See our article extra Behind the Strings for an inside look at the Dusty Strings workshop.

Harp Column: I have so many questions that I want to ask you, but I want to start by asking, what’s behind the name “Dusty Strings?”

Sue Mooers: [laughs] It was tongue in cheek at first.

Ray Mooers: When you’re trying to name your fledgling company, you put down a whole list of options. Among them were Pacific Dulcimer Company, Cascade Dulcimer Company, Rainier Dulcimers, and, down the list, Dusty Strings. We talked about how dusty the shop was and since the shop was in our home our home was dusty as well. But Dusty Strings then expanded to be more of a metaphor for the folk music revival at the time, really. People would find [dulcimers] under the bed or in the attic and they were blowing the dust off literally and tuning the instruments up to play music. It’s really kind of a metaphor for this.

HC: The story of how you happened into making hammered dulcimers is a great one, so you have to share it with our readers who don’t know how it all transpired.

RM: We were just wandering this folk festival, and the amazing thing about it is that we could have taken a right turn and listened to some music over here but we took a left turn and encountered this guy playing a hammered dulcimer. Which, I mean, that was the tipping point. That was what led us down this path.

SM: And that was in ’77. The chance encounter—it’s mind-blowing to think back, all of what flows from that. But we didn’t know for a while what [the dulcimer] even was until he was taking a class.

RM: Well I was taking my fifth year of undergrad. I had actually graduated the year prior from the University of Washington with botany and microbiology degrees. I didn’t get accepted to dental school so I had to figure out some other path. I was taking a music theory class at the UW and a fellow came—this was another one of those kinda magic moments—representing his company in Colorado called Hughes Dulcimer Company. Virgil Hughes, he traveled around the country in his van loaded with musical instrument kits: mountain dulcimers, harps, banjos, and this strange trapezoidal instrument that I now recognized from their catalog was a hammered dulcimer. This put a name to the instrument that we had seen and heard being played. At that point I ordered one and ordered a mountain dulcimer. So after we built that first kit, we were hooked kind of in the same way a lot of people were when they encountered it. We took it to an extreme degree, of course, but a lot of people had those same encounters during that time not just in Seattle but all over the country. People were finding out about this instrument, and we jumped in and wanted to learn how to build them. We read some of the meager publications that were in existence at that time about the instrument, how to build them. We sent away for that for a widely available a packet of information and plans from a builder in West Virginia. So we collected everything that we could and started building some, I’ll call ‘em prototypes. I think in the first year, 1978, I think we had built maybe 15 hammered dulcimers.

SM: We were just playing around. It was a hobby. It wasn’t conceived as a business at all.

RM: We were both of us working different jobs.

SM: But people fell in love with the sound because it was so different. So amazing.

RM: Then it was, “Would you build me one?” So we started doing that more. Then it was, “I’m not really going to get into dental school; I don’t want to keep trying. I’m done with school.”

SM: So we decided to give this a try. Let’s just see, you know, if we can build these and sell them and make a living out of it.

RM: And we were renting a house and it had a full basement, so that’s where the shop developed. The spare bedroom was an office and storage.

SM: Dining room was display room.

RM: Living room was where people would come in and we would sit down and discuss the instrument and take their order.

HC: Did you feel like a pioneer in any way? You were feeling your way out and, like you said, there wasn’t a lot of information about how to build these instruments.

SM: Well yeah, there was no set path to follow but [Ray] doesn’t tend to do that anyway. [He] likes to figure things out on his own. So I think it felt natural. It felt like the thing to do. You know this is fun. This is interesting. He likes problem solving. I accuse him of starting this business to legitimize his penchant for buying tools.

RM: You know this was like the classic entrepreneurial spirit happening. You know, there was no other drive other than that. It was drive to create things with our hands to sell them to people who appreciated the work, so that drove us. But literally in two or three months, all of a sudden we were this nexus of information about the instrument and everybody came to us, everybody brought their old ones that they had found in the attic because we were the experts. So we transitioned from knowing nothing to being experts in a matter of months.

HC: You didn’t make your first harp until you had been making hammered dulcimers for several years, so tell me how you got into harp making?

RM: I have a distinct memory as a boy, walking out to this bus stop several blocks from our house and there was a family that lived on the way to the bus stop who had this golden harp that sat in this picture window. I looked at that thing probably every day that I walked to the bus stop. Anyway, I think that did something to me, what exactly it was didn’t really surface for some years. But I started collecting everything that I could about the harp as the dulcimer business progressed. I was coming across articles and pictures and so I just grabbed those and stuffed them in a file. Then there came a point in 1984, where one of our really good, important woodworkers named Robert Coro wanted to design a new hammered dulcimer. We already had seven models of hammered dulcimers, so maybe this is the time that I’m going to get the file out and we’re going to work on a harp. We got the file out and started consuming all this information and finding other information and investigating string theory and all the nuances of constructing these instruments. But we already had some pretty good experience in constructing instruments that needed to be robust.

SM: Under high tension. Similar.

RM: Lots of strings. You know we had a pretty good feel for the structure part.

SM: We also had a network of stores selling our instruments and the appeal for the hammered dulcimer and the appeal for the harp, especially from beginning musicians, was similar.

HC: This was 1984 when you built your first harp, so your first harp just turned 30?

RM: Right.

HC: So those first models, how did they hold up? Obviously, your harp building has evolved, but how do those early models compare?

SM: We see those harps come back to us for restringing or repair or to update levers. We were using the brassrod levers, that was all that was available at that time, or no levers on some of them. I think these sound great; they look great, I mean, they’re totally dated, but you know. We hit on a sound with those early harps that really grabbed peoples’ ears.

HC: Well that’s one thing I really wanted to ask you; I think that anybody who has played on one of your harps knows what a distinct sound Dusty Strings harps have. Without giving away any trade secrets, what do you think are the most important factors in your sound?

SM: We were new to the harp world without any preconceived notions. We took what we’d learned from the hammered dulcimer and applied some of that to the harp. So the sound board material that we used was different. We didn’t use spruce. We used mahogany. We liked mahogany on the hammered dulcimer better than we did spruce, so I thought, let’s try it. We observed things on older harp models that we thought, “There’s got to be a better way to do this and avoid this problem.” We put a veneer over the top of the soundboard to try to prevent the splitting and cracking we saw on older instruments. We put a different joint at the top of the sound box that could flex over time and not open up. All those are in that FH26 that we first designed.

HC: The very first one? All of these things?

SM: The first production model had all of these things, right. The feedback we got from people right off the bat was, ‘”This sound is great, it carries. I can be heard in ensemble. This is a little harp but it sounds much bigger to people than it is.” So we thought, “Ok, we’ve got something here that serves some need or purpose that is appealing to folks. And we like it but it’s also that other people do too.” And then Ray did a ton of work on string design. You learned a lot, you know. He delves deep and researches stuff. He’s not like, “I’m going to buy a set from somebody else and just stick it on my harp.” He’s going to learn how this all works.

RM: Build my harp around it.

HC: Right, you make your own strings. So why make your own strings?

RM: Well it’s out of self preservation, I guess. There was no uniformity in string manufacturing. So you have small companies that cater to the individual builder that can do a custom set or two or three for a builder. We originally started buying our strings from Robbie Robinson and Phyllis Robinson’s harp shop. And Robbie said, early on, “Ray, I think you’re going to outstrip my ability to supply you with strings. So I think it would be good if you came down to Southern California and learned how to do it yourself.” So I went down there with one of our early production models, showed it to him, and he basically opened up their doors to me. I spent two days going through their files of materials, suppliers, information. He showed me how to wind strings on their winding machine and I took pictures and absorbed a lot. Within a month of getting back to Seattle we had our own string winding machine built and we were making strings.

HC: You’ve been building instruments for more than three decades. Over that time, what has gotten easier, what’s harder, and what is the same today as the day you started building instruments?

SM: Harder and easier, it’s just different, you know. There are just different things that are more challenging. The complexity is what’s gotten harder.

HC: The complexity of what?

SM: Everything. Information handling. Materials. Sourcing.

RM: Customer service.

SM: Customer service. Changes over the years, used to use this piece of hardware, now you use this. Somebody calls up and says, “I have an old harp I need something for it.” “Well, which harp do you have? Can you tell us what generation it is?” Servicing old instruments gets complicated because of changes over the years.

RM: We spend a lot more time servicing the fleet of harps that’s already out there, I think. There are 16,000 harps. Just in the last two weeks we’ve put the serial number 16,000 on a harp.

HC: You’ve made 16,000 harps?

RM: Yes, and when you couple that up with the about 19,000 hammered dulcimers that we’ve built, together that’s 35,000 instruments that we’ve built in our history. So they’re all out there speaking for us. Some of them are under beds and in attics and closets. Some of them are sitting in people’s living rooms. Many of them are actively played. But they change hands. Generations are going by here as people that bought the instrument in their lifetime pass away and that instrument goes to someone else.

SM: Then they want to restring it.

RM: They want information about it.

SM: So it just gets complicated as you add product and models and all that to keep it all working. Servicing. So that’s what’s different. But what’s gotten easier? I don’t know. Have things gotten easier? I don’t know I think you take those things for granted.

RM: We have a reputation. You don’t have to spend so much time and energy tooting your own horn.

SM: Validating.

RM: We have a history of instruments out there that sort of speak for themselves without us saying anything. There’s people out there that are talking about their experiences with our instruments on the internet. That solves a pretty big problem for us in terms of telling people who we are. People do it for us in a lot of ways. So that I think has gotten easier. In terms of the manufacturing, there’s a challenge here every day in the factory. Some things that we think we solved years ago and we’re never going to have that problem again and up it comes again. It’s very interesting how those things happen but I think it’s just inherent in manufacturing things out of wood.

HC: Interesting. What do you think is the most rewarding part of your business?

SM: We have a similar answer but I think we have different aspects of it too. For you, Ray, it’s got to be something along the lines of mastery of process and getting a really cool way to jigging and setting it up. And just acing it. You know, that’s pretty satisfying.

RM: It is. I think more than that for me it’s hearing from people that are enjoying their relationship with their instrument. Just people, really, hearing their stories. That’s really the best thing.

SM: The piece for me is hearing stories about how the harp has impacted somebody’s life, and some of them are profound. I keep a box of Kleenex by my desk, some of them are heartbreaking, some are truly amazing. And that’s where you just know that what you’re doing is important and has an impact. It’s just good.

RM: We also try to learn from people, and the fun thing about going to these conventions, people tell you what they think, or what they need that we’re not supplying and so those are great and fertile grounds for learning.

HC: Harpists are generally not shy about telling you.

RM: Right, right. You know we love to hear what we’re doing well, but equally I love to hear about what we are not doing well or not providing.

HC: Tell us a little about your different roles with the company. Ray, are you still building harps on a day-to-day basis?

RM: No, I haven’t been for years. In fact I really transitioned out of day-to-day woodworking at the point when we started building harps. So it’s more designing it all, a process role, sort of pushing the company in a more technological way of manufacturing.

HC: What about you, Sue?

SM: One of the nice things when we started the business is that he is the tinkerer and I had the business experience from a prior job. Then, sales, a lot of what goes on directly with the customers and dealers on the little more detailed level; I’ll get called in to help with that. Then we cross over and collaborate a lot. We’re used to working together, it doesn’t matter the arena, but it’s something that we fell into naturally early on and still do. There’s a lot where we’re just bouncing stuff back and forth. I know how we build stuff and why and how we got there.

RM: You have a really deep understanding of what goes into instruments so you’re on the phone a lot; you’re a source of information.

SM: Well when you can tell people why something is, and that there’s a good reason for it, it helps them understand.

HC: So, you’ve worked together your entire married life…

SM: Yes! And raised children.

HC: How many kids do you have?

SM: Two.

HC: I was going to ask the best and worst parts of working with your spouse, but that’s not a fair question. What one word or phrase would you choose to describe your working relationship with your spouse?

SM: Symbiotic.

RM: Mutual respect.

HC: Well, that right there sums up why you’ve been so successful. So, you’ve been innovating from the beginning; your first harp was an innovation. Now you’ve just come out with the Boulevard, which is interesting to me that after 30 years of making lever harps with lever harp tension, you decided to create a lever harp with pedal harp tension.

SM: We were asked for it. Someone suggested providing another affordable option for pedal harp students. We thought, why not do a variation of the Ravenna? Developing the Ravenna was a pretty big turning point for us, I think, in the harp world, because, again, people were asking us for an affordable instrument that worked. It took off right out of the gate, because we hit a spot that wasn’t being served well and that’s what we’ve tried to do all along in our business. The Boulevard is different in that the spot is being served well already, so we’re just kind of joining in there with people who want something; it’s got a different sound, so maybe it will appeal to people differently.

RM: But it’s probably not something we would have come out with had we not been prompted by outside sources.

SM: And in fact, we had some thoughts like, “Is it really even a good idea because it won’t be our signature sound?”

RM: We’ll give it a try.

SM: So it’s interesting. People are liking it; our feedback is good.

HC: How long does it take you to introduce a new model from the concept to production and coming off the production line?

RM: It’s an easy two years, from the time that we start, the designing, the prototyping, and then prototypes sit for months and months and months. Typically, we watch them and play them to see how they handle the stress.

HC: How much failure is involved in the process? How much do you try that doesn’t work out the way you thought it would, or that just flat-out fails?

RM: Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious. You don’t really know what’s going to happen until the instrument’s out there for a while.

SM: Until it’s proven.

RM: The reality of it is, and I think most harp companies or instrument makers in general, you do your best to create something that’s going to give a good sound, a robust construction that gives a nice useful life. And I think all of us harpmakers, we take our licks at times when something doesn’t go as well as we had hoped. So, you do your best to clean that up, and redesign and take that failure out of the instrument. Maybe there’s certain conditions under which the instrument isn’t performing well—in high humidity or low humidity. You learn with experience.

SM: I think there are a lot of things we’ve tried that we decided not to do. In the way of model changes, such as small variations of bracing on the hammered dulcimer, soundboard thickness or width on a harp, we try it and say, “No, we’re not going to adopt that change because it doesn’t improve it.” So there are things that we’ve tried that don’t go anywhere, which is different from deciding to build a model and putting it out there and finding out that you really should have done something a little differently.

RM: We’ve done a lot of experimentation on most of the models that we have created. So, we create the basic prototype, then we go into production with it, then maybe we want to refine it due to some feedback we’ve gotten. Then we’ll create five, six, or seven prototypes—that’s where we are studying a specific aspect of the construction. Maybe it’s the width of the soundboard, the depth of the body, and combinations of those two things. Then we’ll invite local players to come and help us sort it out. They’re just playing blind, they don’t know what the differences are, but we do. We’re making notes as they’re playing and then they are given the opportunity to give us feedback as to what they like, and it helps us narrow down the options. We’re not harp players ourselves. I play some, other people in the company play some, but we’re not professional harpists so we rely upon our community to give us that feedback. So we’ve had a lot of those play-offs over the years that helped us refine things.

HC: Tell us about the school you started at your store.

RM: Well, the school was a long-time dream of ours. We moved into the Fremont location just to build the instruments, then the retail store came out of that. Well, as a proprietor of a musical instruments store, you’d love to be able to offer lessons for all the instruments that you sell. It gives you a stronger connection; people stick with you, they want to learn. So, it had always been this dream to have instrument manufacturing with the retail and a school where people can learn. The pivotal point was when we moved the manufacturing over to this building [that we’re in now]. That opened up all of that space to reconfigure and enlarge the retail store and repair shop we have over there. Then we were able to create a 4,500-square-foot music school that took over a lot of the old manufacturing space where we have some private studios and three larger rooms where we can host workshops, group lessons.

HC: You have always exhibited at many of the big harp conferences, including the American Harp Society Conference, that’s really a gathering of pedal harpists. I’m interested in how you see your relationship with the pedal harp world. How do you think you fit in?

RM: The fact that we’re present; we’re not afraid of going there. I mean I love all the people involved in the pedal harp world. They’re great, great people. I’ve made some good friends. I think also, the 36-string harp is a viable tool for making music for pedal harpists. Lots of them are unable to play their pedal harp anymore, or they’ve put it aside just because they can’t physically move it. They want something a little bit lighter and lighter to the touch, something that has a nice dynamic range without so much effort. So that has played into it and given us acceptance as a company in that world.

SM: I think we provide another tool for people that widens the scope of what they can do. And it took a while, I think, for the pedal harp community to recognize what the benefits are of a lever harp but I think historically speaking that was also understandable. Because before we and Triplett and some of the other companies really started building performance quality lever harps, instruments prior to that and especially before the advent of the Loveland lever, they weren’t reliable or performance quality, not something a professional musician could actually use very well. So I think that those developments and our method of building instruments made these harps much more viable as a useful tool for teaching, or for gigging where you can’t take a pedal harp, I mean these are the things we hear from people about why they’ve finally decided to get one of these “little harps,” [laughs] which took me a minute to process the first time I heard that at an AHS conference because I thought they were making a joke, because in the lever harp world this is not a little harp. We still see people sit down at a conference who have never played [a Dusty Strings harp], who clearly have a pedal harp background, and they start playing the harp and stop part way through and say, “I can’t believe the sound of this.”

RM: “Is it amplified?”

SM: Looking around, “Is it plugged in?” That sort of thing, because there are no expectations.

RM: But the other thing that happened is Ray Pool was sitting in our booth [at an AHS conference] playing “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and flipping the levers like crazy, and it stopped people in their tracks, literally. They took notice of it. From that point on it was okay to be sitting in a lever harp booth, to be seen there. I mean it just really changed.

SM: The other thing that was a surprise to me was understanding that a lot of pedal harpists didn’t really know what to do with a lever harp. And nobody likes to look like they don’t know what they’re doing, so that would keep them from sitting down and playing.

HC: Yes, absolutely. One thing I always like to ask people at the top of their game is, if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing? Or what would you want to do?

SM: Something with my hands. That’s one thing I miss. As you grow with the business you have to do less of the hands-on.

RM: Both of us are real hands-on people. I suspect we’d be doing something similar. Maybe it’s not in music but maybe it’s in some other group of arts and crafts.

HC: Creating something together.

RM: Creating something together, marketing it together, showing it together. Going down that same path that was so exciting in the early days of this company.

HC: You’ve been making instruments for more than three decades, and obviously you’re doing something right to not only be in business but to be thriving and growing. What do you think is the secret to your longevity and your success?

SM: The thing that just popped into my head was caring about the details and the quality, and the people. We want to make sure we’ve got an anchor point to go back to if we get lost, but I think it’s all about the people. It’s who we do business with, it’s what you’re trying to do, it’s the relationships with them. And finding good people to work with is the other one.

RM: I was going to say that too. I mean we started this thing, but keeping it together is the responsibility of everybody that’s working here. Our ability to attract and keep people has been paramount really.

SM: It’s being careful in honoring the people and relationships, both people you work with inside the company and also the customers and the people you work with outside the company. It’s just caring.

RM: And we don’t have big heads. I mean really we’re just doing the best that we can and enjoying the process and enjoying the people and taking care of things when they don’t go right. Just treating customers like they want to be treated. It’s the Golden Rule.

Harp Column: I have so many questions that I want to ask you, but I want to start by asking, what’s behind the name “Dusty Strings?”

Sue Mooers: [laughs] It was tongue in cheek at first.

Ray Mooers: When you’re trying to name your fledgling company, you put down a whole list of options. Among them were Pacific Dulcimer Company, Cascade Dulcimer Company, Rainier Dulcimers, and, down the list, Dusty Strings. We talked about how dusty the shop was and since the shop was in our home our home was dusty as well. But Dusty Strings then expanded to be more of a metaphor for the folk music revival at the time, really. People would find [dulcimers] under the bed or in the attic and they were blowing the dust off literally and tuning the instruments up to play music. It’s really kind of a metaphor for this.

HC: The story of how you happened into making hammered dulcimers is a great one, so you have to share it with our readers who don’t know how it all transpired.

RM: We were just wandering this folk festival, and the amazing thing about it is that we could have taken a right turn and listened to some music over here but we took a left turn and encountered this guy playing a hammered dulcimer. Which, I mean, that was the tipping point. That was what led us down this path.

SM: And that was in ’77. The chance encounter—it’s mind-blowing to think back, all of what flows from that. But we didn’t know for a while what [the dulcimer] even was until he was taking a class.

RM: Well I was taking my fifth year of undergrad. I had actually graduated the year prior from the University of Washington with botany and microbiology degrees. I didn’t get accepted to dental school so I had to figure out some other path. I was taking a music theory class at the UW and a fellow came—this was another one of those kinda magic moments—representing his company in Colorado called Hughes Dulcimer Company. Virgil Hughes, he traveled around the country in his van loaded with musical instrument kits: mountain dulcimers, harps, banjos, and this strange trapezoidal instrument that I now recognized from their catalog was a hammered dulcimer. This put a name to the instrument that we had seen and heard being played. At that point I ordered one and ordered a mountain dulcimer. So after we built that first kit, we were hooked kind of in the same way a lot of people were when they encountered it. We took it to an extreme degree, of course, but a lot of people had those same encounters during that time not just in Seattle but all over the country. People were finding out about this instrument, and we jumped in and wanted to learn how to build them. We read some of the meager publications that were in existence at that time about the instrument, how to build them. We sent away for that for a widely available a packet of information and plans from a builder in West Virginia. So we collected everything that we could and started building some, I’ll call ‘em prototypes. I think in the first year, 1978, I think we had built maybe 15 hammered dulcimers.

SM: We were just playing around. It was a hobby. It wasn’t conceived as a business at all.

RM: We were both of us working different jobs.

SM: But people fell in love with the sound because it was so different. So amazing.

RM: Then it was, “Would you build me one?” So we started doing that more. Then it was, “I’m not really going to get into dental school; I don’t want to keep trying. I’m done with school.”

SM: So we decided to give this a try. Let’s just see, you know, if we can build these and sell them and make a living out of it.

RM: And we were renting a house and it had a full basement, so that’s where the shop developed. The spare bedroom was an office and storage.

SM: Dining room was display room.

RM: Living room was where people would come in and we would sit down and discuss the instrument and take their order.

HC: Did you feel like a pioneer in any way? You were feeling your way out and, like you said, there wasn’t a lot of information about how to build these instruments.

SM: Well yeah, there was no set path to follow but [Ray] doesn’t tend to do that anyway. [He] likes to figure things out on his own. So I think it felt natural. It felt like the thing to do. You know this is fun. This is interesting. He likes problem solving. I accuse him of starting this business to legitimize his penchant for buying tools.

RM: You know this was like the classic entrepreneurial spirit happening. You know, there was no other drive other than that. It was drive to create things with our hands to sell them to people who appreciated the work, so that drove us. But literally in two or three months, all of a sudden we were this nexus of information about the instrument and everybody came to us, everybody brought their old ones that they had found in the attic because we were the experts. So we transitioned from knowing nothing to being experts in a matter of months.

HC: You didn’t make your first harp until you had been making hammered dulcimers for several years, so tell me how you got into harp making?

RM: I have a distinct memory as a boy, walking out to this bus stop several blocks from our house and there was a family that lived on the way to the bus stop who had this golden harp that sat in this picture window. I looked at that thing probably every day that I walked to the bus stop. Anyway, I think that did something to me, what exactly it was didn’t really surface for some years. But I started collecting everything that I could about the harp as the dulcimer business progressed. I was coming across articles and pictures and so I just grabbed those and stuffed them in a file. Then there came a point in 1984, where one of our really good, important woodworkers named Robert Coro wanted to design a new hammered dulcimer. We already had seven models of hammered dulcimers, so maybe this is the time that I’m going to get the file out and we’re going to work on a harp. We got the file out and started consuming all this information and finding other information and investigating string theory and all the nuances of constructing these instruments. But we already had some pretty good experience in constructing instruments that needed to be robust.

SM: Under high tension. Similar.

RM: Lots of strings. You know we had a pretty good feel for the structure part.

SM: We also had a network of stores selling our instruments and the appeal for the hammered dulcimer and the appeal for the harp, especially from beginning musicians, was similar.

HC: This was 1984 when you built your first harp, so your first harp just turned 30?

RM: Right.

HC: So those first models, how did they hold up? Obviously, your harp building has evolved, but how do those early models compare?

SM: We see those harps come back to us for restringing or repair or to update levers. We were using the brassrod levers, that was all that was available at that time, or no levers on some of them. I think these sound great; they look great, I mean, they’re totally dated, but you know. We hit on a sound with those early harps that really grabbed peoples’ ears.

HC: Well that’s one thing I really wanted to ask you; I think that anybody who has played on one of your harps knows what a distinct sound Dusty Strings harps have. Without giving away any trade secrets, what do you think are the most important factors in your sound?

SM: We were new to the harp world without any preconceived notions. We took what we’d learned from the hammered dulcimer and applied some of that to the harp. So the sound board material that we used was different. We didn’t use spruce. We used mahogany. We liked mahogany on the hammered dulcimer better than we did spruce, so I thought, let’s try it. We observed things on older harp models that we thought, “There’s got to be a better way to do this and avoid this problem.” We put a veneer over the top of the soundboard to try to prevent the splitting and cracking we saw on older instruments. We put a different joint at the top of the sound box that could flex over time and not open up. All those are in that FH26 that we first designed.

HC: The very first one? All of these things?

SM: The first production model had all of these things, right. The feedback we got from people right off the bat was, ‘”This sound is great, it carries. I can be heard in ensemble. This is a little harp but it sounds much bigger to people than it is.” So we thought, “Ok, we’ve got something here that serves some need or purpose that is appealing to folks. And we like it but it’s also that other people do too.” And then Ray did a ton of work on string design. You learned a lot, you know. He delves deep and researches stuff. He’s not like, “I’m going to buy a set from somebody else and just stick it on my harp.” He’s going to learn how this all works.

RM: Build my harp around it.

HC: Right, you make your own strings. So why make your own strings?

RM: Well it’s out of self preservation, I guess. There was no uniformity in string manufacturing. So you have small companies that cater to the individual builder that can do a custom set or two or three for a builder. We originally started buying our strings from Robbie Robinson and Phyllis Robinson’s harp shop. And Robbie said, early on, “Ray, I think you’re going to outstrip my ability to supply you with strings. So I think it would be good if you came down to Southern California and learned how to do it yourself.” So I went down there with one of our early production models, showed it to him, and he basically opened up their doors to me. I spent two days going through their files of materials, suppliers, information. He showed me how to wind strings on their winding machine and I took pictures and absorbed a lot. Within a month of getting back to Seattle we had our own string winding machine built and we were making strings.

HC: You’ve been building instruments for more than three decades. Over that time, what has gotten easier, what’s harder, and what is the same today as the day you started building instruments?

SM: Harder and easier, it’s just different, you know. There are just different things that are more challenging. The complexity is what’s gotten harder.

HC: The complexity of what?

SM: Everything. Information handling. Materials. Sourcing.

RM: Customer service.

SM: Customer service. Changes over the years, used to use this piece of hardware, now you use this. Somebody calls up and says, “I have an old harp I need something for it.” “Well, which harp do you have? Can you tell us what generation it is?” Servicing old instruments gets complicated because of changes over the years.

RM: We spend a lot more time servicing the fleet of harps that’s already out there, I think. There are 16,000 harps. Just in the last two weeks we’ve put the serial number 16,000 on a harp.

HC: You’ve made 16,000 harps?

RM: Yes, and when you couple that up with the about 19,000 hammered dulcimers that we’ve built, together that’s 35,000 instruments that we’ve built in our history. So they’re all out there speaking for us. Some of them are under beds and in attics and closets. Some of them are sitting in people’s living rooms. Many of them are actively played. But they change hands. Generations are going by here as people that bought the instrument in their lifetime pass away and that instrument goes to someone else.

SM: Then they want to restring it.

RM: They want information about it.

SM: So it just gets complicated as you add product and models and all that to keep it all working. Servicing. So that’s what’s different. But what’s gotten easier? I don’t know. Have things gotten easier? I don’t know I think you take those things for granted.

RM: We have a reputation. You don’t have to spend so much time and energy tooting your own horn.

SM: Validating.

RM: We have a history of instruments out there that sort of speak for themselves without us saying anything. There’s people out there that are talking about their experiences with our instruments on the internet. That solves a pretty big problem for us in terms of telling people who we are. People do it for us in a lot of ways. So that I think has gotten easier. In terms of the manufacturing, there’s a challenge here every day in the factory. Some things that we think we solved years ago and we’re never going to have that problem again and up it comes again. It’s very interesting how those things happen but I think it’s just inherent in manufacturing things out of wood.

HC: Interesting. What do you think is the most rewarding part of your business?

SM: We have a similar answer but I think we have different aspects of it too. For you, Ray, it’s got to be something along the lines of mastery of process and getting a really cool way to jigging and setting it up. And just acing it. You know, that’s pretty satisfying.

RM: It is. I think more than that for me it’s hearing from people that are enjoying their relationship with their instrument. Just people, really, hearing their stories. That’s really the best thing.

SM: The piece for me is hearing stories about how the harp has impacted somebody’s life, and some of them are profound. I keep a box of Kleenex by my desk, some of them are heartbreaking, some are truly amazing. And that’s where you just know that what you’re doing is important and has an impact. It’s just good.

RM: We also try to learn from people, and the fun thing about going to these conventions, people tell you what they think, or what they need that we’re not supplying and so those are great and fertile grounds for learning.

HC: Harpists are generally not shy about telling you.

RM: Right, right. You know we love to hear what we’re doing well, but equally I love to hear about what we are not doing well or not providing.

HC: Tell us a little about your different roles with the company. Ray, are you still building harps on a day-to-day basis?

RM: No, I haven’t been for years. In fact I really transitioned out of day-to-day woodworking at the point when we started building harps. So it’s more designing it all, a process role, sort of pushing the company in a more technological way of manufacturing.

HC: What about you, Sue?

SM: One of the nice things when we started the business is that he is the tinkerer and I had the business experience from a prior job. Then, sales, a lot of what goes on directly with the customers and dealers on the little more detailed level; I’ll get called in to help with that. Then we cross over and collaborate a lot. We’re used to working together, it doesn’t matter the arena, but it’s something that we fell into naturally early on and still do. There’s a lot where we’re just bouncing stuff back and forth. I know how we build stuff and why and how we got there.

RM: You have a really deep understanding of what goes into instruments so you’re on the phone a lot; you’re a source of information.

SM: Well when you can tell people why something is, and that there’s a good reason for it, it helps them understand.

HC: So, you’ve worked together your entire married life…

SM: Yes! And raised children.

HC: How many kids do you have?

SM: Two.

HC: I was going to ask the best and worst parts of working with your spouse, but that’s not a fair question. What one word or phrase would you choose to describe your working relationship with your spouse?

SM: Symbiotic.

RM: Mutual respect.

HC: Well, that right there sums up why you’ve been so successful. So, you’ve been innovating from the beginning; your first harp was an innovation. Now you’ve just come out with the Boulevard, which is interesting to me that after 30 years of making lever harps with lever harp tension, you decided to create a lever harp with pedal harp tension.

SM: We were asked for it. Someone suggested providing another affordable option for pedal harp students. We thought, why not do a variation of the Ravenna? Developing the Ravenna was a pretty big turning point for us, I think, in the harp world, because, again, people were asking us for an affordable instrument that worked. It took off right out of the gate, because we hit a spot that wasn’t being served well and that’s what we’ve tried to do all along in our business. The Boulevard is different in that the spot is being served well already, so we’re just kind of joining in there with people who want something; it’s got a different sound, so maybe it will appeal to people differently.

RM: But it’s probably not something we would have come out with had we not been prompted by outside sources.

SM: And in fact, we had some thoughts like, “Is it really even a good idea because it won’t be our signature sound?”

RM: We’ll give it a try.

SM: So it’s interesting. People are liking it; our feedback is good.

HC: How long does it take you to introduce a new model from the concept to production and coming off the production line?

RM: It’s an easy two years, from the time that we start, the designing, the prototyping, and then prototypes sit for months and months and months. Typically, we watch them and play them to see how they handle the stress.

HC: How much failure is involved in the process? How much do you try that doesn’t work out the way you thought it would, or that just flat-out fails?

RM: Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious. You don’t really know what’s going to happen until the instrument’s out there for a while.

SM: Until it’s proven.

RM: The reality of it is, and I think most harp companies or instrument makers in general, you do your best to create something that’s going to give a good sound, a robust construction that gives a nice useful life. And I think all of us harpmakers, we take our licks at times when something doesn’t go as well as we had hoped. So, you do your best to clean that up, and redesign and take that failure out of the instrument. Maybe there’s certain conditions under which the instrument isn’t performing well—in high humidity or low humidity. You learn with experience.

SM: I think there are a lot of things we’ve tried that we decided not to do. In the way of model changes, such as small variations of bracing on the hammered dulcimer, soundboard thickness or width on a harp, we try it and say, “No, we’re not going to adopt that change because it doesn’t improve it.” So there are things that we’ve tried that don’t go anywhere, which is different from deciding to build a model and putting it out there and finding out that you really should have done something a little differently.

RM: We’ve done a lot of experimentation on most of the models that we have created. So, we create the basic prototype, then we go into production with it, then maybe we want to refine it due to some feedback we’ve gotten. Then we’ll create five, six, or seven prototypes—that’s where we are studying a specific aspect of the construction. Maybe it’s the width of the soundboard, the depth of the body, and combinations of those two things. Then we’ll invite local players to come and help us sort it out. They’re just playing blind, they don’t know what the differences are, but we do. We’re making notes as they’re playing and then they are given the opportunity to give us feedback as to what they like, and it helps us narrow down the options. We’re not harp players ourselves. I play some, other people in the company play some, but we’re not professional harpists so we rely upon our community to give us that feedback. So we’ve had a lot of those play-offs over the years that helped us refine things.

HC: Tell us about the school you started at your store.

RM: Well, the school was a long-time dream of ours. We moved into the Fremont location just to build the instruments, then the retail store came out of that. Well, as a proprietor of a musical instruments store, you’d love to be able to offer lessons for all the instruments that you sell. It gives you a stronger connection; people stick with you, they want to learn. So, it had always been this dream to have instrument manufacturing with the retail and a school where people can learn. The pivotal point was when we moved the manufacturing over to this building [that we’re in now]. That opened up all of that space to reconfigure and enlarge the retail store and repair shop we have over there. Then we were able to create a 4,500-square-foot music school that took over a lot of the old manufacturing space where we have some private studios and three larger rooms where we can host workshops, group lessons.

HC: You have always exhibited at many of the big harp conferences, including the American Harp Society Conference, that’s really a gathering of pedal harpists. I’m interested in how you see your relationship with the pedal harp world. How do you think you fit in?

RM: The fact that we’re present; we’re not afraid of going there. I mean I love all the people involved in the pedal harp world. They’re great, great people. I’ve made some good friends. I think also, the 36-string harp is a viable tool for making music for pedal harpists. Lots of them are unable to play their pedal harp anymore, or they’ve put it aside just because they can’t physically move it. They want something a little bit lighter and lighter to the touch, something that has a nice dynamic range without so much effort. So that has played into it and given us acceptance as a company in that world.

SM: I think we provide another tool for people that widens the scope of what they can do. And it took a while, I think, for the pedal harp community to recognize what the benefits are of a lever harp but I think historically speaking that was also understandable. Because before we and Triplett and some of the other companies really started building performance quality lever harps, instruments prior to that and especially before the advent of the Loveland lever, they weren’t reliable or performance quality, not something a professional musician could actually use very well. So I think that those developments and our method of building instruments made these harps much more viable as a useful tool for teaching, or for gigging where you can’t take a pedal harp, I mean these are the things we hear from people about why they’ve finally decided to get one of these “little harps,” [laughs] which took me a minute to process the first time I heard that at an AHS conference because I thought they were making a joke, because in the lever harp world this is not a little harp. We still see people sit down at a conference who have never played [a Dusty Strings harp], who clearly have a pedal harp background, and they start playing the harp and stop part way through and say, “I can’t believe the sound of this.”

RM: “Is it amplified?”

SM: Looking around, “Is it plugged in?” That sort of thing, because there are no expectations.

RM: But the other thing that happened is Ray Pool was sitting in our booth [at an AHS conference] playing “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and flipping the levers like crazy, and it stopped people in their tracks, literally. They took notice of it. From that point on it was okay to be sitting in a lever harp booth, to be seen there. I mean it just really changed.

SM: The other thing that was a surprise to me was understanding that a lot of pedal harpists didn’t really know what to do with a lever harp. And nobody likes to look like they don’t know what they’re doing, so that would keep them from sitting down and playing.

HC: Yes, absolutely. One thing I always like to ask people at the top of their game is, if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing? Or what would you want to do?

SM: Something with my hands. That’s one thing I miss. As you grow with the business you have to do less of the hands-on.

RM: Both of us are real hands-on people. I suspect we’d be doing something similar. Maybe it’s not in music but maybe it’s in some other group of arts and crafts.

HC: Creating something together.

RM: Creating something together, marketing it together, showing it together. Going down that same path that was so exciting in the early days of this company.

HC: You’ve been making instruments for more than three decades, and obviously you’re doing something right to not only be in business but to be thriving and growing. What do you think is the secret to your longevity and your success?

SM: The thing that just popped into my head was caring about the details and the quality, and the people. We want to make sure we’ve got an anchor point to go back to if we get lost, but I think it’s all about the people. It’s who we do business with, it’s what you’re trying to do, it’s the relationships with them. And finding good people to work with is the other one.

RM: I was going to say that too. I mean we started this thing, but keeping it together is the responsibility of everybody that’s working here. Our ability to attract and keep people has been paramount really.

SM: It’s being careful in honoring the people and relationships, both people you work with inside the company and also the customers and the people you work with outside the company. It’s just caring.

RM: And we don’t have big heads. I mean really we’re just doing the best that we can and enjoying the process and enjoying the people and taking care of things when they don’t go right. Just treating customers like they want to be treated. It’s the Golden Rule.