4 lb at 19 strings, 16 lb at 30 | 62 lb at 40 strings, 78–90 lb at 47 |
| Price, new | $600 to about $8,800 | Roughly £1,200 to £4,000, built to order | $15,500 to six figures |
| Where it came from | A Dublin pedal-harp maker, 1820s | Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, 10th century | Érard’s double action, early 1800s |
| What it is for | Folk, Celtic, therapy, exam grades 1–8 | Early Gaelic repertoire | Orchestral and solo classical |
On a maker’s own price list, “Celtic” is a set of strings
Camac builds a 38-string lever harp called the Isolde, and they sell it in two versions. The Celtic Isolde and the Classical Isolde are both 141 cm tall and 14 kg. Both have 38 strings running 1C to 6A. Both have a maple and beech body with a spruce soundboard, and both come in the same mahogany, cherry and walnut finishes. Every line of the specification is identical but one.
The Celtic gets Alliance fluorocarbon strings, which Camac describes as “beautifully light”. The Classical gets Kürschner fluorocarbon at a tension Camac states is “identical to that of concert harps”. That is the difference. Same frame, same soundboard, same levers, same wood — and one is sold for traditional music and the other for classical repertoire on the strength of how hard the strings pull.
This matters more than it sounds, because string tension is the thing a beginner’s hands learn. Light strings are easier and brighter; concert-tension strings hurt for a month and then transfer straight to a pedal harp. If a conservatoire is anywhere in the plan, that is the fork, and it is worth more thought than the shape of the pillar. Lever harp vs. pedal harp works through what the two mechanisms actually do.
The other Celtic harp has brass strings and no levers at all
“Clarsach” is simply the Gaelic word for harp. But the harp of the Gaels, from at least the tenth century, was a specific instrument: strung with wire, played with the fingernails, and built with a soundbox hollowed out of a single log. Ardival, who still build them in the Scottish Highlands, describe brass as the common metal, with silver and gold sometimes used in the bass.
The oldest survivor is in the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin — the harp the college itself calls “the oldest surviving Irish harp, mistakenly associated with Brian Boru (d.1014) but probably dating from the later Middle Ages”. Trinity’s own description of it is the shortest good description of the whole family: a soundbox carved from a single block of willow, supporting 30 brass strings, played with long fingernails for “a resonant, bell-like tone”. It is the earliest surviving example of the type of instrument played in Ireland from medieval times until the tradition died out in the early nineteenth century.
Wire is not a decoration. Brass rings for a very long time, so the technique is largely about stopping notes rather than starting them, and the hand has to damp what it has just played. The nails are not an affectation either; they are how you get a clean attack on metal. Nobody arrives at that from a nylon-strung harp by accident, which is why players treat it as a separate instrument rather than a stringing option.
It is also not the cheap option. Ardival’s smallest, a 19-string Kilcoy at 2 kg, lists around £1,200; the 30-string Kinnellan, worked up from the string scheme Edward Bunting published in 1840, is £3,950. These are made to order in small numbers. If what you want is an instrument to learn on this year, the levered harp is the one.
The modern Celtic harp is a shrunken pedal harp
The name suggests an ancient instrument and a modern one. The lineage runs the other way. When the wire-harp tradition collapsed — Bunting was already transcribing tunes from elderly players at the Belfast Harp Festival in July 1792 because there were so few of them left — nothing carried on from it directly. What replaced it was an invention.
John Egan was Dublin’s leading harp maker in the early nineteenth century, and what he built were pedal harps. In the 1820s he made a smaller, portable version of one: gut strings instead of brass, a rounded soundbox, about three feet tall, and in place of pedals a row of ivory knobs on the inside of the pillar — his “ditals” — each turning the same forked discs a pedal harp uses. The Historical Harp Society of Ireland, who own one, put its significance plainly: this harp “is the ancestor of the modern neo-Irish harp: the most usual Irish harp in use in the 21st century”.
So the Celtic harp in a shop today is descended from a pedal harp, by way of a pedal-harp maker, and the sharping lever on its neck is a simplification of the pedal mechanism rather than a survival from anything older. That is why the two instruments feel so similar to play, why the same books work on both, and why almost every orchestral harpist started on the small one.
What “regular harp” costs, and what it weighs
Lyon & Healy is the one major maker who publishes a full list price, so the gap is easy to see rather than guess at. Their cheapest pedal harp is the Chicago Petite 40 at $15,500, which is 40 strings and 62 lb. A 47-string Style 100, the size a professional plays, is $30,900 and 78 lb. The trunk it travels in is another $2,450.
The lever ladder underneath runs from about $600 for a fully levered 22-string, through Salvi’s 25-string Juno at $2,390, to Lyon & Healy’s own lever harps: the 34-string Drake at $3,490, the Ogden at $4,690, the Troubadour at $5,690 and the 40-string Prelude at $6,790. There is no overlap. The step from the dearest lever harp to the cheapest pedal harp roughly doubles the price again, and it is not a step up in quality — it is a mechanism.
Nor is “Celtic” a synonym for cheap. Ardival’s modern 34-string lever harp lists at £4,680, more than any of their historical wire harps. Why harps cost what they do itemises where the money goes, and how much a harp weighs has the full weight ladder if the question is whether you can carry one.
What actually changes when you sit down
Both instruments are played the same way — same hand position, same fingering, same four fingers per hand with the little finger unused. A teacher moves between them without comment. Three things genuinely differ.
The keys. A lever harp is tuned in E flat and each lever raises its own string a semitone, which gives you eight major keys and their relative minors — three flats through to four sharps. A pedal harp is strung in C flat and each pedal has three notches, which gives all fifteen, and you can change one mid-bar with a foot while both hands keep playing. Almost all Irish and Scottish music sits in G, D and A, well inside what levers reach. Orchestral writing does not.
The hands. Levers are moved by hand, so a lever change costs you a hand for a moment and has to be planned into the arrangement. This is why published folk-harp editions mark lever changes above the staff, and why a harp missing a lever makes a piece unplayable rather than merely harder.
The upkeep. A pedal harp’s mechanism runs on cables that stretch, so it wants regulating every year or two at roughly $510–595, plus a technician’s travel if the harp does not come to them. Levers are re-regulated after about five years and then rarely. Over a decade that difference is comfortably more than the price of a first lever harp.
Check the string count against the word on the label
The word Celtic gets attached to instruments that are not harps at all. A lyre has strings stretched across a flat frame with no pillar and no neck, cannot be levered, and plays one key; several are sold as Celtic lyre harps at $100 to $470, which is most of the way to a real 22-string harp with a lever on every string. They are pleasant objects and a genuinely different instrument — a lyre is not a small harp goes through what separates them.
Two questions settle any listing. How many strings, and how many levers? A 22-string harp with 22 levers plays eight keys. A 22-string harp with two levers plays four, and one with none plays one — for much the same money. String counts by harp size covers what each range gets you.
What to buy
Roosebeck Heather Harp, 22 strings, full Chelby levers
- 22 DuPont hard nylon strings, C3–C6, three full octaves
- A Chelby sharping lever on every string
- Solid rosewood frame, plywood soundboard
- 36″ × 18″ × 9″, 11 lb
- Tuning tool, spare string set and a play book included
- ~$600
This is the cheapest instrument that gets a lever onto every string, so all eight keys are yours rather than four. Three octaves covers the first-year folk repertoire and most of the second, and at eleven pounds it goes to a lesson under one arm. The Chelby levers engage from the side rather than pinching from above, so they do not drag strings off the bridge pins, and the caps are color-coded red for C and blue for F, which is the convention the concert makers use on their strings.
The honest limits: the soundboard is plywood rather than solid spruce, so it is warm rather than loud; the nylon stringing is the light-tension choice and the wrong one if a pedal harp is where you are heading; and it arrives needing several weeks of daily tuning before it settles. It is a good first harp rather than a harp for life.
Roosebeck Minstrel Harp, 29 strings, full Chelby levers
- 29 DuPont nylon strings, C3–C7, four full octaves
- A Chelby lever on every string
- Solid rosewood frame, Finnish birch plywood soundboard
- 36.5″ × 22.75″ × 9.5″, 14.6 lb
- ~$775
The seven extra strings all sit below the Heather’s bottom C, which is where the left hand lives in a Celtic arrangement. Four octaves is the point at which most published Irish and Scottish settings stop needing to be simplified to fit, and it is the difference between playing an arrangement and adapting one. Three and a half pounds heavier, and still a one-person carry.
The honest limits: same nylon strings and same plywood soundboard as the Heather, so this buys range rather than a better voice, and it stops short of the 34 strings the exam boards assume. The vine, thistle and knotwork carvings are the same instrument — Roosebeck says so themselves. Our Minstrel review goes through it in detail.
Sylvia Woods — 40 O’Carolan Tunes for All Harps
- 40 tunes by Turlough O’Carolan, 1670–1738
- Two arrangements of each: an easy version and a harder one
- Chord symbols throughout, usable by other instruments
- 112 pages, 8.5″ × 11″
- ~$23
The thread that actually runs from the old wire harp to the new one is the repertoire, not the woodwork. O’Carolan was a working Irish harper who played the wire harp, and Sheebeg and Sheemore, Eleanor Plunkett, Fanny Power and Carolan’s Concerto are still among the first pieces most harpists learn. Hal Leonard’s own description is exact: arranged for beginning and advanced harpers, playable on both lever and pedal harps, with each tune set twice so you can start on the easy version and come back to the other one in a year.
Two arrangements per tune is the part worth paying for. Most collections give you one setting, which is either beyond you now or beneath you soon. If you would rather have dance tunes than airs, Woods’ Irish Dance Tunes for All Harps is 50 Irish dance tunes at around $12, written, as Hal Leonard put it, in the keys they are most often played in — which is what the levers are for. Our guide to first harp books covers the methods that teach you to read them.
A new harp needs tuning before every session and daily for its first few weeks, so a chromatic tuner belongs in the same order — the tuners worth having covers the clip-on and orchestral options, and the beginner buying guide compares these against everything else at the price.
Questions people ask
Is a Celtic harp the same as an Irish harp?
Today, yes — both names mean a lever harp. Historically they did not. Rees puts the drift precisely in their glossary: Irish harp is “a term associated with both wire and lever harps. Historically, the term was associated with wire harps but the usage of the term has been muddied over time and is now commonly taken to mean any lever harp.” Anyone talking about the wire instrument will normally say early Irish harp or clarsach to avoid the confusion.
What is a clarsach?
The Gaelic word for harp, used two ways. In Scotland it is often just the ordinary word for a lever harp — Ardival call their 34-string lever model “the standard size of a modern clarsach”. In an early-music context it means the medieval wire-strung instrument specifically. Which one somebody means is usually clear from whether they are talking about levers.
Do you need long fingernails to play one?
Only on the wire harp, and there it is not optional — brass wants a nail to give a clean attack, and Ardival say plainly that nails produce the better sound on wire strings. On a modern Celtic harp, strung in gut, nylon or fluorocarbon, you play with the pads of the fingers and keep the nails short, exactly as on a pedal harp. A nail catching a nylon string produces a click and wears a groove.
Is a Celtic harp easier to learn than a regular harp?
Not to play — the hand technique is the same and a teacher will not treat you differently. It is easier to own. It costs a twenty-fifth as much, weighs a sixth as much, fits in a car, needs no annual regulation, and asks nothing of your feet while both hands are learning to do two different things. What it gives up is the flat keys and the ability to change key inside a bar.
How many strings should a Celtic harp have?
Twenty-two is enough to start, 29 removes most of the arrangement problems, and 34 is the standard size for exam work and for playing with other people. The number of levers matters more than the number of strings at every one of those sizes.