Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

IaNerd wrote: "Another possibility is to have the slider transition some of the blow notes to what--in full Richter tuning--would have been their respective blow bends or overblows." A good idea for those wanting to retain their overblow licks in familiar places on the instrument, but without the st...

RELATED IDEA Here's another idea along the same lines, but without the intention to get better overblows. Instead it gives you extra useful chromatic notes to play outside your home scale. It will work great on half-valved slide harmonicas also, which is my preferred setup. Do exactly the same retun...

I agree, and that's a great thing for progress on the harmonica 😊 In this vein, here's another slide-diatonic tuning idea (actually two related ideas), prompted from a post by Suyash Kumar on the Facebook Harp Repair group. He demonstrated how you could get really strong overblows by lowering the pi...

It is indeed a great concept Dom! You might be interested to check out this 2015 video, showing a bunch of cool possibilities for quad-reedplate twin-comb harmonicas. The bendy version is at the end: https://youtu.be/sJGBnZXRHWg?si=AgLbWN8xwTsPAMsa I tend to think of these collectively as Double Chr...

BLU TACK vs SOLDER Gosh, you've certainly gone to town on the Blu Tack Dom! It works... but it's unnecessary to use it on such an extensive retune unless, you want to reverse/change the tuning quickly. If you decide you like the tuning scale and want to keep it, I suggest remove all the Blu Tack and...

Good logic for your tuning scheme, Dominick. It makes perfect sense to me - although I won't be surprised if you tweak it a bit after you start playing the tuning regularly. The Slide-Diatonic concept can be used in many different ways to give extra notes/bends and alternative bend-enharmonics for t...

A couple of years ago Easttop took over selling the Lucky 13. They make the decisions on which tunings to continue with or not, so you need to contact them about it. Contact details are on their website: https://easttop-harmonica.com/ If Easttop do discontinue the Lucky 13 in Diminished Tuning, othe...

Thanks! That could be useful.

I've ordered one myself, so I won't need to keep asking about small details

What's the hole spacing on the Trochilus, Dom? I mean between mouth or slider holes. On most chromatics it's roughly 9.35mm, but on the Easttop 1040 it's 9.65mm. Incidentally, it's quite easy to swap around welded reeds. I did a YouTube video on it about 15 years ago, and there have been others sinc...

Thanks for the excellent photos and info, Dom! I've been an admirer of this thin comb and vertical-slot slider format for some time. It's a very old design, dating back to the 19th century, with some commercial models made in the mid 20th century. Vertical Slot Chrom Top View.jpg Vertical Slot Chrom...