Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Some of the tunings posted here are difficult to read, but they could be improved easily. If you click the </> symbol above the box for entering text two brackets will appear. If you put the tuning between the two brackets, you have better control over what it will look like. Check how they will loo...

This is a interesting subject and one that I have pondered at times . I am an enthusiast of Stainless Steel reeds because of this reason. Although Stainless Steel varies in composition I assume it is may be more benign to the human body. It does not readily oxidize like the Brass/Bronze families. I...

As a teenager, I used to carry an ocarina around my neck and play just about whenever I found the time, sort of like what I do with harmonicas nowadays. It had a range of a range of nine notes, fully chromatic, and I could adapt and fit just about any melody I could imagine. For most major songs I p...

Thanks for the comments! For the record, I'l like to point out that I myself play plastic harps daily, and that I absolutely don't want to point fingers at people who do. While searching (I've done quite a bit of that lately), I found the following: https://myplasticfreelife.com/2011/04/bpa-free-doe...

I would like to talk about the various materials used in our instruments. As we go about not only pressing them to our lips, but also ingesting whatever dissolves into the saliva, which goes back and forth into the harp as we blow and draw for hours a week all year around. When it comes to food pack...

Thank for the encouragement! The music I try to play is really not written with the harmonica in mind :) The purpose of the repeated notes is twofold, but I'm afraid it has nothing to do with drones. One reason is to save me many changes of the slider; it would allow me to play quick passages in the...

I have a friend who loves music from India and the Middle East, and he wanted a harmonica to play a favorite song which is in the E harmonic minor scale. I realized that we can design a tuning with just four holes per octave in which the blow and draw notes exactly form an E harmonic minor scale an...

Does anyone have any experience with chromatics where the slide does not affect every note in the same way, i.e. raising/lowering one half step? I am aware of slide diatonics, but "going to the next note in the scale" seems to me like a fairly regular thing to do. I could imagine this would make it ...

The problem of chamber lengths has been brought up.

Couldn't this be handled by using long default chambers, and filling the back of them with some modular piece? Sort of like the Power Plugs?

A serious harp player who is not totally focused on a single genre should see the sense in owning at least one modular instrument. Just imagine going to a gig, knowing that in your bag sits precisely the harp that you need for every song! But you should be aware, that just this application usually ...