Harp guitars are individual creations in their own right. To date I have made three  - small bodied Concert sized ladder braced instrument with six sub-bass strings; a multi-scale Taropatch Harp Ukulele; and a muti-scale Grand Concert sized instrument with six sub-bass strings based around my  Samhain model. If you are interested in having a harp guitar made then contact me to discuss it further.

Jacob

This is my small bodied Concert sized ladder braced instrument with six sub-bass strings designed to be played in DADGAD and other open tunings. He is called Jacob (Jacob climbed the ladder to heaven where the angels play . . . harps) with a Lutz spruce top and English walnut back and sides. The main strings have a scale length of 624mm and the sub basses are around 710mm. Here are some recordings of me playing Jacob. First there is a medley of "Voyage D'Irelande/Terry Teehans/Lucy's Reel" (Pierre Bensusan/trad/Mike McGoldrick) and then my arrangement of Stephen Sondheim's "Send In The Clowns".

"Jacob" is now owned by talented young guitarist Dale Campbell and you can see them both in action here:

Ferdinand

I've always been attracted to the unusual and people who plough their own furrows rather than following the mainstream. Since reading Gregg Miner's wonderfull article on Harp Ukuleles I wanted to build one of my own with "a tip of the hat" to Christopher Knutsen's creations, but not a copy - one in my own style. So I decided to make one using "bits and pieces" from around the workshop. The instrument is called Ferdinand as it's an arch-uke (that's a First World War European joke ). I decided on a multi-scale instrument based around a tenor ukulele scale and chose 424mm for the treble scale, 445mm for the bass scale with 13 frets clear of the body and based around my travel guitar body size. I wanted to make the bracing "interesting" so decided on a Taropatch with four sub-bass strings so that I could use mandolin tuners for the main neck and half a set for the hollow arm. The top is a European Spruce mandolin top covered in bearclaw that I had joined and "rosetted" and then forgotten about in the workshop. The back, sides, neck and hollow arm peghead are sapele offcuts from a door frame being thrown out by a local architectural woodworking firm a few years ago. and the peghead veneers are East Indian Rosewood off-cuts. The fingerboard is a scrap of nice Macassar ebony and the bridge is English Walnut. The hollow arm is "joined" to the body on the front using an EIR strip, and to make it look "planned" rather than make-do, I curved the edges and cut an elliptical sound hole there. The binding is curly koa, and curly narra on the fingerboard. The tuners are Gotoh mandolin. The main neck is strung with Aquila nylgut Low G Tenor ukulele strings, and the sub-basses are D'Addario Classical guitar strings - 6th, 5th, 5th and 4th. I have the instrument in G C E F GG CC DD GG tuning. Here is a recording of me playing "Waffen Waltz/Ferdinand" in this tuning. The first piece was written by Chris Wood and the second is my own composition.

Samhain Fada Lámh

"Samhain Fada Lámh" means Samhain Long Arm. He has a Lutz Spruce top and mahogany back and sides (reclaimed from an Edwardian Bureau). He has a multi-scale length of 630-660mm and is Grand Concert sized. Here's a recording of me playing my own composition "Winter Sun" on this guitar in FGABbCGDADGAD tuning.

Here's a video of me demonstrating "Samhain Fada Lámh":