ANDREW KASABHARp GuitARLOCAtiON: CaryAGE: 41iNFLuENCES: Michael Hedges, William Eaton, Leo Kottke, Keller WilliamsKNOWN FOR: Lush and lively acoustic melodies, made more robust by the bass tones of his prototype harp guitarMORE! andrewkasab.com

HOLLOWAY HARp GuitARKasab plays a 2011 prototype harp guitar, made by an Idaho man named Scott Burwell. “He’s an accomplished harp guitarist himself. He was also a luthier, so he decided he was going to start up a company making only harp guitars. He cranked out about a hundred or so of these guitars just to see what they would do,” says Kasab. “It’s modeled after a Dyer 1909 model. They were a company founded around the turn of last century, and they made these harp guitars up until about the 1930s.”

tuNiNGThe guitar has the regular six strings, while there are six bass strings above, stretched in a widening array. Kasab has been tinkering with something called re-entrant tuning, which allows greater variety of technique. The guitar strings go from low notes to high notes, while the other half alternates— “High to low, high to low, and then high to high to low: What it allows you to do is this kind of back and forth fingering on your right hand, so you can man-age subtle little bass ideas while still doing something with your left hand.”

StRiNGS With so many strings working against the hollow body of one instrument, Kasab is con-stantly working to balance the tension he needs to get the proper notes from each part of the guitar. “One of the things that I’ve tried to do is to keep the tension really low on the bass strings, partly because these are banjo tuners that I’m using on the bass strings,” he explains. “They’re very, very fussy to get into pitch.”

The strings can also push one another out of whack: “On a standard guitar, it’s about 190 foot-pounds of pressure. On this, in some of these higher tunings that I might use, it’ll get upwards of 300. It’s braced really well, but it’s a game of tension. If I adjust it too much, then the guitar will actually detune. I have to go back and tune it again.”

tECHNiQuEThough the harp guitar has been in existence for more than a century, Kasab isn’t fully convinced that the technical approach to it is completely developed yet. “I’m trying to use as many alternate techniques to play as I can,” he says. “I may use my left hand to carry notes while my right hand is doing something different, harmonics or something that’s a little outside the normal using a pick and strumming. At some point I might see about incorporating a violin bow, maybe a slide. And if I can figure out how to get enough pressure on here, then I may even be able to do some little chromatic movements on each bass string. But that’s something I haven’t broken yet.”

DtAR SOLStiCE pREAMpStored in a soft gig bag that Kasab is able to easily move between shows, this device splits the guitar and bass side of the harp guitar, allowing him to elicit a better and more defined range of sounds. “It adds a little more roundness on the bottom,” Kasab explains. “It’s very easy to manipulate live. If I’m playing through a larger system, then I just use my preamp. It

just goes straight in, and it really feeds them a good sound.”Finding the right balance between the bass and mid-range

sounds can be an entertaining process of trial and error, though. “Last year, I played at Deep South the Bar in Raleigh, and I had a different preamp that I was using,” he says. “The subwoofers were doing a little feedbacking. All the sudden, it

gets to be a little fun because if you work the sustain right, then it’s like the Jimi Hendrix of acoustic guitar. It was driving the sound guy nuts.”

AMpLiFiERSBecause the harp guitar produces such a wide range of sounds, Kasab splits the sig-nal into two amplifiers: “[The top] is just a Fishman Loudbox, which is a really good standard for an acoustic … really cover-ing the mid frequencies and the higher frequencies.

“Under it is just a consumer-brand Sony powered subwoofer. It’s really cov-ering the very lowest of the low frequen-cies and a little bit of the extra punch,” he continues. “This poor little [subwoofer], I got on Craigslist for 30 bucks. It’s just about the ugliest thing ever. It’s got a cou-ple of erasers that have been Krazy-Glued and cut in half and amplifier feet that have been tacked into the top [to support the top amp]. It’s lasted for about a year, and I’m amazed that it’s still there.”

TexT

by J

or

dan

Law

ren

ce;

Ph

oTo

s b

y d

.L.

an

der

so

n;

Layo

uT

by M

axi

ne M

iLLs