Whoops. Up and bought an autoharp on eBay. It's actually a "ChromAharP" (pretty wacky capitalization!)
While I wait for it to arrive, I got to mess with my mother-in-law's (real) Autoharp. It's a new one, with the plastic box covering the 21 chord bars. I tuned it (it was a half-step off near the top -- obviously not getting much use) and messed with it a little. No Bm! No F#m! 21 chords and I can't play any songs that are in D (which is *lots* of 'em)! E7, but no E! No C#s! Who dreamed this thing up?
I was starting to think that since they've built a few million of 'em, they must work for somebody, so maybe I could live with the native set up. But even on the 21 chord model, there's no black-key chords except for Bb7 and Ab. Huh?
So, clearly, I'll have to rebuild the chord bars. Not sure how I'll re-label 'em, but that's the least of my worries. First, to find suitable "felt". I wonder if some alternate material would work on the chord bars: some dense foam like flip-flops, or artificial chamois, or something. I also don't know if I'll rebuild the existing bars, or just replace them with duplicates -- might seem safer, and let me do some experimentation without doing any permanent damage. For one thing, I did layouts with three and even four "rows" of buttons (like the way the 21-chord boxes have three rows of 7). And to make matters worse, I read some guy talking about re-tuning some strings, as well! Turns out the low-end is non-complete, and he wanted a low G# to fatten up the E chord he was adding. More options to worry about! (Personally, I'm not terribly attracted to adding a low third to a chord...)
