The knot is not what holds a harp string in. On anything thinner than about .036 — middle C and every string above it, on most harps — the knot pulls straight through the hole in the soundboard the moment the string comes up to pitch. What holds it is the anchor: a scrap of thick old string, a leather washer or a stiff nylon spline threaded through the loop before you pull the knot tight. Fit that, and the rest of the job is threading and winding.
That is a lever and pedal harp job. Small lyre harps use ball-end steel strings that need no knot and no anchor at all, and they are a different piece of work.
The whole job, in order
- Back the tuning pin out about four turns — zither pins only, not tapered pins.
- Tie the harp knot in the new string, threading the anchor through the loop if the string is .036 or thinner.
- Feed the string through the soundboard hole from the front and pull the knot up snug on the inside.
- Push about ¼ inch of the free end through the hole in the tuning pin.
- Wind in the same direction as the pins either side of it — three or four wraps, dropping straight down to the bridge pin.
- Bring it up to pitch slowly, checking after each turn that the pitch is rising.
- Leave the tail long for a day or two, then trim it to about 1½ inches above the pin.
What the job needs
Roosebeck Harp Tuning Key, Medium
The size that covers the full-size lever and Celtic range — Roosebeck’s own harps from the little Baby Harp up to the 38-string round back, and most other makers’ pins besides. Mid-East also make a small version for lyres and specialty instruments, so check which end of the range your harp sits at before ordering.
Harp tuning pins are tapered squares and the square is not one size. Lyres take about 4 mm, most lever and Celtic harps somewhere between 4.5 and 5 mm, and some larger instruments more again. A key one size up rounds the corners off your pins permanently, and a key one size down will not go on at all, so measure across the flat top of a pin before buying anything. “Harp tuning key” on its own is not a specification.
If your harp arrived with a key, that key is the right size and there is nothing to work out. Buy a second one for the case; the one you own is always at the other end of the house when a string goes.
The anchors are worth a sentence on their own, because they are the part people throw away. When you pull the broken string out, a small leather tab or a stub of thick nylon usually comes with it. Keep it. It goes into the new knot, and a harp that came with a bag of them came with a consumable you will eventually run out of. A quarter-inch off the end of a dead bass string does the same job.
Getting the right string
Harp strings are made for a specific harp and a specific position on it. They are ordered by string number, counting down from the shortest string as number one, together with the harp’s model — not by note name, and not by gauge alone. Two harps tuned to the same pitch can want different strings in the same slot because the scale lengths differ, and a lever harp and a pedal harp of the same height differ again. Your maker publishes a string chart for the instrument, and that chart is the whole answer.
There are three constructions on a typical lever or pedal harp, and they behave differently the moment you take them out of the packet.
| String type | Where it sits | Knot | Anchor | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monofilament gut or nylon | Treble and middle | You tie it | Yes, at .036 and thinner | The knot creeping through the hole overnight |
| Nylon-wound | Lower middle | Already tied | Not needed | Forcing it through the hole and splitting the wrap |
| Wire-wound | Bass | Already tied | Not needed | Cutting through the winding instead of the plain core |
Wound strings arrive with the knot formed at the factory, which removes the fiddliest part of the job and replaces it with a requirement for restraint. Thread them through gently rather than pushing, and if you have to shorten one, cut only the plain core sticking out past the winding. A wound string with a nicked wrap sounds dead from the first note and there is no fixing it.
Which pins does your harp have?
Look at the right-hand side of the neck, opposite the side you put the key on. What you see there decides whether the pin needs preparing before the string goes anywhere near it.
Tapered harp pins pass all the way through the neck and stick out on both sides. They are held by friction against the wood. Fit the string and wind; there is nothing to prepare.
Zither pins — the same micro-threaded pins a piano or an autoharp uses — are smaller and only appear on the key side. They screw into the wood rather than wedging into it, and they are common on smaller and lighter harps because they need less timber removed from the neck. Before you fit a string, turn the pin counter-clockwise about four full turns. Skip that and you run out of thread as you tighten, and the pin starts pulling against the wood instead of holding in it.
Step one — tie the knot and fit the anchor
Tie a plain overhand knot near the end of the string, leaving a tail of two or three inches. Do not pull it tight yet. Pass the tail back through the loop of that knot a second time, so you have a loop with the tail running through it, then lay the anchor across that loop and pull the knot down onto it. On a thicker monofilament — roughly .040 and up — the doubled knot alone is enough and the anchor can stay in the drawer.
The finished knot should be a hard little bundle wider than the hole it is about to sit against, with the anchor lying across the hole rather than pointing into it. Tug it hard between your fingers before it goes anywhere near the harp. It is far easier to find out now than at pitch.
Nylon is slippery and the first knot you tie will probably slide. Practice on the broken string you just took off: same material, already useless.
Step two — seat it in the soundboard
Feed the free end through the string hole from the front of the soundboard and out through the access hole in the back of the body, then pull until the knot comes up against the inside of the board. Some harps want the knot pulled through from the back instead — the access holes are there so your hand can reach the knot either way.
If the knot disappears into the hole, it is too small. Pull it back out and add the anchor, or tie it again with more turns. Do not try to compensate by winding extra turns on the pin.
Step three — wind it onto the pin
Push the free end through the hole in the tuning pin until about ¼ inch shows on the far side. Then wind, and two details decide whether this string behaves for the next two years.
Match the direction of the neighboring pins. Every string on the harp wraps the same way. Look at the pin above and the pin below and copy them.
Aim for three or four wraps that drop straight down to the bridge pin. Fewer than three and the string can creep under tension. More than four means you left too much slack, and the coils climb the pin and start crossing each other, which is the usual reason a string sits perfectly in tune one day and a semitone flat the next. If you are getting six or seven wraps, unwind, pull more string through, and start again.
On a thick monofilament that will not grip, take the first wrap away from the neck, then bring the next wrap back over the top of it. The string pinches itself and stops slipping.
Step four — bring it up to pitch
Go slowly, and check the pitch is actually rising as you turn. If it is not, stop immediately: you are on the wrong pin, and the string you are tightening is a good one that is about to snap. This is the single most common way a routine string change turns into two string changes.
Take it up in stages rather than straight to pitch. New gut and nylon stretch enormously at first — the string will read a third flat within an hour, and it needs bringing back up several times a day for the first week. That is the string settling and the knot bedding in, not a fault. Wire-wound strings settle in a day or two.
Clip the tuner to the shank of the tuning key rather than to the harp. The display then sits an inch from the pin you are turning, and no metal clip touches the soundboard. A Snark ST-2 at around $22 reads vibration rather than room noise, which is what you want with thirty other strings ringing in sympathy.
Leave the excess sticking up for those first couple of days. If the knot does let go, or you find you were a string number out, you have something left to work with. Once it holds pitch, trim to about 1½ inches — two fingers’ width — above the pin.
Never take them all off at once
A lever harp carries somewhere around 900 to 1,200 pounds of pull across its soundboard, and a concert pedal harp closer to a ton. That load is not something the instrument survives in spite of — the neck and the soundboard are curved and braced around it, and they hold their shape because it is there.
Take every string off together and the whole frame relaxes, then has to be re-loaded from nothing. Harp makers are blunt about this: Harpsicle’s own instructions tell owners not to change all the strings on a lever harp at the same time. Work in ones and twos, or an octave at a time, and let the harp settle in between. A full restring is a job spread over days, not an afternoon.
One string at a time is a different matter — individual strings carry roughly 15 pounds of tension in the treble and up to 60 in the bass, which against a four-figure total is nothing at all. Replacing one string on a fully strung harp is safe. Stripping the instrument is not.
Lyre harps are a different job
The small 7-, 16- and 19-string lyres have no soundboard access hole, no anchors and no string chart. The strings are usually steel with a ball or loop end that sits in a saddle, the pins are zither pins taking a smaller key — around 4 mm rather than the 4.5 to 5 mm a lever harp wants — and the strings are sold as complete numbered sets rather than singly. Changing one is closer to restringing a guitar: the loop end drops into the saddle, the other end goes through the pin, and there is nothing to tie.
Because the sets are cheap and the strings are the part that fails first on an inexpensive lyre, most owners keep a spare set in the bag rather than ordering one string at a time.
16-String Lyre Harp Replacement Set
- 16 strings, numbered
- Steel, loop end
- For standard 16-string lyres
- ~$8
A plain numbered steel set for the standard 16-string lyre — the shape the Donner DLH-003 and the AKLOT both belong to, tuned G3 to A5. Steel is what these instruments are voiced for. Nylon sets exist and sound gentler, but they give away most of the volume that makes a small lyre audible in the first place.
Check the numbering on the packet against the string you are replacing rather than matching gauges by eye. The difference between adjacent strings on a lyre is small enough to get wrong, and a string one position out will sit at the wrong tension for the rest of its life.
- Cheap enough that there is no argument for not owning one
- Numbered rather than sold loose
- Loop ends seat straight into the saddle — no knot, no anchor
- Sixteen only — a 19- or 21-string lyre needs its own set
- Bright and metallic, which is not to every taste
Count the strings on your own instrument before ordering — 7, 10, 16, 19 and 21 are all common, and a 16-string set will not stretch to a 19-string lyre. If you are still choosing an instrument, our guide to the best lyre harps covers which ones ship with a spare set in the box.
How long harp strings last
There is no fixed lifespan, and makers say so plainly — a string can go in a fortnight or last a decade. What can be pinned down is when a string stops being worth keeping, which is a different question from when it breaks.
Gut is the shortest-lived and the most sensitive to a dry room or a hot car. Nylon monofilament lasts longer but goes brittle with ultraviolet, so a harp that lives in a sunny window is on a faster clock than the same harp in a corner. Steel-wound bass strings corrode from the inside and go dull years before anything visible happens to them.
| Player | Full set | Top two octaves |
|---|---|---|
| Professional or daily performer | Every 6–12 months | Twice a year |
| Serious student, plays most days | Every 1–2 years | Yearly |
| Casual player | Every 3–5 years, or on breakage | As needed |
The top two octaves come round faster than the rest because they are short. A tiny amount of wear is a large proportion of a six-inch string, and those are the ones that stop holding pitch first — most obvious on a pedal harp, where a worn treble string drifts as the pedals move.
Four signs a string is finished, none of which involve it breaking: it will not settle on a tuner and hunts around the note; it sounds dull next to its neighbors; a wound string has started to unwrap; or the winding has shifted sideways where it crosses the bridge pin.
What harp strings cost
Individual strings are cheap and full sets are not, which is most of why a harp gets restrung a few strings at a time rather than in one afternoon.
| Harp | One string | Full set |
|---|---|---|
| Lyre harp, 7–21 strings | Sold as a set | Around $8–20 |
| Lever harp, nylon | Around $3–20 | Around $135–285 |
| Lever harp, gut | Around $12–25 | Around $350–520 |
| Pedal harp, gut with wire basses | Around $8–30 | Around $600–800 |
Two things push the total around. Wire-wound bass strings are the expensive end of any set — the wires alone on a concert pedal harp run to somewhere near $120 — so a set quoted “without wires” is a hundred dollars cheaper and is not a complete set. And gut costs two to three times what nylon does in the same slot, which is the trade a lever harp owner makes when specifying the instrument in the first place. If the arithmetic is a surprise, our piece on why harps are so expensive puts strings in context against the rest of the running costs.
Paying someone else to do a full restring is typically another $175 or so in labor on a lever harp, on top of the strings themselves.
Common questions
My knot pulled through the soundboard. What did I do wrong?
Almost certainly no anchor, or an anchor that slipped out of the loop as you tightened. Retie with the anchor sitting across the loop rather than along it, and pull the knot down hard onto it by hand before the string goes near a pin.
Can I use fishing line or a guitar string?
Not on a harp you care about. Harp monofilament is specified to reach a particular pitch at a particular tension over a particular length, and fishing line of the same diameter stretches differently and never settles. A steel guitar string in a slot designed for nylon is worse: at the same pitch and length it pulls far harder, on a point of the soundboard that was not built for it.
Do I need to loosen the strings on either side?
No. One string off a fully strung harp changes nothing structurally. Loosening the neighbors only gives you more to retune afterward.
The same string keeps breaking. Why?
Where it lets go names the culprit. At the tuning pin usually means a sharp edge in the pin hole or too few wraps. At the bridge pin points at a burr or a worn groove in the pin itself. At the soundboard is either the knot or a rough eyelet. One string breaking is ordinary wear; the same string breaking twice in the same place is the harp asking you to look at that spot.
How long before a new string holds its tuning?
A week or two of daily retuning for gut or nylon, a couple of days for wire. Tuning it often makes it settle faster, not slower. A whole newly strung harp can want fifty tunings before it stabilises.
Can I reuse the anchor from the old string?
Yes, and it is the normal thing to do. Leather washers and nylon splines are not consumed by the job. Keep the ones you find and cut spares from dead bass strings.
After the string is on
Tune it, then tune it again tomorrow, and keep doing that until it stops moving. Our step-by-step guide to tuning a harp covers the order to work in and the transpose trick that makes a pedal harp readable on a chromatic tuner, and the harp tuner comparison covers which tuners cope with the bottom octave. For everything else that keeps an instrument playing well, there is our collection of harp tips.