In an area of harp guitar design and invention still in its infancy, Massimiliano (Max) Monterosso’s brand new travel harp guitar may prove to be a viable addition. His was instigated when he had to loan a Europe-gigging Muriel Anderson his full-size hollow-arm Dyer-inspired instrument after hers suffered some major lost-in-transit damage.
He’s been quietly pursuing this experiment for several months now and just posted the completed photos on his site, now that the results are known, which he is quite happy about.
He has an interesting “making of” photo journal on his site here.
The brief photos and comments/captions here are (mostly) in Max’s words, collated from his various emails to me. I’m honored to have been in the loop, Max. Can you perhaps slip it into a little flat-rate post box and send it over to try out?!
<<< “Maple top (as in a hollow-body electric); next time I’ll try a spruce top.
Due to the extremely small size, the instrument is head heavy, but standing up with a strap balances things out. Playing it sitting down as a classical guitar helps a lot…the little hook shape on the bottom catches on your right leg and holds the guitar in place.
The neck attachment system can (next time) be inset into the body quite a bit.
The posts for the bass strings have a through-hole, so there is no need for an extra retainer for the strings once disassembled.
The pinless bridge makes taking off the strings a snap, with no pins to loosen.
For the neck, all you need is a capo to keep the strings wrapped on the tuners and minimize slipping.
The neck fits into a tapered recess, no index pins are needed, it’s a pretty snug fit, and the three machine bolts hold it really tight. The cam levers are nice to tighten things up with no tools.
The bass arm tubes are anodized aluminum.
I particularly like the invisible cover for the back access and the wood knobs.
It will all fit in an 80 x 30 x 8 cm rifle case (approx. 31 x 12 x 3”), with the guitar in two layers: neck and tubes on the bottom, body and harp head on top.
It sounds surprisingly loud when unplugged. Next is to dial in the d-tar “mama bear” electronics and see if it can give a reasonable acoustic live tone.”
And in answer to our readers’ obvious question, no, Max won’t be bringing it to HGG10 (maybe next year, though!).
