The pickup decides what you sound like. The amp only decides how far it carries. It is easy to buy them in the wrong order — a few hundred on the amplifier, and whatever is cheapest to stick on the harp. A good pickup through a modest amp still sounds like a harp. A bad pickup through an expensive one sounds like a bad pickup, reproduced faithfully.
The whole rig comes to somewhere between $400 and $700, and about a quarter of that is the part that matters most.
Fishman SBT-HP Soundboard Transducer
Made for harp and piano rather than adapted from a guitar part, passive so there is no battery to die mid-ceremony, and it mounts with an adhesive pad instead of a drill. Plugged into any acoustic amp it needs nothing else — no preamp, no phantom power, no direct box. At a fifth of what a purpose-built multi-element harp pickup costs, it is the sensible first pickup for anyone who is not gigging every week.
The kit at a glance
| Gear | What it is | Price band | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fishman SBT-HP | Passive soundboard transducer, adhesive mount, 1/4″ jack | ~$120 | The pickup to start with |
| Myers Pickups The Feather | Gooseneck condenser mic, active preamp built in, clamps on | ~$225 | Nothing adhered to the soundboard |
| Fishman Loudbox Micro | 40 W, 9.1 lb, instrument + mic channels, XLR out | ~$290 | Light enough to carry with a harp |
| Fishman Loudbox Mini | 60 W, 21 lb, PRO-LBT-500, Bluetooth | ~$440 | Headroom for bigger rooms |
| Fishman Loudbox Mini Charge | 60 W, 21.8 lb, PRO-LBC-500, rechargeable | ~$550 | Gigs with no mains socket |
| Behringer Ultra-DI DI400P | Passive direct box, 1/4″ in, balanced XLR out | ~$30 | Plugging into a venue’s own system |
Pickup or microphone
A pickup is bolted to the instrument, so it hears the harp and almost nothing else. It ignores the room, the chatter, the band and the loudspeaker pointed at you, which is why it is what most working harpists end up using. The cost is realism: a transducer hears wood moving, not air, and the result is a little drier and more direct than the instrument sounds from the bench.
A microphone hears the actual sound, and it is unquestionably the better tone. It also hears everything else, and a harp is a large hollow resonator sitting a few feet from a speaker, which makes feedback a live problem rather than a theoretical one. Unless there is a sound engineer in the room, a microphone is the harder path — and if what you want is a recording rather than a gig, the distance rules that make a harp sound right on a microphone are a different job entirely, as is micing one properly.
The two worth fitting
Fishman SBT-HP Soundboard Transducer
- Passive piezo, no battery
- Adhesive pad mount, removable
- Voiced for harp and piano
- 42″ lead, 1/4″ jack
- ~$120
Fishman make a soundboard transducer for several instruments and this is the harp and piano version, which matters because the two share a problem — a large flat radiating board rather than a small resonant body. It sticks to the underside of the soundboard, runs its lead out through the back, and that is the installation. Nothing is drilled and nothing is permanent.
Fishman recommend pairing it with an impedance-matching preamp, and their own preamps run from about $200 to $360, which is more than the pickup and more than some of the amps below. You almost certainly do not need one. That advice exists for people plugging a passive piezo into a mixer or a guitar amp, where the input is the wrong impedance and the tone comes out thin and quacky. Every acoustic amp on this page has a high-impedance instrument input designed for exactly this pickup — the preamp is already inside the amp. Buy the preamp only if you are going straight into a PA desk and hate how it sounds.
What you are accepting for the money is that one sensor cannot hear a five-foot soundboard evenly, which is the honest limitation of every single-element transducer and the reason placement below is not optional.
- Built for a harp soundboard rather than adapted from a guitar part
- No battery, so nothing to fail during a set
- Comes off again without a trace
- Immune to room noise and to a speaker pointed at you
- One sensor covers the whole compass, so the balance depends entirely on where you put it
- Drier and more direct than the harp sounds acoustically
- Picks up lever clicks and pedal mechanism along with the strings
Myers Pickups The Feather — Concert Harp
- Condenser mic on a flexible gooseneck
- Active preamp built in
- No phantom power needed
- Clamps on, no adhesive, no drilling
- ~$225
This is a microphone rather than a transducer, hung on a bendable gooseneck that positions the capsule wherever you want it over the strings or the soundboard. All the mounting hardware is included and none of it is permanent, so on a harp you would rather not glue anything to — a fine instrument, a rented one, or one you intend to sell — it solves the problem the Fishman creates.
Being a microphone, it is the better sound and the worse behaved. The capsule is omnidirectional, so there is no rear rejection to fall back on: it will feed back sooner than a soundboard transducer will, and it hears the room, so it wants a stage rather than a noisy drinks reception. The preamp is inside the unit, so it goes straight into an amp with no extra box.
Myers list it under a separate heading for each kind of harp — concert, lever, pedal — all at the same price, so order the one named for your instrument. What arrives is a saddle clip and a one-inch soft rubber suction cup, and it comes off again leaving nothing behind.
- Nothing adhered to or drilled into the harp
- More natural tone than any soundboard transducer
- Reposition it in seconds to change the sound
- Preamp built in, so it needs nothing else
- Feeds back at lower volumes than a transducer does
- Hears the room as well as the harp
- Nearly twice the price of the Fishman
- A gooseneck near the strings is one more thing to knock
The multi-element pickups built specifically for harps — three or four sensors spaced up the soundboard to even out the response — are the step up from both of these, and they cost three to four times the Fishman. If you are playing for money most weeks, that is where you will end up. For everyone else the difference does not justify the gap.
Where the pickup goes on the soundboard
A soundboard transducer hears the piece of wood it is stuck to, and a harp soundboard does not vibrate as one thing. It flexes in different patterns at different pitches, so the board has loud regions and quiet regions that move as you go up the range. Put the sensor in the wrong place and the amplified harp has a hole in the middle of its compass, or a bass end that thuds while the top disappears.
Start at about a third of the way up the soundboard, on the centre strip, slightly to one side of the string line. If the bass is heavy, move up. If the top is thin, move down. There is a genuine disagreement among harp makers about how many sensors you want — some space three or four elements up the board to average the problem out, and at least one argues the opposite, that a single sensor placed correctly gives a more even result because multiple elements overbalance the mid and high range. With one transducer you are in the second camp whether you meant to be or not, so placement is the whole job.
Putty first, adhesive last
Mount it temporarily with poster putty, or a loop of low-tack tape if you are nervous about the finish, and play the full range of the instrument through the amp. Move it an inch, play again. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between a harp that sounds like itself and one that sounds like a cardboard box. Only once you have found the spot should you clean the wood with an alcohol wipe and commit to the adhesive pad.
Do not drill your harp for a jack socket. A harp holds its value in a way that few instruments do, and a hole in the body is permanent in a way that a pickup is not. The lead can run out through the sound holes in the back, and the jack can sit in a clamp or simply be taped to the soundbox for the evening.
The amp
Look for an amp built for acoustic instruments rather than for electric guitar. A guitar amp is voiced to add character and to distort pleasantly, which is the opposite of what a harp needs; an acoustic amp is built to stay flat and clean. Three things matter beyond that — what it weighs, whether it runs off a battery, and whether it has a phase switch, which flips the signal against itself and will kill a feedback howl outright without costing you any tone.
Fishman Loudbox Micro (PRO-LBT-400)
- 40 W bi-amplified
- 9.1 lb
- Instrument + mic channels
- Phase switch, reverb, chorus
- Balanced XLR output
- ~$290
Nine pounds is the argument. You are already carrying a harp, a stool, a stand and a bag of strings, and the difference between this and the Mini is twelve pounds on every trip from the car — which on a wet Saturday matters more than twenty watts ever will. It has the same phase switch, the same high-impedance instrument input and the same balanced XLR output as its bigger siblings, plus a second channel if you sing.
Forty watts is genuinely enough for a solo harp in a restaurant, a small ceremony, a care home or a studio corner. It runs on mains only, so it is the wrong choice if your gigs happen in fields.
- Less than half the weight of the alternatives
- Phase switch and XLR out, same as the dearer models
- Cheapest way into a proper acoustic amp
- Second channel for a voice or a second instrument
- Mains only
- Runs out of headroom in a marquee or against other instruments
- Smaller driver, so less weight at the bottom of the harp’s range
Fishman Loudbox Mini (PRO-LBT-500)
- 60 W bi-amplified
- 21 lb
- 6.5″ woofer, 1″ tweeter
- Phase switch, 3-band EQ, reverb, chorus
- Bluetooth 5.1, balanced XLR output
- ~$440
The extra twenty watts and the bigger woofer buy headroom rather than volume, which on a harp is the right thing to buy — the peak of a two-handed glissando is many times the level of everything around it, and an amp running near its limit turns that peak into a crunch. This is the one to have if you play marquees, halls, or alongside a flute or a singer.
Bluetooth means backing tracks without another box. The weight is the price: at 21 lb it is a second trip to the car, and it is worth being honest with yourself about how often you actually need the extra power before paying for it in pounds as well as pounds sterling.
- Real headroom for glissandi and full rooms
- Bigger driver handles the bass strings properly
- Bluetooth for backing tracks
- Three-band EQ on the instrument channel
- 21 lb, and awkward rather than heavy
- Half as much again as the Micro
- Mains only — the battery version is separate and dearer
Fishman Loudbox Mini Charge (PRO-LBC-500)
- 60 W, rechargeable
- 21.8 lb
- 4 hrs at full volume, 12 at average, 18 at low
- Phase switch, reverb, chorus, Bluetooth
- ~$550
Mechanically the Mini with a sealed lead-acid battery inside it, and the letter in the model number is the whole difference — LBC rather than LBT. Harpists need this more than most musicians do, because the work turns up in gardens, on lawns, in cloisters and at outdoor ceremonies where the nearest socket is a hundred yards of extension lead away.
Twelve hours at a sensible volume covers a whole wedding with the ceremony, the drinks and the breakfast in it. If all your playing happens indoors near a wall socket, this is the thick end of a hundred dollars and an extra pound of weight for nothing.
- Plays a full day’s work away from mains
- Same 60 W and same controls as the Mini
- Removes the extension lead and the trip hazard
- The dearest thing on this page by a distance
- Lead-acid cell, so it wants charging before it is stored
- Ten hours to charge from flat
- Pointless if you always play indoors
How much power you actually need
Less than you would think, but with more headroom than you would think. A harp is not loud, so raw volume is rarely the constraint. What it has is enormous dynamic range, and the wattage is there to stay clean on the peaks rather than to fill the room.
Forty watts covers a solo harp in a restaurant, a small ceremony or a care home. Sixty covers a marquee, a garden, a hall with a hundred people in it, or a harp that has to hold its own next to a flute or a voice. Past that you are no longer buying an amp, you are buying a small PA, and the money is better spent on the pickup.
Feedback, and why the amp goes to the side
A harp is a large, light, hollow box built to resonate, which is exactly what you do not want in front of a loudspeaker. The soundboard picks up the amplified sound, passes it back through the pickup, and the rig starts to howl on one note — usually low, usually the note you least want to lose.
Three things fix most of it, in this order. Put the amp several feet to your side rather than behind you, angled across the room instead of into the back of the harp. Get it up off the floor onto a chair, a case or a stand, because floor coupling is where the boom comes from and height lets the sound travel over the audience instead of into the first row. Then use the phase switch. Only after all three should you start pulling frequencies out with the EQ — cutting is what people reach for first, and it is the one that costs you sound.
One more habit worth having: turn the amp down before you plug or unplug anything. A quarter-inch jack going into a live input produces a bang that is capable of damaging the speaker.
When the venue already has a system
Churches, hotels and function rooms often have a system and someone running it, and then an amp is dead weight. What the engineer needs is a balanced signal on an XLR, which a pickup on a quarter-inch jack cannot deliver down a long cable without collecting hum along the way.
If you own any of the amps above you already have the answer — the balanced XLR output on the back sends your sound, EQ and all, to the desk, and the amp doubles as your own monitor. If you are travelling light with just a pickup, a passive direct box does the same conversion for about thirty dollars and weighs nothing. The Behringer Ultra-DI DI400P is the one to keep in the case and forget about; it needs no power and there is nothing to set.
When not to bother
A pedal harp in a stone church, or a good lever harp in a room of forty people who are listening, needs nothing at all. Harpists play a great many weddings unamplified and are heard perfectly well. Amplification earns its place when the room is fighting you rather than when it is merely large — an outdoor ceremony with wind and traffic, a reception where a hundred people are talking, a marquee whose canvas roof swallows everything, or any situation where you are playing next to instruments that are simply louder than you are.
The other reason is control. Once you are amplified you can play quietly and still be heard, which is a better way to work a room for two hours than pushing the instrument hard the whole time.