The rapid repetitions give Spanish classical guitar, and some mandolin playing, its studded, lilting lyricism. The tremolo is a difficult classical guitar technique where the player uses all non-thumb fingers to pluck repetitions of a note after it is initially played. “But five years ago, one night, I was just on my sofa and playing, same as usual,, ‘Oh, let me try tremolo.’” No one had really invented a new way of playing the instrument in decades. Autoharp technique, there is basically picking and strum, that’s all,” he said. “I had a question in my mind all the time. Tooīut it was that practice that led him to ponder ways to expand his technique. “ she extremely-” he said, pausing to find the right words. The average night would have him on the sofa, practicing the autoharp, driving his family crazy. Thumb leads, plucking, timing the pressing of buttons to dampen certain strings right after he played them to isolate melodies. The autoharp, with its promise of ease, had fooled him.Ĭhoi started practicing, up to 10 hours a day.
He went to the International Autoharp contest in Walnut Valley, Kansas. “I decided to be an autoharp champion,” he said. “Nobody makes autoharps like Ray does,” his friend Meis said.Īt this point, Choi thought he was pretty good at the instrument, to the point that he decided to make a commitment to it, he said. He also started making them himself, hoping to tweak the instrument more to his liking, and engraving elaborate patterns along the edges. 1 seller of autoharps in the country, meriting a visit from a quizzical representative of Oscar Schmidt, the last extant manufacturer of autoharps. Once he’d saved up enough money to open up his music store in 1991, he started selling autoharps to other Korean churches. “The autoharp is really good,” he said, simply, his eyes shining.Ĭhoi soon became something of an evangelist for the instrument. He took to the instrument as an outlet for his talents, and it clicked with his love of traditional folk music. The instrument was not uncommon in many Korean churches at the time (again, for its ease of use). Once in the States in the 1980s, Choi did what most Korean immigrants did: he worked, he saved, and he went to church.Ĭhoi naturally fell into a musical role at his church, which had an autoharp. Nobody was interested in traditional music like me,” he said.īut like so many of his generation, he felt trapped in dictator Park Chung-hee’s South Korea. His tastes, though, veered away from popular music and he fell hard for traditional music. At 9, he won a singing contest in his hometown of Chungju, South Korea, and his life’s path was set. He has small, strong hands, nimble and seemingly a good match for the autoharp’ s unforgiving proportions.Ĭhoi remembers when he decided to become a musician. Choi is a genial man with a large, friendly face, but when he shakes hands, one is immediately struck by their size. But the active areas of the store, the counters and the floors, are lined with autoharps some for repairs, some being built (he is a luthier), some for sale. String instruments of all sorts hang from the walls, and by the register, Choi hawks a small box of his CDs recorded by his son, David Choi, the YouTube star. On a recent day in the Orange County suburb of Garden Grove, Calif., Choi demonstrated his innovative autoharp technique in the music shop he’s run since 1991, Grace Music and Violin. His friend, Bill Meis, a writer and fellow autoharp enthusiast, said, “You can say without exaggeration that this is extremely unique.”
As the instrument fell into disuse after a brief folk revival in the ’60s, autoharp playing and technique might have stayed the way it was, preserved in amber, until a Southern Californian music store owner named Ray Choi smashed notions of what an autoharp could do. Very skilled players can pluck melodies out, but few achieve this level of skill.
Its 36 strings are arrayed tightly under the buttons for ease of pressing and strumming. Perhaps because of its apparent ease of use, the autoharp seems to actively discourage virtuosity. Is it any wonder the instrument was once sold door-to-door, for easy use in home parlors by non-musicians? Or that the rise of the phonograph led to its demise? The instrument was, literally, child’s play. Chords were played by pushing the button that had the letter of the chord engraved on it. The player was guided only by a sheet of paper with the lyrics of, say, “This Land is Your Land,” with the letters of chords written over the word where the change should happen. A different child would play it every morning until everyone had rotated through, at which point we would rotate through again. It accompanied the patriotic song sung every morning after the Pledge of Allegiance. My fifth-grade classroom, like so many across the country, had an autoharp. Ray Choi is the best autoharpist in the world.
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