Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

This is the best of times and the worst of times for that! The best because there have never been so many options available. The worst because it means the choice can be bewildering.

First, what type of harmonica - have you decided that at least? It would narrow down the options.

A bit of news... After much struggle trying many different approaches over the past few weeks on alternative methods for getting easy overbends on stock harps, I've finally arrived at a good solution. It will be an assembly that players can easily retrofit onto existing harps. I'm just now in the pr...

Reels can sound nice played slowly, but if you want to play with others in a session you need to be capable of playing them fast as well, as that is the norm.

Interested to hear your thoughts Lizzy. April now for mine, B

Wow! Thanks for the links. That guy Larry Howell is some designer/engineer! Fascinating stuff

Actually one area I have been exploring, just for fun, is alternative approaches to damping reeds inside diatonic harmonicas to get pure sounding, loud overbends. My Overblow Booster is one way, inspired my Masaru Hashimoto's design for the Suzuki Overdrive. It encloses the reeds in outer comb chamb...

Since its related, there is some wonderful NEW Swedish and other Scandinavian harmonica music being performed and recorded beautifully by these two guys:

https://youtu.be/lkvTJceApzU

Its an interesting question. Actually I've been talking about this recently with Roni Eytan, who plays my Quartertone DoubleChrom. It works, but is an expensive, unwieldy beast, so I was looking for another way to give him the quarter tone options he needs in a simpler harmonica. What you can do is ...

Hi Lizzy, All of these and more harmonica products/parts are in various stages of development, but in recent months I've been away travelling, as well as become focussed on a collaborative recording project - which is currently taking up quite a bit of time. In a general sense, discussing new produc...

Robert: the Suzuki Overdrive gives the option to have both overblow assist and isolated-reed expression (as with valves). The SlipSlider gives isolated-reed expression on the blow notes if you slide the draw reedplate only halfway. Doing that stops the draw reeds from vibrating, because they are abo...