Folktek

The Feedback Harp is a collaboratiive work of Ben and Arius. We've made a few of these. This piece was an incredibly ambitious undertaking...We worked on it for 3 months.

We intended for this piece to feedback controllably, to be sampled and altered in as many ways as we could think of...The result is an enormous mashup of sound with a very sweet undertone to it - with the added bonus of gritty possibilities. We designed the string section to feed through several circuits...First it runs side by side through an analog echo with controls for feedback, time, and, eq's and input levels... It has two two-way switches that shift pitch up or down or in combination, or knob to effect feedback and decay and a switch to filter some of that feedback. The output signal is a mix of the echo and the shifter.. Those signals are run into a much more high tech sampler delay circuit with a vast array of possibilities. About two seconds of delay, three primary delay times to choose from, and an entire switch/button array section that allows for thousands of possibilities to alter the function of the delay and fuck up sampled sounds to a great degree.

The string section you see on the left of the panel is the switch/button array. The buttons are extremely easy to press as we've allowed for less than 1/16" space for each...Tapping them lightly does the trick, or those connections can be switched to themselves or each other for a constant effect. Finally the delay signal runs into an amplifier and a speaker is mounted under the metal plate of the string section. The amp has controls for tone and volume and the speaker runs side by side with a 1/4" out. The addition of the speaker adds to the intention of the piece being an adjustable feedback machine. The housing for this piece is a vintage real leather case with removable lid.