I recently bought the harp add on for Pianoteq. I noticed, that there are four pedals. One of it (assigned to cc64) is a damper pedal that workes contrary to how a piano pedal works. When pushing it, the played notes get damped. But they keep sustaining until the pedal doesn’t get pushed. This is how I noticed, that I don’t know much about how to write for harp and would like to know if there are any “first steps” resources on how to do so. How would you write the above explained pedal to kick in so I can build an expression map for it.
For a start, such a pedal doesn’t exist on an actual harp. Strings are damped with the hands, one hand-span at a time. The pedals that are on a harp are for changing pitches.
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Ah!!! Good to know. Can you say how that would be notated
There is a helpful series of videos with good fundamental information about the harp here:
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Thank you
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If you can afford the expense and looking to go deep, I feel this course by a professional harpist designed specifically for composers is great: Harp Writing for Composers (course) - Danielle Kuntz
She goes deep with various techniques, but if you’re not looking to get that advanced, in short I think the most important thing to understand are simply how the pedalling works (which helps with writing realistic chromaticism), and the distribution of notes within a hand span. Being aware of these two factors will help you with most of everyday harp writing.
Regarding the Pianoteq CC64 thing, a harp works opposite to piano regarding sustain – in that its default natural state is to sustain, and the harpist must manually dampen (exact opposite of piano). So that probably explains that behavior with the VST which is meant to replicate this.
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