Welcome to

Creator, editor, author, webmaster:
Gregg Miner

Consulting Editor:
Frank Doucette

Special Contributors or Assitance:
Benoît Meulle-Stef
Stacy Hobbs
Nate Blaustein
Sean Martin

Special Thanks for selflessly sharing images and information from their personal files:

Don Adams
Roger Belloni
Tony Bingham
Kerry Char
Francois Charle
John Doan
Jim Garber
Franco Ghisalberti
Robert Hartman
Michael Holmes
Giovanni Intelisano
Rainer Krause
Darcy Kuronan
Tom Noe
Frank Nordberg
Jonathon Peterson
Paul Ruppa
Riccardo Sarti
Stephen Sedgwick
Arian Sheet
Michael Simmons
Christian Steinbrecher
Andreas Stevens
Alex Timmerman
Lynn Wheelwright
Chris Wilhelm
Michael Wright
and many dozens more listed throughout the site. Additional individual contributors are listed within the Knutsen Archives, in the Forum Site Update threads, and in my frequent blogs.

Harpguitars.net is the worldwide web hub for all things harp guitar. It is funded by the nonprofit Harp Guitar Foundation, which depends on donations from readers such as you.

The site includes exhaustive sections on History, Players and Luthiers, along with extensive articles, photographs and music listings. It strives to be non-"political" and all-inclusive.

Allow me to introduce myself: Gregg Miner. I'm the original creator, webmaster, and your host. My bio and testimonials are below, and you can see my full harp guitar and other musical instrument credits on my personal web site. All text, commentary and captions are my own, except where otherwise noted. I have been helped by a small army of occasional volunteers (see list at left), and am always looking for more help from anyone with an interest in the instrument or with information and knowledge to share.

Background

In the year 2000, a web site called harpguitars.com appeared, the brainchild of Don Adams, a web designer and harp guitar aficionado. It included the first-ever public forum for harp guitar players and collectors and featured a potpourri of harp guitar topics. Unfortunately, after just two years, it went offline in 2002.

It was Don who helped plant the seed to create my own archival study site in 2002 on the instruments of Chris Knutsen, the "father" of our American hollow-arm harp guitar. That site quickly outgrew my wildest expectations, while at the same time I was discovering a huge amount of other unpublished harp guitar material scattered about. Added to all this was the ever-expanding harp guitar community, which took a new direction with the first annual (though we didn't know it at the time!) Harp Guitar Gathering®, founded by Stephen Bennett in 2003.

In April, 2004 I made the decision to expand upon Don's original concept to create a new, permanent home for all things harp guitar: Harpguitars.net. The vast Knutsen Archives were folded into the History section of the site, which quickly became one of the largest single-topic online repositories and shows no signs of being remotely complete. For its web presence, the Harp Guitar Gathering® (eventually trademarked) was originally incorporated into Harpguitars.net from the Gathering's inception.

In May of 2009 - after five years of web site growth and six consecutive Gatherings - The Harp Guitar Foundation 501(C)3 nonprofit corporation was created. Until January, 2020, it was the umbrella organization for both Harpguitars.net and the Harp Guitar Gathering®. At that time, Stephen Bennett and the Gathering staff retired from The Harp Guitar Foundation to create a new and separate nonprofit exclusively for the Harp Guitar Gathering^®, with the harpguitargathering.com domain and trademark ownership transferring from our nonprofit to theirs.

The Harp Guitar Foundation was largely made possible by the over 200 subscribers that had voluntarily contributed to my site over the last five years. Their remaining funds gave us a strong start and we begin our new future. My original philosophy for Harpguitars.net (to "serve, preserve and expand" the harp guitar world) became The Harp Guitar Foundation's Mission Statement, while my original web site hosts the nonprofit Harp Guitar Foundation pages.

Thanks for your support!

Gregg Miner

Gregg Miner has been fascinated by harp guitars since the early 1970s. He purchased his first instrument (a 1916 red sunburst Gibson) in 1983 for $1500, which took him several years to pay back on his VISA loan. He fell in love with the harp guitars of Chris Knutsen when he found his first one in 1988. He collects harp guitars, researches harp guitars, writes about harp guitars, plays harp guitars, produces harp guitar CDs, buys and sells harp guitars, and currently runs Harpguitars.net, Harp Guitar Music and the Harp Guitar Foundation. You would think that by now he would be sick of harp guitars, but he is not.
Miner’s other musical hobbies include an entire museum of plucked stringed instruments and recordings made with a hundred of the instruments, which can be seen on his personal web site.
His many non-musical interests, you just wouldn't believe.
He spends his days incognito as a Northrop Grumman manufacturing engineer.
His wife since 1989, Jaci Rohr, has not only put up with all this nonsense, she now sits on the board of the Harp Guitar Foundation. They reside in southern California with two little dogs, neither of which has shown any aptitude for the harp guitar.

Some References and Testimonials.