Harp Guitar – History, Construction and Notable Players

The harp guitar is one of the most visually striking instruments in the guitar family. At first glance it resembles a standard guitar, but a second look reveals additional strings extending beyond the fingerboard – strings that are played open, without fretting. This combination of a fretted guitar with unstopped extra strings creates a sound world of unusual depth and resonance, and it places the harp guitar in a category of its own within the history of stringed instruments.

Understanding the harp guitar means understanding both its long historical roots and its more recent revival in the hands of innovative players. Whether you are a guitarist curious about extended possibilities, or simply someone fascinated by unusual instruments, the harp guitar has a story worth knowing.

What Is a Harp Guitar?

The defining characteristic of a harp guitar is straightforward: it is any guitar that carries additional unstopped strings beyond the standard six. These extra strings are not fretted by the left hand in normal playing – they vibrate freely at their full open length and are plucked or strummed to add harmonic depth, resonance, or melodic colour to the music.

This distinguishes the harp guitar clearly from extended-range guitars such as seven-string or eight-string guitars, which add extra stopped strings that can be fretted like any other string on the instrument. On a seven-string guitar, the additional low string is fully integrated into the fretboard and can be played at any pitch. On a harp guitar, the extra strings sit apart – often on a separate arm or extension of the headstock – and are tuned to fixed pitches that the player works with as resonating open notes.

The extra strings on a harp guitar are most commonly bass strings, adding low-register resonance and drone-like depth beneath the standard guitar range. Some instruments carry extra treble strings instead, extending the high register. A smaller number of instruments carry both, creating a genuinely harp-like spread of register. The bass subgroup is by far the most common, and it is the form most people encounter when they see a harp guitar for the first time.

Historical Roots: From Renaissance to the 19th Century

The idea of combining a fretted instrument with additional open strings is not a modern invention. It reaches back to the Renaissance, when instrument makers were already experimenting with ways to add bass range to lutes and guitars without requiring the left hand to fret every note.

The theorbo and the chitarrone – large, long-necked lutes developed in Italy in the late sixteenth century – are among the clearest early ancestors of the harp guitar concept. These instruments carried a set of standard fretted courses on the fingerboard and an additional set of longer, unstopped bass strings running alongside them. The extra strings were tuned to fixed pitches and plucked open to provide bass lines and harmonic support. This arrangement allowed lutenists and continuo players to cover a wider bass range without sacrificing the agility of the fretted strings.

Through the Baroque period, instruments in this family – including the archlute – remained important in ensemble music and accompaniment. As the guitar gradually replaced the lute in popular and salon music through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, instrument makers began applying similar ideas to the guitar itself. Various hybrid instruments appeared in Europe during the early nineteenth century, combining guitar-style bodies with additional strings meant to extend the instrument's harmonic palette. These experiments fed directly into what would become the classical and romantic guitar tradition, where the romantic guitar itself represented an era of constant experimentation in construction and stringing.

The Golden Age: America, 1890–1920

While European instrument makers had long experimented with additional strings on guitar-like instruments, the harp guitar reached its most widespread popular moment in the United States between approximately 1890 and 1920. This was the instrument's golden age, and two names above all others define it: the Dyer company and the Larson Brothers.

The W.J. Dyer and Brother company of St. Paul, Minnesota, became the most prominent retailer of harp guitars in America during this period. Dyer sold instruments that were manufactured in collaboration with the Larson Brothers – Carl and August Larson, Swedish-born craftsmen working in Chicago. The Larson Brothers were exceptional builders with a deep understanding of structural engineering and tonal design. Their harp guitars featured a characteristic sub-bass arm extending from the upper bout of the body, carrying between five and twelve additional bass strings running above and outside the main neck.

The Dyer-Larson instruments were widely distributed through mail-order catalogues and music retailers across the United States, and they found enthusiastic players in parlour musicians, vaudeville performers, and early recording artists. The harp guitar was genuinely popular – not a curiosity for specialists, but a commercially viable instrument sold in considerable numbers to ordinary players who wanted the fuller sound those extra bass strings provided.

Other American makers also produced harp guitars during this period, and the instrument appeared in various configurations depending on the builder's preferences and the player's requirements. The defining features of the American harp guitar tradition were the sub-bass arm, the relatively large body necessary to project the low-register strings effectively, and the practical orientation toward parlour and ensemble playing.

After roughly 1920, the harp guitar faded from mainstream popularity in the United States. The rise of amplification, changing musical fashions, and the dominance of the standard six-string guitar as the universal instrument all contributed to the decline. Existing instruments passed into collections, attics, and the occasional specialist's hands, and new production fell away sharply.

Construction and Design Principles

Building a harp guitar presents challenges that go well beyond those of a standard classical guitar or flamenco guitar. The additional strings impose extra tension on the instrument's structure, requiring careful bracing and often a reinforced body to prevent distortion or collapse over time. The sub-bass arm that carries the extra strings must be integrated into the body in a way that transmits vibration effectively while remaining structurally stable.

The extra strings on a harp guitar are typically longer than the strings on the standard guitar portion of the instrument, since their low pitch requires either great length or very low tension. This is why the characteristic extended arm appears on most American harp guitars – it allows the strings to run at a length sufficient for the low pitches intended, with the strings anchored at a tailpiece and passing over a separate nut or bridge before extending to individual tuning pegs on the extended headstock.

The body of a harp guitar is generally larger than a standard guitar body, partly to accommodate the structural needs of the extra strings and partly because the instrument's sonic character benefits from additional air volume and soundboard area. The top bracing pattern must account for the changed distribution of forces, and makers typically develop individual solutions suited to their specific design philosophy.

Tuning the extra strings is a practical matter as much as a musical one. Unlike the fretted strings, which can be adjusted to different keys through capo use or retuning in the normal way, the open strings of a harp guitar are tuned to fixed pitches before playing. The player must therefore plan repertoire and arrangements around the available open pitches, or retune the extra strings between pieces. This requires both forethought and a reliable system of individual tuning machines for each extra string.

Notable Players

The harp guitar's modern reputation rests substantially on the work of two American musicians whose recordings brought the instrument to new audiences long after its initial golden age had passed.

Michael Hedges (1953–1997) was a guitarist and composer whose work for Windham Hill Records in the 1980s and 1990s redefined what acoustic guitar could sound like. Hedges was known above all for his radical two-handed tapping technique and his ability to layer rhythm, melody, and bass simultaneously on a single guitar. He incorporated the harp guitar into his recordings and performances, using the extra bass strings to build the low-register foundation that his music required. His 1984 album Aerial Boundaries is widely considered a landmark of acoustic guitar performance, and his use of the harp guitar helped bring the instrument to the attention of a new generation of players and listeners. Hedges died in a car accident in 1997 at the age of 43, but his recordings and his compositional innovations continue to influence guitarists working across styles.

Muriel Anderson is an American guitarist and composer who has worked extensively with the harp guitar in both solo performance and ensemble contexts. Anderson studied classical guitar and later developed a broad performing practice that encompasses fingerstyle, classical, country, and jazz influences. Her recordings include dedicated harp guitar work, and she has been an active advocate for the instrument, helping to connect contemporary audiences with its possibilities. Anderson founded the Music for Life Alliance and has been involved in guitar education at various levels.

These two players represent very different approaches to the instrument, but together they demonstrate that the harp guitar is capable of serious artistic use in contemporary music rather than being purely a historical artefact. The great classical guitarists of the mainstream tradition have rarely engaged with the harp guitar, but players working in the fingerstyle and acoustic guitar worlds have found it a genuinely useful extension of the instrument's possibilities.

Harp Guitar and the Broader Guitar Family

Placing the harp guitar within the wider context of the guitar family helps clarify what makes it distinctive. The standard classical guitar – six strings, all stopped – has a defined range from the low E of the sixth string to the upper reaches of the first string at the highest frets. Extended-range guitars like the double-top guitars and other instruments in the luthier tradition push the boundaries of construction and tone, but they remain within the six-string paradigm.

The harp guitar does something structurally different. It does not simply extend the fretboard – it adds an entirely different system of strings that operates according to different playing principles. This is philosophically closer to the theorbo than to a seven-string guitar, even though a modern harp guitar may look superficially similar to a standard instrument with some extra hardware attached.

This distinction also connects to questions about what kind of musical thinking the harp guitar encourages. A guitarist moving to a seven-string instrument can apply all existing technique and simply learn to incorporate the new string into that framework. A guitarist taking up the harp guitar must think more carefully about which open pitches the extra strings will be tuned to, how those pitches fit the repertoire, and how to use unstopped resonance as a compositional and performative resource rather than simply as an extension of the normal fretted range. It is a different kind of expanded thinking, and it connects naturally to the older traditions of famous classical guitar pieces that exploit open-string resonance as a central element of their sound.

The Harp Guitar Today

Interest in the harp guitar has grown steadily since the 1980s, partly driven by players like Hedges and Anderson and partly by a wider revival of interest in early twentieth-century American acoustic instruments. A small number of specialist luthiers continue to build harp guitars, drawing on both the historical Dyer-Larson tradition and contemporary innovations in construction.

Vintage Dyer and Larson Brothers instruments are collected and played by specialists around the world, and their construction techniques are studied by contemporary builders interested in understanding how the original golden-age instruments achieved their characteristic sound. The combination of historical craftsmanship and musical substance makes these instruments genuinely significant objects in the history of the guitar.

For players interested in expanding their tonal palette without moving to ensemble playing or electronic amplification, the harp guitar remains one of the most direct ways to access bass-register resonance on a purely acoustic instrument. The learning curve involves both the physical adjustments required by an instrument with additional strings and the conceptual work of thinking musically in terms of open bass resonance, but the results – as the recordings of Hedges and Anderson demonstrate – can be remarkable.

If you are interested in exploring the wider world of the guitar and its history, our overview of acoustic vs classical guitar differences provides a useful foundation, and the history of Francisco Tárrega shows how the classical guitar tradition developed in the period when harp guitars were at their peak popularity in the United States.