Old, meet New

The OpenPedal Journey

Welcome to my ongoing exploration and reimagining a piece of musical history — an 18th-century single-action pedal harp that most recently appeared in Apple TV’s Dickinson series.

This beautiful old harp has made its way to my workshop not for a traditional restoration, but as the foundation for something new: Project OpenHarp & OpenPedal are an open-source platform focused on making harps more accessible, modular, and lower cost.

It’s equal parts recreation of beauty, experimentation, and innovation — and it’s very much a work in progress.

This instrument was chosen because, while it presents beautifully, it’s far from intact. Nearly all of the original action components are missing, and much of the existing woodwork is incorrect or has been replaced with non-original parts that now need to be remade. The goal isn’t to return this harp to its exact historical form. Instead, it’s serving as a foundation for prototyping a modernized petite modular harp — one that could expand access for musicians with physical limitations, and introduce new possibilities like quarter-tone tuning through electronically controlled mechanics.

The current wood of the harp presents its own challenges. At some point in its history, the original was replaced with what I can only describe as a "furniture grade" substitute - roughly carved pieces of pine with nearly ½” layers of wood filler. This replacement lacks both the structural integrity and the sound quality of the original. Fortunately, this means we can disassemble and layout the instrument in CAD with little fear of damaging irreplaceable historical elements.

Here’s another example of the “looks good on the surface but ultimately unusable. Even in this state I began patterning/modeling the instrument in CAD to prepare for creating a new harp from this ones bones.

I knew a lot of the action was missing from this 1700s harp, but I definitely wasn’t expecting to find butter knives being used as replacement pedals!