In the late 1970s, Rick Rubarth was a young singer, songwriter, and guitarist working in folk clubs in the Detroit area, when he heard his first harp on a Robin Williamson recording. Captivated by the beautiful sound of Caswell’s harp on the album, Rick vowed at the time to become a harpist. But how do you get a harp if you are a hungry artist with no extra money for new instruments? Solution: build your own. It took Rick about six months working in the evenings in a small workspace in his apartment to make a very credible first instrument to learn to play on. Thirty years and 1,100 harps later, at the age of 52, Rick Rubarth has sadly become a modest harpist, but fortunately for the harp world, he is one of the best builders on the scene today.
Being a maker of instruments of any kind requires great sensitivity to sound and a compelling desire to make objects with your own hands. Rick had both qualities from the beginning. He grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, a member of the musical family who met every Sunday after church at the grandmother’s house play and sang old-time classics from the vaudeville era such as New York Sidewalks and Built Bike. for two. The guitar strumpers were Rick’s father and older brother, while his mother played the piano. “She was the true talent of the family,” recalls Rick. “He could read sheet music and play by ear too. He played everything from Chopin and Copeland to Rhapsody in Blue and boogie-woogie. Unlike many classically trained performers, I could improvise and learn by ear. I didn’t. I didn’t receive any formal instruction. from her, but I got some of the musical genes. My dad taught me to play the guitar. At 14, I was writing my first songs. “
Looking at the crafting side of the equation, Rick recalls that he always built something during his childhood. Model airplanes and ships were a favorite pastime, as were elaborate Rube-Goldberg-style cardboard constructions, depositing a coin in a bank in the most complicated way possible. Later, the high school carpentry workshop proved particularly rewarding and sparked a lifelong interest in wood and its properties.
Rick eventually had to sell that first harp during one of those inevitable lean times that any practicing musician is subject to, but thus created an opportunity to build a new harp, which would hopefully sound even better than the first. During the early period of his career, he would build one or two harps at a time and then ponder what he could change to improve the sound. In the early years, the goal was not to earn a living, but to learn a trade and discover the mysteries of an instrument.
In 1977 Rick moved to Ann Harbor Michigan, where he worked as an industrial electrician in the automotive industry. Most of his free time was spent making harps. “I lived near the Stearns Instrument Museum and the curator would let me into the back rooms to see the old harps in his collections. They were important historical instruments: there was an old Morley harp and a very old copy of the Queen Mary harp. – but they had collapsed and were lying in pieces on the shelves, waiting for some time in the future when they could be restored. This was an amazing opportunity for me because I was able to see the inside! I took a lot of measurements and watched the way they were sculpted and they braced the tops. It was a great foundation for my future education. “
Four years later, Rick, now married, moved to Denver, Colorado, where he has lived ever since. He established a pattern of part-time work, performing in the city and building harps. In the late 1980s, a music retailer suggested that there was a niche available in the small harp market, so Rick designed a 22-string instrument, which proved very successful. Over the years, he has built and sold over 700 of these affordable harps, yet the greatest harps have remained his true passion.
He currently devotes all his attention to his design for the Merlin, a 36-string harp that Rick feels is the pinnacle of his life’s work. Designing and perfecting the Merlin required more than a decade of experimentation and hard work. “A harp is a complex puzzle whose pieces must work in complete harmony,” he explains. “If you change any item, for example the scale length of a string, all other items are affected as well. You have to keep building new harps to test your ideas. Sometimes the improvements are small, sometimes they are more. dramatic. Everything takes a lot of time and patience. “
The Merlin has a cooperated solid maple back, aviation birch plywood soundboard, and a truss rod system in the column, allowing the harp to be extra strong but not too heavy. But what really sets the Merlin apart is the unique system of struts within the instrument that are made from a synthetic material that, unlike wood, does not lose strength over the years. The struts relieve much of the enormous strain (around 1,100 pounds) that the strings put on the soundboard, allowing it to move more freely and produce a louder, richer sound.
I recently interviewed Rick to find out more about this unique harp.
Ken: Why do you use plywood instead of a solid spruce top?
Haystack. The traditional solid spruce top will swell and shrink up to half an inch or more, inevitably causing cracks. The specialty aircraft plywood I use is quite amazing. Five solid birch sheets are laminated together to form a tough, tough one-eighth-inch-thick panel. It does not crack and produces a fantastic tone. I continue to use traditional graduation techniques: I thin the upper areas to enhance and improve vibration. I’m getting a better sound than my spruce soundboards. By the way, there is a good discussion on this topic that you can check out on musikit.com.
Ken: You are one of the few builders using fluorocarbon ropes.
Rick: Yeah. I think Kortier was the first and I got on the train from the beginning. I am convinced that everyone will eventually use them. The rope is 20% denser than nylon. It is ideal for mid-range strings. I use nylon in the first octave and a half, then fluorocarbon up to the six strings of the bass, which are wound in steel. Unfortunately, you can’t just put fluorocarbons into just any harp and expect a huge improvement – you have to build an instrument to specifically maximize what fluorocarbons can do. It took me a lot of experimentation to get it right.
Ken: I notice that the Merlin has three sound holes instead of the usual four.
Rick: You have to be very careful about how many square inches you put into the sound holes. A cello, for example, can fill a concert hall, yet the F-holes are a small fraction of the total soundboard surface. For the best bass response, I don’t want the sound to spill over. Instead, I want the sound to be captured momentarily, to mature inside the box before it is released. I found that I can help achieve this by eliminating the lowest sound hole. I have a special access plate at the base that you can remove to get to the bass strings when you need to change them.
Ken: What prompted you to add the unusual struts on your Merlin model?
Rick: The harp is a brutal instrument. All those strings are trying to rip out the soundboard. Unlike a violin, which is dynamically balanced and can last for centuries, a harp is unbalanced and has a relatively short lifespan. If you make a thick top to resist the tension of the string, you will be amazed at its ability to vibrate. If you thin it too much, it will just fall apart. So the traditional solution is to grade the top, which means carving it thinner for the high strings and gradually making it thicker towards the low strings. Wood braces are also added to make the end of the bass stronger. I have spent countless hours trying to perfect my cap graduation system to give the best sound. But there is always that inherent conflict in the harp between making the soundboard strong to resist string tension and making it light so it vibrates well and projects sound efficiently.
For a long time I felt like I had pushed my harps to the limit of what traditional methods would do and was trying to think of something new. One day I saw a video of that famous footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing under high winds, the road spinning like a carpet. I looked at the curved cables and the corrugated cover and felt it was telling me something. Eventually I realized that I wanted to counteract the tension of the strings with curved struts in the same way that a suspension bridge counters the force of gravity with its curved suspension cables. On the Merlin, these struts oppose string tension, relieving much of the tension at the low end of the soundboard, allowing for much freer vibration. You get a huge improvement in the quality of the bass notes and the harp has a longer lifespan.
Ken: The Merlin has an exceptional projection. I heard that it can hold up to an orchestra even without electronic amplification.
Rick: I have received that feedback from some of my clients. You know, good projection has been my goal for decades, but ultimately what I really want is full expressiveness across the entire dynamic range. I want my harp to convey as fully as possible what the musician feels inside. And I want it in the hands of as many players as possible. I deliberately keep my harps free of expensive ornaments so they can remain affordable. I have worked as a musician my whole life and am building for other musicians.
All I’ve tried to do is make the harp that I would buy myself even if cost wasn’t an issue. The Merlin is my favorite harp. I have solved the riddle to my satisfaction. Now I just want to make a lot of them, send them out into the world, and save some for myself.
