Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

We all know the story of how Richter tuning, created by a German in the 19th Century to play oom-pah music on the harmonica in 1st position, turned out to be magically wonderful for playing wailing , soulful Blues music when the harp was played in the 'wrong' key. 2nd Position blues harp was born, a...

Thanks drumonica. If you don't mind me asking, what's your area of interest?

Jim Antaki is someone I admire: a true harmonica innovator who has a day job as a world-renowned biomedical engineer. He's created many original harmonica products, and has been working for more than 20 years on his ELX electric harmonica: a Special 20 with optical sensors under the covers that sens...

We got a glimpse of Seydel's new 16 hole chromatic at the NAMM Show - hopefully it will officially see the light of day at Frankfurt.

Hello friends! This Forum is for intelligent discussion on all things innovative and different with respect to harmonicas. There are two main boards: Brendan’s Custom Harmonicas, Tunings etc is devoted to my stuff in all its forms: harps, tunings, books, recordings etc. Since my custom harps and tun...

Thanks Gary, a similarly afflicted alt tunings junkie like myself. Though you have it worse, I think... ;) PowerChromatic is designed for half-valved setup, as it allows semitone bends on all draw notes for easy chromatic playing with bends. I often use half-valved PowerChromatic in the Mixolydian p...

Thanks Cathal. Yes, Easy Thirds tuning would be a good option for the Lucky 13 for sure :) For those not familiar with it, Easy Thirds duplicates holes 4/5/6 of the 10 hole-diatonic lower down. So on a C Lucky 13 it would be: BLOW C E G - C E G C E G C E G C HOLE 1 2 3 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 DRAW D ...

Hi Jomiba, it's coming soon. It will be double Paddy Richter of course: Paddy Richter in both of the two low octaves. I've used that myself for quite a while in a custom-tuned version of the Hohner 365. Here is a video where you can hear Double Paddy Richter in D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5...

Suzuki had a very fertile period of development and innovation for about 5 years during the period I was working for them. All the chromatics were upgraded to the V2 lipped comb type, with several new models added: Fabulous, G-48, Sirius, and the Manji, Olive, SUB30 in diatonics. Just the low Manjis...

Thanks Ivan. I did make lipped versions of the 270 PowerComb for a while (photos are still up on my website: http://www.brendan-power.com/combs-hohner.php#lipped), but they were tricky to print and sand so I discontinued them However you could glue your Hohner slider assembly backplate on to the fro...