Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

What a nice story! I'm much looking forward to hearing how this develops! Regarding your choice of tuning I think you are on to something. I have been recommending Paddies whenever I advice beginners for several years! My main motivations are usually to let the beginner play in minor keys and to ext...

This post could come under the category of "Too Much Information!" As long as it concerns harmonicas, there's no such thing :P FLIPPED SLIDER SOUND Using a D chrom to play in D & G is better for Irish music than using a G. In my experience, trad tunes lay better for both keys on the D. I'm a little...

2nd position works well on a PowerChromatic. When I ask the Seydel configurator for a PowerChromatic in the key of Bb though, its lowest note is a C! You could easily shift it so that blow notes become Bb, C, Eb, G, Bb, etc (A#, C, D#, A# in their notation!) That would give you the covarage you want...

Thanks again for sharing! Have you used the mute in any other harps but the SlipSliders? Mounting some kind of slide with bumps on it on the back, couldn't you add it to a normal harp? One could imagine building tunings especially taking advantage of one (or several!) mutes, and I might some day soo...

I just realised I was wrong in my first post! My understanding at the time was that, at least for the simpler setups we've discussed, the abilities of the staggered reedplate harps was basically a subset of the abilities of a SlipSlider: you get to bend most of the normally unbendable notes but you ...

That is what I meant, yes! When I wrote my first post I was apparently confused about where you had cut the reedplate. I guess I thought it made sense to cut it where the breath change happens, but both way works! I made a little diagram before I saw your new post. The two versions have different mo...

I'm always glad when I can contribute :D The design I posted, with an extra A, will allow you to bend down the B, and by moving the gap and filling it with an extra C you have created a version that allows you to bend the C down to a Bb. You want to be able to do both. Hm. I suppose in your version ...

You mention at the end that you wanted to be able to bend 7 draw. Couldn't this be done by simply adding one extra chamber and one extra reed to your first model, in the gap between your two blow reedplates? Seeing how much time you poured into this you might have found some reason I've overlooked w...

Wow! Seems I'll be looking forward to Tuesdays for a while. Thanks for letting us in to your brain! The staggered reedplates is a great start of this series. :) This design seems to, at least superficially, to be a predecessor of and to accomplish much the same thing as the SlipSlider. A downside, y...

Brendan had something like this a few years ago, it might have been called OctaHarp Selectable (?) or something similar. (edit: Yep! Found it: https://www.brendan-power.com/harmonicas-twin-diatonic.php ) It consisted of two combs arranged "in series", one behind the other, in such a way that the cha...