Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Thanks for the charts Edvin. You are really good at coming up with useful tuning schemes for any harmonica configuration :) Thank you :) However, I wonder if we're talking at cross purposes? You talk about dual-function reeds as if the reeds themselves can be played as blow or draw. I guess you ima...

I'll have another go at what could be done if we could invert the blow/draw notes in a single holes, i.e assuming the blow note and the draw note in a single hole could change place. Spiral tuning has a lot of chords and is good and intuitive for melody playing. A disadvantage of the Spiral is that ...

Thank you for the clarifying post! I'll try to think about the problem in this correct version, but it does seem tricky. For my system from the first post, I had in mind reeds that would respond to either a blow or a draw. I see now this is not what you meant, and take this as another example of how...

If you mean that you have some button that flips the holes: Could this could be selectable to only affect some holes? There could be some uses for this. Flipping the top 4 holes of a standard Richter would turn the top to a spiral tuned harp. In addition to "fixing" the inverted breathing pattern in...

One application would be to include a compact chord harmonica at the bottom of a slide harmonica. This could be useful as many popular slide harmonica tunings are optimised for single note melody rather than chords. Practical outline: In a slide harmonica we dedicate the bottom 3 holes for chords. I...

My unique Look-Dots (small position markers on the front of the comb) make it easy to know where you are on the Lucky 13 Mk2. Here's a video showing how they work for the standard Richter model. The same info applies to the PowerBender, PowerDraw and Paddy-Richter harps too. https://youtu.be/2jQx8u...

Thanks Edvin for your helpful comparison of the two tunings. One point I take from it is that I should add a Lucky 13 Solo in the key of D to the keys available! That would probably be useful for Irish Solo players, but even without it the range of keys and tunings is already really impressive. Als...

Oh I'm a bit confused then, my apologies, I'm just starting to get into the different tunings and I'm coming from the tinwhistle world. for Irish music you'd recommend a mk2 Lucky in solo tuning instead of a mk2 lucky 13 in Paddy Richter? The solo and the paddy do different things. A Solo tuned L13...

Paddy Powerbender is a nice tuning! I've been playing around with it during the spring, and I'm coming to really like it. There are several nice positions, and I really prefer the top octave to the Richter one. I never tried a Paddy Powerdraw, but thinking about it I realize that for 4th position mi...

Maybe it's a single harmonica, as described here: https://www.patmissin.com/ffaq/q36.html ?

An instrument seems to be intended for early music education without bottom reeds.

As for the numbers and brackets I have no idea!