First position aeolian natural minor custom tuning.
Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2019 8:54 pm
Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum.
I recently purchased some Lee Oskar harmonicas. One of them was an A minor (2nd position). I enjoyed it, but I thought it would be fun to play in natual minor on 1st position instead. I heard that harmonica was basically a D minor on first position, but it's not the case.
edit:
When playing in 1st position, it's still has all the notes of A minor (aeolian) but on Dorian mode and with D as root note, so all the notes are still in A minor key.
I decided to buy an E minor (2nd position) labelled as A minor in 1st position (same thing, it's not an A minor harmonica). I looked on the internet for real 1st position natural harmonica but I found none. From what I found, Hohler special 20 natural minor (first position) are basically labelled differently but with the exact same layout as Lee Oskar natural minor.
I still wanted a real 1st position natural minor harmonica. The only way was to use custom tuning (which I never did before), so I took my Em 2nd position and converted it to Am 1st position by lowering the pitch of one semitone on draw 6 and 10.
Is it just me or people often do this? Is this a known alternate tuning or did I invent something I thought would be quite obivious?
Edit: Here are videos showing what it can do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVlaR_m ... dex=5&t=0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7LNqXiR4oY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eX4fncfQg0
I recently purchased some Lee Oskar harmonicas. One of them was an A minor (2nd position). I enjoyed it, but I thought it would be fun to play in natual minor on 1st position instead. I heard that harmonica was basically a D minor on first position, but it's not the case.
edit:
When playing in 1st position, it's still has all the notes of A minor (aeolian) but on Dorian mode and with D as root note, so all the notes are still in A minor key.
I decided to buy an E minor (2nd position) labelled as A minor in 1st position (same thing, it's not an A minor harmonica). I looked on the internet for real 1st position natural harmonica but I found none. From what I found, Hohler special 20 natural minor (first position) are basically labelled differently but with the exact same layout as Lee Oskar natural minor.
I still wanted a real 1st position natural minor harmonica. The only way was to use custom tuning (which I never did before), so I took my Em 2nd position and converted it to Am 1st position by lowering the pitch of one semitone on draw 6 and 10.
Is it just me or people often do this? Is this a known alternate tuning or did I invent something I thought would be quite obivious?
Edit: Here are videos showing what it can do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVlaR_m ... dex=5&t=0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7LNqXiR4oY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eX4fncfQg0