Put every lever down before you touch a pin. On a pedal harp, every pedal up. Then start at middle C — the red string nearest the middle of the harp — and work outwards by note name: every C on the instrument, then every D, then every E. A settled harp takes about three minutes that way.
Two of those instructions are the ones that catch people out. A harp tuned with its levers engaged goes out of tune the moment you flip them back, and a harp tuned straight up the row leaves you trusting a clip-on tuner in the bass, which is exactly where a clip-on tuner is least reliable.
Table of Contents
- What you need
- Levers down, pedals up
- The steps
- Why by note name and not straight up the row
- The two mistakes that break strings
- Pedal harps: let the tuner do the transposing
- When the tuner will not settle
- Check the levers when you have finished
- How often, and how long it takes
- Frequently asked questions
- In short
What you need
Snark ST-2 Chromatic Clip-On Tuner
Clips to a tuning pin — or better, to the shank of the tuning key — so the screen faces you while both hands are busy. It reads vibration through the frame rather than sound through the air, which is what keeps it steady while thirty other strings ring in sympathy. Lever-harp makers point their own customers at it.
That is the whole kit. A phone app will get a small lyre into tune and will struggle on anything with a bass register, because the free ones listen through the phone’s microphone and the room is full of the notes you are not trying to tune. If you want the full comparison — handhelds, strobes, the ones that behave on low strings — that is our guide to harp tuners.
The key matters more than people expect. 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 larger instruments more again. A key one size up rounds the corners off your pins permanently. A key one size down will not go on at all.
Roosebeck Harp Tuning Key, Medium
- L-shaped steel
- Square socket, medium size
- Covers Roosebeck’s own range from the Baby Harp to the 38-string round back
- ~$17
If your harp came with a key, that key is the right size and there is nothing to work out — buy a second one so there is always one in the case. If it did not, this is the size that covers most full-size lever and Celtic harps, and Mid-East make a smaller one for lyres and specialty instruments.
Measure across the flat top of one of your pins before ordering anything, or ask whoever built the harp. “Harp tuning key” on its own is not a specification, and the published measurements for any given key are worth treating as a starting point rather than a guarantee.
- Fits the range most lever harps sit in
- Cheap enough that owning two is sensible
- Short enough to live in a case pocket
- An L-handle gives less controlled leverage than a T-handle
- Wrong size for lyres, which want the small version
T-handle keys exist in 4.5 mm and 5 mm and are worth the swap if your wrist complains, because they turn a pin in smaller, steadier increments than an L-key does. They are also the easier shape to clip a tuner onto. Both are compared alongside the tuners in the tuner guide.
Levers down, pedals up
A sharping lever and a pedal disc do the same job: they grip the string partway down and shorten its speaking length by a precise amount, raising it a semitone. Tune a string with that mechanism engaged and you have tuned the shortened string. The open string underneath it is now flat, and the tension sitting behind the lever bleeds out slowly over the next hour of playing and pulls the whole note down with it.
So every lever goes down before you start, and every pedal goes to the top of its slot. Tune the full length of the string, every time, and let the mechanism do its own arithmetic afterwards.
Which notes your harp should read
With the levers down, a small lever harp reads the plain white notes of C major. A larger one very often does not, and that surprises people the first time. Most lever harps past about thirty strings are strung in E flat, so that the levers reach a wider set of keys — which means that with everything disengaged the B, E and A strings read B flat, E flat and A flat. The tuner is not wrong and neither is the harp.
| Harp | Mechanism | Strings read | C strings | F strings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small lever harp, beginner setup | All levers down | C major — all naturals | Red | Blue |
| Lever harp strung in E flat | All levers down | Three flats — B, E and A read flat | Red | Blue |
| Pedal harp | All pedals up | C flat major — set the tuner to transpose −1 | Red | Blue |
| Paraguayan harp | No levers or pedals | C major — geared tuners, no key needed | Blue | Red |
The colour coding is the fastest way to find your place on an instrument with thirty-odd identical-looking strings, and it is worth committing to memory in the form “red is C, blue is F” — with the exception in the last row. A Paraguayan harp reverses them, so a player moving between the two has to stop counting from habit. If the colours have faded on an older instrument, our guide to how many strings a harp has covers the octave numbering harpists use to name them instead.
The steps
- Levers down, pedals up. Sit at the harp as though you were going to play it.
- Clip the tuner to a tuning pin near the string you are working on, or to the shank of the key. Keep metal jaws off bare wood.
- Find middle C — the red string nearest the middle — and pluck it firmly with the pad of a finger.
- Fit the key onto the pin for that string. Turn it a few degrees and watch the display: if the pitch does not move, you are on the wrong pin.
- Clockwise raises the note, anticlockwise lowers it. Work in small movements, checking the display between each.
- When middle C sits centred, move to the next C — down an octave, not up a step — and tune that. Then the next, to the bottom of the harp, then back through the middle and up to the top.
- Repeat for every D, then every E, and so on through the seven note names.
- Go through the whole harp a second time. The strings you tuned first will have dropped while you worked on the rest.
Why by note name and not straight up the row
Tuning C, then D, then E all the way up the instrument is the obvious method and it works. Tuning every C, then every D, is better, for a reason that has nothing to do with speed.
An octave is the easiest interval in music to hear. Two strings an octave apart either lock together or they beat against each other audibly, and you do not need training to notice it. That gives you a second opinion on every string you tune — one you can use precisely where the tuner is at its weakest.
A 34-string lever harp bottoms out around 65 Hz and a concert pedal harp near 33 Hz. Down there the fundamental is quiet and slow to develop, so a clip-on hunts for a second or two before it settles and will sometimes lock onto an overtone and show you a confident, wrong answer an octave up. Tune the bass by working down in octaves from a middle-register string you have already set, use the tuner to confirm rather than to decide, and the problem stops being a problem.
The same order helps at the top of the harp, where the strings are short, quiet and quick to die away. Pluck those lightly with a fingernail for a clear bell tone instead of digging in with the pad of the finger — a hard pluck on a top string is mostly attack noise, and the tuner has to wait for it to clear before it can read anything.
The two mistakes that break strings
Turning the wrong pin
The pins sit far closer together on the neck than the strings do at your hands, and each string leaves its pin at an angle, so the pin nearest where you are looking is often one out. Tighten the wrong one and you are raising a string you are not listening to, with nothing to warn you until it goes.
The check takes a second: turn a few degrees and confirm the display moves. If the note you are plucking does not respond, stop and find the right pin before you turn anything further.
Turning too far
Harp pins are geared far more directly than machine heads on a guitar. A few degrees of key is a large change in pitch, and the movement that feels like nothing at all is usually already too much. If a string is reading a whole tone flat, bring it up in several small movements and let it speak between each — a string dragged up in one pull tends to overshoot, and pulling it back down again leaves it slack against the pin, where it will not hold.
Nylon and gut also creep for a few seconds after you move them. Tune slightly, pause, listen, then adjust again. That pause is most of the difference between a harp that stays in tune for a session and one that does not.
Pedal harps: let the tuner do the transposing
With every pedal in the top position, a pedal harp’s strings sit in C flat major. Read literally, that means tuning to B, C sharp, D sharp, E, F sharp, G sharp and A sharp, and translating those in your head string after string is how mistakes happen at eleven o’clock at night.
Set the tuner’s transpose to −1 instead. The display then shows plain naturals — C, D, E, F, G, A, B — while the harp sits where it belongs, and you can work through the strings without converting anything. Most chromatic tuners past the cheapest tier have this, and it is the single setting that makes tuning a pedal harp straightforward.
Everything else is the same job on a bigger instrument, with more strings and more of them below the range where a tuner is confident. If you are still deciding between the two mechanisms, we compare them in lever harp versus pedal harp.
When the tuner will not settle
Three different faults look identical on the display, and they have different fixes.
| What you see | What it is | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The reading jumps between two notes a step or two apart | Sympathetic resonance — the strings you are not playing are ringing along | Mute the strings below with your palm, pluck more lightly, move the clip nearer the pin |
| The reading is steady but an octave out | The tuner has locked onto an overtone rather than the fundamental | Check it against the octave above, which you have already tuned |
| One string hunts back and forth and never centres | A false string — the diameter has gone uneven along its length | Replace it. No amount of tuning will fix a false string |
The third is worth knowing because it is invisible otherwise. A false string sounds slightly dull and slightly sour next to its neighbours, and it is the string in every harpist’s instrument that they have quietly stopped using. Our guide to changing a harp string covers replacing it, and the other three signs that a string is finished.
Check the levers when you have finished
A harp in tune with its levers down is not necessarily in tune when you play it. Once you have finished, go back through and engage each lever in turn, watching the display as you do.
The sharped note should land on the semitone above. If it consistently reads sharp or flat when the lever goes up — the same amount, on the same strings, every time — the harp needs regulating, which means adjusting the levers themselves so the pitch they produce is correct. That is a technician’s job rather than a tuning problem, and it is not something to attempt with the key in your hand. It is also the reason a harp that “will not stay in tune” sometimes turns out to be perfectly in tune with everything down.
Pedal harps get the same check with each pedal moved through its three positions, and they need regulating more often, because there is far more mechanism to drift.
How often, and how long it takes
Before every session. Not because harpists are fussy, but because a lever harp carries somewhere around 900 to 1,200 pounds of pull across a thin wooden soundboard and a concert pedal harp closer to a ton, and that structure responds to every change in temperature and humidity in the room. A guitar shrugs those off. A harp does not.
A settled instrument takes about three minutes once the order is habit. A new one takes considerably longer and there is no shortcut: new gut and nylon stretch enormously at first, and a freshly strung harp can want fifty tunings before it stabilises. Gut and nylon settle over a week or two of daily retuning, wire-wound strings in a couple of days. Tuning it often makes it settle faster, not slower.
The other consequence of that is a habit worth building early: tune, play through the instrument once, then tune again. The second pass takes thirty seconds and is the difference between a harp that sounds in tune and one that nearly does. More of that kind of thing is in our harp practice tips.
Frequently asked questions
Which way do I turn the key to sharpen a string?
Clockwise, as you look at the head of the pin. That tightens the string and raises the pitch on tapered, threaded and zither pins alike. Confirm it on the display anyway — a few degrees and a glance costs nothing, and it doubles as the check that you are on the right pin.
Can I use a guitar tuner?
Only if it has a chromatic mode, and even then only for the middle of the instrument. In guitar mode a tuner is looking for six specific notes and will drag everything you play towards one of them. Guitar-oriented tuners also often stop detecting below the low E at 82 Hz, which leaves the entire bottom register of a full-size harp invisible.
Do I need a contact microphone?
Not for tuning at home. A clip-on tuner already reads vibration through the frame, which is the same principle. A wired pickup into a tuner’s quarter-inch jack earns its place backstage or in a room with other instruments playing — the same setup covered in our guide to recording a harp.
Where exactly should the clip go?
On a tuning pin near the string you are adjusting, or on the shank of the tuning key — which has the advantage of travelling with you as you work. Not on bare wood: the jaws mark a soundboard and read no better for it. For the top octave, where vibration gets faint, the access hole in the back of the body or the midrib inside gives a stronger signal.
My new harp will not hold its tuning at all. Is something wrong?
No. New strings stretch and a new soundboard settles under load, so the first few weeks are relentless. Tune the whole instrument, then immediately go through it again. Gut and nylon come good after a week or two of daily tuning, wire-wound strings in a couple of days.
Should I tune to something other than A=440?
Only if you are playing with people who are. A=440 Hz is the default on every chromatic tuner and the right answer for practising alone or with almost any ensemble. Early-music groups sometimes ask for A=415 for Baroque repertoire, occasionally A=392 for French Baroque, and any tuner with a calibration setting will move to meet them.
In short
Levers down, pedals up, transpose −1 if it is a pedal harp. Start at middle C and tune by note name rather than up the row, so that every string in the bass has an octave above it to check against. Turn the key in small movements and confirm the display moves before you commit to a pin. Then go round again.
Three minutes, before you play, every time. If you are still choosing an instrument, start with our guide to the best harps for beginners.