Awesome Harp

Musicians Alexandr Misko and Alexander Boldachev performed this powerful acoustic arrangement of The Cranberries song Zombie as a tribute to fallen Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The duo’s nuanced performance serves to remind us not to be indifferent zombies and to stand up to oppression.

Kristan Toczko is a talented harpist with a knack for playing popular music on a classical instrument. Here, she shows off her skills with a brief performance of the famous guitar intro to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on an electric lever harp. By connecting it to distortion pedals and retuning the harp, she was able to closely replicate the sound of the original.

Musician Jamie Dupuis has demonstrated his mastery of the 20-string harp guitar with his performances of Where Is My Mind and Boulevard of Broken Dreams. In this clip, he takes on the warm and enveloping vibes of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, a track that has given us chills every single time we’ve heard it played.

We always loved the lyrics of INXS 1987 song Never Tear Us Apart. Here’s a wonderful new acoustic interpretation of the passion-filled track, performed on a Timberline harp guitar by musician Jamie Dupuis, accompanied by vocalist Emma McDaniel.

Amy Turk is an incredibly talented harpist and performs everything from classical to pop to video game music. She knocked it out of the park with the solo from Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing, played on the Harp-E, an electroacoustic harp great at producing bends and microtones. Dave Stanton accompanies on guitar and bass.

For decades, musicians have used talk boxes to combine guitar sounds and their voices into a robotic effect. Dunlop sent harpist Emily Hopkins one of their analog talk boxes and some other effects pedals, and she gave them a whirl to see what kind of sounds she could make. Mostly, it’s just a video of Emily cracking up.

Harpist Kristan Toczko offers up an early Halloween treat with this seamless medley of music from Call of Duty: Black Ops – Zombies, Halloween, Stranger Things, and The Walking Dead. Then she finishes things off with a little bit of Still Dre. We also love her cover of The Simpsons theme.

Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack from Interstellar is a masterpiece of cinematic music. Musician Jamie Dupuis performed this stellar version of movie’s main theme on his 20-string harp guitar. The beautiful sunset setting for the video makes viewing even more enveloping than the music itself. Headphones recommended.

Musician Emily Hopkins transformed two of her harps into heavy metal monsters by routing their audio through the Nepenthes guitar effects pedal by Electrofoods. The distortion pedal adds insane amounts of fuzz, and when combined with other pedals, it only gets more bonkers, creating sounds straight out of Hell.

The harp’s heavenly sounds are typically associated with classical or ethereal fantasy music. But musician Maël Isaac proves rock and alternative are perfectly suited to the sit-down string instrument too. Listen up as he performs classics from David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Joy Division, The Pixies, The White Stripes, and more.

One of the things we love about NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert is that it embraces all kinds of music. In this episode, musician Bridget Kibbey wows us with her incredible harp-plucking skills, and fills our ears with the most soothing of sounds.

Musician Amy Turk turns in two excellent covers of Muse tracks, the powerful Plug in Baby and the emotional Falling Away with You, beautifully rendered on her harp. Be sure to check out her YouTube channel for more great performances.

We’re used to see musician Rob Scallon shredding licks on his electric guitar (or the occasional shovel), but for his latest video, he upgraded from eight strings to 22, and ripped up the place on harp. Honestly, we had no idea that instrument could make such sounds.