upped the ante and asked for a harp
guitar. “I just didn’t want to go there,
so I said, ‘No, no, no, no,’” Greenfield
recalls. “Eventually, he asked me one
more time, and I said, ‘Okay.’”
McKee wanted six bass strings and six
regular guitar strings. “We talked about
the tunings that he uses, and basically, he
doesn’t go all that radical, because you’ve
got all those bass strings. So if you want
to hit low notes, you don’t need to take
it from the regular guitar neck. Because
he’s used to playing fanned-fret instru-
ments, we made the regular neck a subtle
fan—just to deal with some of the more
normal tunings he uses on that neck.
And then there was the harp.”
During Greenfield’s repairing and
restoring days, he worked on some old
harp guitars, never imagining he’d ever
build one. “I had them in my hands,
and other than looking at them and say-
ing, ‘Wow, this is cool,’ I never took any
measurements or did any drawings. So I
had to go back and do all the research.
But what I did learn from those early years
was that the Dyer guitars and the Knutson
guitars were the most successful—to my
ear—as musical instruments. They worked
really well, and they sounded really good.
And most of the harp guitars made today
by my colleagues are sort of based, one
way or another, on those original two
lines. So that was my starting point, too. I
knew I wanted a secondary harp arm, and
then I took a left turn and went crazy—
which is what I normally do.”
One of the innovations Greenfield built
into the HG1.2 was a fulcrum-style bridge
like those you’d see on an archtop guitar.
The strings are harnessed to the end of the
guitar with a tailblock, and they pass over
the harp bridge at a very low angle. “I did
that for two reasons,” explains Greenfield.
“First, I wanted to reduce the amount of
tension on the top. Those six harp strings,
when they’re tuned to pitch, have some-
where between 180 and 200 pounds of
tension. When it goes over the bridge that
