As I wait for photos from our Certified Harp Guitar Photographer Chuck Thompson, I’ll jump ahead a bit…
As mentioned in the 11th Harp Guitar Gathering overview, for my segment on Saturday just before lunch, I did a Powerpoint presentation that pretty much covered the entire history of super-trebles.
I’ve just now turned it into a permanent, fully-illustrated 4000-word PDF Members article on the site (more on web PDFs below).
It was an idea whose time had come last May, when Philippe Fouquet and I were brainstorming on an appropriate topic for my lecture at the first harp guitar festival in France – and I realized that all five performers there were now playing super-treble harp guitars!
As always, what at first glance appeared to be a simple, fun little slideshow turned into a major research project with a staggering amount of instruments and information on what some still refer to as “tinklies.”
I decided that it was interesting, important and novel enough to present again at our own Gathering. In the interim, I re-wrote a bit, with some helpful observations from John Doan (in the original audience, and of course no stranger to super-trebles himself!). John also kindly donated several never-before-seen “historical photos” – himself in the early 1980’s (already priceless and entertaining history!). (Note: the presentation and conclusions remain my own, and do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of others)
The presentation at HGG11 seemed to go over quite well, and prompted a nice round of Q & A afterwards (BTW, I should mention the full or part-time super-treble players in attendance at this year’s Gathering: Muriel Anderson, Claude Laflamme, Brad Hoyt, Nate Blausten, Ed Dowling, Michael Schreiner, Bruce Labadie, Rob Mastrianni and now Mark Farley…miss anyone?).
Any Harpguitars.net Members can now access the private article, “Super-Trebles: To Infinity and Beyond” (as always, access and copyright are strictly enforced, thanks for your cooperation).
What’s up with the quality? I had noticed that my PDF text looks terrible once posted, and finally realized it is a problem only with the Mozilla Firefox browser. Whether they’ll ever fix/improve it remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it looks perfect in Internet Explorer, Safari, and the increasingly popular Google Chrome (sorry, privacy rules do not allow downloading to your desktop).
Will/can I ever update it? Yes, I hope so – but perhaps I’ll wait for the next hundred super-treble inventions!
Thanks, Sean – make sure to go through it again sometime – some great new material (photos) on John Doan’s early years, plus a couple additional instruments (including your own latest).
Excellent and inspiring presentation. I had the chance to see it in France and is well worth ever dollar of the membership donation, just to read it.
Hi, missed the presentation ,there’s always so much to do, often wished I could be in 2 places at once. Glad you included it here. I sold my super treble equipped hg (that’s how I could afford the rest of my harp guitar “arsenal”). So, shouldn’t be in the above list. – Ed