
I am a professional luthier, building mainly mandolin family instruments for over 30 years in Canada on tiny Hornby Island, BC. I built a moraharpa-styled nyckelharpa quite awhile back. It’s fun to play, but is limiting and I wanted to make something larger and with sympathetic strings, while sticking to tradition.

I chose to build a kontrabasharpa over say, a chromatic nyckelharpa as I like the drone string placed in between the two melody strings, and to be honest I don’t like the look of all the metal tuning heads on chromatic harpas (for all the sympathetics) – it takes something from the ancient look of the instrument.
To the left is a photo of the Moraharpa I made. In a way it is very like a kontrabasharpa, the way I did it, cuz it has two melody strings with a drone in between. No sympathetic strings though. The historical Moraharpa had one key row and 2 drones.
There is some info on building this fine swedish folk instrument on the web, but not really enough. Hoping you find this interesting and I am sure the Swedish builders will be quietly amused at my techiniques and ideas 🙂
I just love those harpas.