When pressing the slider of a slide-endowed harp half way in, one can sound both reedplates. One use for this on a standard chrom could be to emulate blue notes, notes outside the standard chromatic scale. I know some people do this by rapidly shifting between two adjacent chromatic notes, but I'm sure people have experimented with sounding them together as well.
What if the two blow notes or the two draw notes in the same hole formed a more sonorous interval than a minor second? If we want to keep the instrument chromatic, with solo tuning (or any tuning where all notes belong to a single major scale) unfortunately the only regular intervals the slider can have are the minor second or a diminished fifth. The later is sometimes known as "the Devils interval", and is one of the most dissonant intervals there are.
For Bebop tuning, however, the extra b flat is just enough to allow a slide interval of a major third! It would look like this:
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Blow: Slide in e g# b d
Slide out c e g bb
Draw: Slide out d f a b
Slide in f# a c# d#
Perhaps a tuning like the Power chromatic, which is already almost chromatic using bends, would be a more natural candidate? Let's look at the chart:
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Blow: Slide in e f# a c#
Slide out c d f a
Draw: Slide out d e g b
Slide in f# g# b d#
Edit: It seems I was up too late as well... There are three keys which cannot be played without moving the slide.
Of course the possibilities are yet much larger if we don't limit ourselves to regular slide intervals, but allow the slide to raise notes by different amounts.
What do you all think of this idea? Does anyone know of any previous use of the half-slide technique to produce (partial) chords?