Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Sorry Patrick! I went off on a tangent, talking about a different way of looking at the PowerChromatic scale only and not attending to your main point. Combing COT with PC in either direction might give a curious result on paper, but I'm not sure its that musically appealing compared to just raising...

My horizontally moving Slider-Mouthpiece invention has some useful advantages over conventional harmonica slider assemblies. Here I describe its back story and essential features:

https://youtu.be/iU-TrFzMbh8

These are fun to make, and can be very useful!

https://youtu.be/cCkGUm5qZvc

Another interesting alternative is to make your own Irish Session Harp from a Low D chromatic. You can keep both keys in Solo Tuning by displacing the D and G scales. This works on both straight and cross tuned chromatics. Here's how it would look: SLIDE OUT: DE. F#G. AB. DC#. DE. F#G. AB. DC#. DE e...

There are several ways of using a single slide harmonica for playing in keys D & G for Irish music. This post could come under the category of "Too Much Information!", but it's something I've thought about a lot - so here are some ideas to mull over: FLIPPED SLIDER SOUND Using a D chrom to play in D...

Recently I posted here about a Richter diatonic harmonica design with staggered reedplates and a front slider. It had 13 bends (compared to 8 on a normal harp), but I hadn't seen how to add the crucial 14th bend on hole 7. I designed the harp between 2016-18. It was very promising but that missing b...

Thanks for your message Roman. There is a historical free reed instrument that uses this principle of shortening the reed to get higher notes: the single-reed pitch pipe. John Cook did an excellent video on it, and actually made one from scratch: https://youtu.be/V_sPcJkstSo From time to time people...

One of my best inventions so far! It has a lot of potential for many different types of harmonicas, I believe. https://youtu.be/0EZn2AKX40I (This invention is shared under a Creative Commons License: MAGNETICALLY ATTRACTIVE REEDPLATE SLIDERS © 2022 by Brendan Power is licensed under Attribution-NonC...

The Overblow-Booster Mk2 is now available as a Parts Kit to retrofit to your own harp. Here's a hands-on instructional video showing how it's done:

https://youtu.be/j-9AM5eahfY

Link to the Ordering page is in the Description.

As often Edvin, you take a single idea and run with it, extrapolating to new applications I hadn't considered. Always surprising and interesting 👍 The rocker arm design shown in my video relies on gravity to hang out of the way in the neutral position. So on conventional diatonic harmonicas it will ...