Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Belated thanks for your video, Dom. It certainly shows that your ingenious assembly works to alter draw reeds pitches in the Seydel 1847. Bertram Becher came up with a different approach he installs in his Big 6 harps, specifically to lower just a couple of notes. He kindly gave me a sample; here's ...

Someone here might be able to confirm my suspicious so I don’t have to go ahead and design and print a device that would allow me to test it I don't see why that's needed...? Why not just take the slide assembly off a chromatic, tune and gap the reeds to your desired setup/s, put your mouth over th...

That's correct Triona! Assuming of course that the primary scale (eg. C) in on the top reedplate, and the 4th down secondary scale (F) is on the lower reedplate. If the reedplates are reversed, so should the slider be. This kind of slider could easily be made at the factory with laser cutting - but ...

Thanks for the sound clip and interesting ideas, Triona. That power-chord harp sounds fun! There is a way to make a slider that plays just one hole or both holes. It can be used to play single notes and an octave or, in your case, single notes and a fifth down. A classic 270-type slider has a series...

Nice ideas 👍 The C/F combo certainly is good for enabling easy wide interval leaps with the slider. However, I wonder how easy it would be to jump around when you're aiming for a draw bendable enharmonic of a blow reed on the C harp. For example, this one: The 2nd position 4 is now accessible as nic...

IaNerd wrote: "Another possibility is to have the slider transition some of the blow notes to what--in full Richter tuning--would have been their respective blow bends or overblows." A good idea for those wanting to retain their overblow licks in familiar places on the instrument, but without the st...

RELATED IDEA Here's another idea along the same lines, but without the intention to get better overblows. Instead it gives you extra useful chromatic notes to play outside your home scale. It will work great on half-valved slide harmonicas also, which is my preferred setup. Do exactly the same retun...

I agree, and that's a great thing for progress on the harmonica 😊 In this vein, here's another slide-diatonic tuning idea (actually two related ideas), prompted from a post by Suyash Kumar on the Facebook Harp Repair group. He demonstrated how you could get really strong overblows by lowering the pi...

It is indeed a great concept Dom! You might be interested to check out this 2015 video, showing a bunch of cool possibilities for quad-reedplate twin-comb harmonicas. The bendy version is at the end: https://youtu.be/sJGBnZXRHWg?si=AgLbWN8xwTsPAMsa I tend to think of these collectively as Double Chr...

BLU TACK vs SOLDER Gosh, you've certainly gone to town on the Blu Tack Dom! It works... but it's unnecessary to use it on such an extensive retune unless, you want to reverse/change the tuning quickly. If you decide you like the tuning scale and want to keep it, I suggest remove all the Blu Tack and...