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He makes his headquarters in Woodland Hills, near Los Angeles, which has a concentration of harps because they are used a lot in studio music but "five harpists do 90 percent of the studio work. "I have in mind to sometime sculpt a special post," he said. He admired also a purple and gold special order that Salvi Harp Co. "Working on harps has sort of brought my life all together, making use of both my mechanical aptitude, and my artistic bent," he said.īarco is a talented wood carver and enjoys doing an especially artistic job, like his recent reconditioning of a 50-year-old harp in striking gold and cobalt blue. By no stretch a musician himself, he just likes the mechanics of harps though he does like some pops music, and feels the harp is well suited to it, especially the amplified harp, which he said makes an "OK" sound. "For an Illinois farm boy, I've gone from the ridiculous to the sublime," he laughed. Ready for anything, Barco took the job, and he's been at it ever since.
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"They said no, but how would I like to work at regulating harps?" I went to Lyon & Healy harp factory in Chicago to ask if they had a machinist's job," he recalled. "When our government contract was filled, I was out of work. Then he became a machinist in and around Chicago, even helping to make torpedos for a time. If you had told him when he was 18 that someday his life would center around harps, you would likely have gotten a horselaugh.Īfter high school, Barco spent six years in the Navy, working in demolition. Barco had his "patient" spread out on the table, inserting a new pedal rod in the post, and as he worked, kept up a running commentary on his work and life. In Ownbey's capacious Avenues home, more than 20 harps occupied every nook and cranny of the living area. He puts in 12- to 16-hour days, conditioning three or four harps a day.
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He likes to keep a harp for a day or two, or if you're in a hurry he'll do it while you wait. He hits Salt Lake City almost every year, or as needed, usually coming in March when the weather has turned pleasant. One imagines he might have been at home as a 19th century peddler, his pack filled partly with dreams, partly with pragmatic services. He is amenable to such rooming and boarding arrangements, to hold down costs.īarco looks about half idealistic college professor, half circus roustabout, with a sharp sense of humor and rough-and-ready optimism to match. Here he was the guest of Shru De Li Ownbey, regulating harps belonging to students in her Suzuki harp program and others, and putting the instruments in tiptop order for the harpists' performance of "Anna and the Echo Catcher" with the Children's Dance Theatre (concerts tonight at 8 and Saturday at 2 p.m. Such a place is Salt Lake City, where he finds far more harps per capita than the average. But Barco goes out to the places where there's a concentration of harps, often with a Suzuki program. Barco estimates there are possibly only 25,000 harps in the world, though more are being made and purchased with the harp's increased use in pops music.Harp factories do employ regulators, but few of them travel to any extent. The problem is, there's not a lot of call for his craft. So you want to be a harp regulator? Don't count on it, says Dale Barco, who thinks he may be one of a kind.