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THE Harp-lute was invented by Edward Light, an English organist and guitar teacher living in London in the late 18th century. Light had, along with several other makers, dabbled first in variations of the then fashionable "English guitar" which was quite different from the Spanish guitar, having six courses of strings tuned over the chord of C major.1 By 1799, he had developed an instrument that was "strung and tuned like a harp"2 in which he replaced the usual wire guitar strings with gut harp strings, but only three years later, in 1802, he added four open strings to the bass side of the instrument, which then had to be supported by a harp-like mini pillar. This development lead to the body of the instrument becoming wider than in Light's guitar, and included the addition of a short neck in the shape of a familiar harmonic curve connecting the pillar to the fingerboard. The instrument now had a total of eleven strings with space on the neck to fit mechanisms to enable semitone changes on the open strings. The body had a lute-type back made of around seven separate panels, but there were still six or seven strings across a fingerboard that were played using frets. The fretted strings were tuned to the chord of C like the English guitar, but the open strings were tuned down the scale from C to F accordingly.
Light called these new instruments "harp-lutes," and, unlike the various harp-guitar predecessors, the movable knobs which he called "ditals" on the neck allowed the adjustment in pitch of some of the open strings in a way that is very familiar to any lever harpist. These instruments developed quite quickly, with almost continuous alterations being made to the number of strings and improvements to the ditals, so that by 1819 he had abandoned the fingerboards almost entirely, and the now nineteen open strings were played with both hands in the same manner as the harp, and a more sophisticated integral dital mechanism was inserted for virtually every string. At this point he called the instrument "The patent British Lute-Harp" and later "Dital harp." It had the same modulating capabilities of the lever or single action harp.
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