Re: Controllable Note Bending on MIDI Harmonicas - What are the Options?
Posted: Thu May 25, 2017 7:18 am
I'm practicing with my mini pitchbender prototype and having fun emulating bends in various tunings.
Interactive reed bending on harmonicas depends on the relative pitches of the two reeds in a chamber. The most stable bends are at the lowest pitch possible (eg. the full tone bend on hole 2 of a diatonic is easier to control than the semitone bend above it).
With MIDI you're freed from that constraint: all notes can bend however much you want, or is decided by the setup of the controller. Mine gives easy bends for 1, 2, and 3 semitones. This range means even normally poor harmonica tunings for bending are suddenly very expressive with MIDI bending.
For example, Solo Tuning becomes very sexy on the DM48 once you can bend all the notes. And Richter bending is now greatly expanded, because notes that don't bend on acoustic harps now do. This makes Richter Tuning sound fresh and new.
To clarify: in Richter 2nd Position lower octaves you can bend the 1st/3rd/5th of the scale. Now with MIDI bending you can bend all those (and in more degrees of bend), but also extend pitch bending to the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th scale notes. This opens up a whole new vocabulary of bending licks which have long been available on other instruments, but not the harmonica.
To get ideas, I'm listening a lot to country and bluegrass Dobro players to hear how they incorporate bends in their playing, and trying to emulate them on the DM48. It's a whole new world of expression and technique that needs a lot of time devoted to perfecting it, but I find myself getting very addicted to this new approach.
One cool thing is that the bends all work perfectly regardless of how strongly you play: they even sound at whisper-quiet levels. That's not so easy with acoustic harmonica bends, which require a certain amount of force to control.
I'm now very happy with the functionality of my mini pitchbender but want to reduce the size a bit. The next step is to get the electronics onto a printed circuit board capable of serial production, as I plan to offer these for others interested.
Interactive reed bending on harmonicas depends on the relative pitches of the two reeds in a chamber. The most stable bends are at the lowest pitch possible (eg. the full tone bend on hole 2 of a diatonic is easier to control than the semitone bend above it).
With MIDI you're freed from that constraint: all notes can bend however much you want, or is decided by the setup of the controller. Mine gives easy bends for 1, 2, and 3 semitones. This range means even normally poor harmonica tunings for bending are suddenly very expressive with MIDI bending.
For example, Solo Tuning becomes very sexy on the DM48 once you can bend all the notes. And Richter bending is now greatly expanded, because notes that don't bend on acoustic harps now do. This makes Richter Tuning sound fresh and new.
To clarify: in Richter 2nd Position lower octaves you can bend the 1st/3rd/5th of the scale. Now with MIDI bending you can bend all those (and in more degrees of bend), but also extend pitch bending to the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th scale notes. This opens up a whole new vocabulary of bending licks which have long been available on other instruments, but not the harmonica.
To get ideas, I'm listening a lot to country and bluegrass Dobro players to hear how they incorporate bends in their playing, and trying to emulate them on the DM48. It's a whole new world of expression and technique that needs a lot of time devoted to perfecting it, but I find myself getting very addicted to this new approach.
One cool thing is that the bends all work perfectly regardless of how strongly you play: they even sound at whisper-quiet levels. That's not so easy with acoustic harmonica bends, which require a certain amount of force to control.
I'm now very happy with the functionality of my mini pitchbender but want to reduce the size a bit. The next step is to get the electronics onto a printed circuit board capable of serial production, as I plan to offer these for others interested.