Vargan EKB is a Yekaterinburg workshop making ethnic musical instruments. By 2020, the project had already been operating for several years and had developed its own range of jaw harps.

The workshop’s jaw harps are made by hand. Its steel models use heat-treated stainless-steel frames and steel reeds, often with a black-oxide finish. The range has also expanded to include instruments with titanium frames and reeds, while several designs use cast bronze frames.

The models vary in pitch, and the reed stiffness depends on the tuning of the individual instrument. Some jaw harps use a removable magnetic ball: when placed on a steel reed, the magnet increases its mass and lowers the fundamental pitch.

The huge number of different models of jaw harps from this workshop, in fact, differ only in design. Even though the length of the tongues is different, the main acoustic/timbral characteristics differ at the level of microscopic nuances, and the global aspect - the pitch of the sound - is taken beyond the models: any can be made in any note. That is, when comparing different models with the same tuning, they are almost identical. When tuning by changing the thickness of the tongue, its rigidity also changes, which in principle affects some playing aspects, but not of primary importance.

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