Steve Triplett built guitars and mandolins before harps.

Triplett Harps is a lever-harp maker in San Luis Obispo, on California’s Central Coast, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Its founder came from other instruments: “Steve Triplett started Santa Barbara Luthiery in the late 1970’s where he built guitars and mandolins… made his first 34 string model in 1980,” the company’s history says. He sold his early harps in person, at Renaissance fairs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the company’s tagline keeps the date: “building the highest quality harps since 1980.”

It is a family business, under the founder’s own surname, and has stayed one for more than four decades. In 2006 the local weekly New Times San Luis Obispo reported that Debbie and Stephen Triplett ran the shop at 220 Suburban Road, with 14 employees, and that the business had “went international about 10 years ago” — that is, in the mid-1990s. The website footer names the company as Triplett Harps, Incorporated, with a 2025 copyright; we did not check the California company register.

A note on the website. Archived copies show it online through June 2026, but when we checked on 2 October 2026 the address would not resolve, though the domain remained registered. That looks like a hosting or technical fault, not a closure, and we found no news of one; we describe Triplett as trading on the evidence we have.

American materials — and Camac levers.

Triplett’s statement of origin is enthusiastic: “proudly built in the usa,” “handcrafted with pride. played with joy.” It goes further on materials: “We take pride in using American-made materials to create our harps, cases, wrenches and strings.”

Then comes the honest exception. Lever harps need sharping levers — small mechanisms on each string that raise its pitch a semitone, flipped by hand when a piece changes key — and Triplett says: “Our sharpening levers are manufactured in France by Camac harps.” The maker of the levers is Camac, the French harp company founded in 1972 by the brothers Gérard and Joël Garnier in Mouzeil, near Nantes, and still independent. An American harp, in other words, carries French hardware, and the company says so.

Its other promises are practical and specific: a seven-year warranty, and the unusual note that there is “no heating or cooling in our factory” — a detail it chose to publish. Triplett makes only lever harps, so its range is built around string counts rather than pedal mechanisms. Its models include the Celtic 34, the wire-strung Avalon 26 — a nod to the older, wire-strung Irish harp — the Eclipse, the Christina therapy harp, the Sierra 34 and the Shanti 28, and dealers list an Axline 30.

Lever harps and the Irish line.

Triplett builds lever harps rather than pedal harps, and lever harps descend from the Irish tradition. Lever harps like these are the descendants of the Irish harp, and that harp has its own legal life. Ireland’s government says it has “the distinction of being the only nation to have a musical instrument as a national emblem,” and Ireland’s patent office says the state harp is excluded “from registration or use as trade marks.” Guinness says it registered its own harp as a trademark in 1876, and that this is why the two face opposite ways. Guinness’s archive says the harp “has been synonymous with Guinness since 1862 when it was used as a symbol on the first bottle label,” and its Storehouse says it was trademarked in 1876, “the first year of trademark registration in the United Kingdom.” The Irish Times reported in 2013 that state archives show officials in the 1980s “feared Guinness could challenge” the state’s plans, and registered “a generic, nine-stringed harp facing in just one direction – left.”

The pedal harp is the other branch of the family, and the one that Triplett does not build. Sébastien Erard applied for an English patent, number 3332, in 1810, for a double-action harp with two forks per string worked by pedals; a Royal College of Music thesis by Fanny Guillaume-Castel says it “remains the standard pedal harp mechanism today.” Lever harps do the same job by hand, one string at a time, which is why the lever matters so much — and why Triplett names who makes it. Erard received the English patent in October 1810, sold the first double-action harps in late 1811 and, the thesis says, about a hundred in 1812, “the first complete year of sale.” His advertisement promised strings “producing three distinct tones instead of two.”

Timber law touches every maker. In 2017 the CITES convention brought the whole rosewood genus, Dalbergia, under its Appendix II controls; since 26 November 2019 it has exempted “finished musical instruments, finished musical instrument parts and finished musical instrument accessories,” though Brazilian rosewood stays in Appendix I. We found no source linking any maker in this round to those timbers. CITES defines a finished musical instrument as one “that is ready to play or needs only the installation of parts to make it playable,” and says the term “includes antique instruments.”

Plain lower case for a workshop.

Triplett writes its slogans consistently in lower case — “proudly built in the usa,” “handcrafted with pride. played with joy.” — which gives the brand the tone of a workshop notebook rather than a catalogue. We did not determine its logo colours.

For a design guide, Triplett is a small lesson in origin claims. It says “built in the usa” and “American-made materials,” and then names the one part made in France. That candour costs nothing and earns trust. It also matches its lower-case voice: a small workshop telling you exactly what is in the box. Compare Rees, another American lever-harp family whose best-known harp grew out of its founder’s dulcimer experiments, which sells colour and fun where Triplett sells craft and plain speech. Venus, the Chicago pedal-harp maker, took a different path and stopped building new production harps in 2018.

For this guide we use a maple brown and a honey with a sans serif, an unofficial interpretation. No harp, lever or logo is reproduced.

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