Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Last night I had a strange idea for a harmonica. It isn't fully formed yet, but part of it involved tuning the blow and draw reeds on some holes an octave apart (so, for example, 4 blow would be C4 and 4 draw would be C5).

I wanted to ask the wise people of this forum if that would cause any problems? I could imagine possibly the reeds might vibrate in sympathy with each other, or the higher draw reed would be impossible to play in tune without accidentally bending it. But I'm no physics expert and am sure someone on here would probably have the answers. Would valving help mitigate these hypothetical problems?

I haven't noticed any problems with notes one or even two octaves apart. The only issue I could foresee might be if the Helmholtz resonance of of a longer chamber interferes with the higher note, but I haven't experienced it myself.

Because the notes are so far apart, there is no interactive reed bending to speak of. One, perhaps unexpected, effect of this is that you can produce something rather similar to valved bends using both notes!

I played around with this a bit using my modular reeds. If you don't have any, you could take a sandwich-type harmonica and exploit the double note in the low octave. A C harmonica has a draw G note, but also three blow G notes in different octaves. Simply sliding the draw plate to the side you could match your low draw G to different notes and see what happens.

I tried to let the draw reed be both higher and lower than the blow reed, both worked. I also tried to use two blow reeds in the same hole, two octaves apart. Playing technique is a little bit different for playing high and low notes, and I found that I could silence the low reed simply by changing my embouchure to match the higher note! (The opposite was harder though...)

Thank you for your insight. I do wish I'd been able to get my hands on a modular reed harp. Would make it so much easier (and cheaper) to explore these passing curiosities I have about completely outlandish harmonica tunings.

The different playing technique is a good point though. Being such an unfamiliar setup, I imagine it might take some practice for the change of embouchure between blow and draw to start to feel natural.

For these sorts of experiments, a modular reed harp really is the way to go. If you just want to try out how the two reeds will behave in one hole though, you could, as I said, make do with an ordinary sandwich-type harmonica just holding the plates in place with your finger.

Let us hear how it works out!

Thanks. I'll do some experiments and keep refining my idea before I take the plunge on the Seydel configurator. (Money's a bit tight at the moment anyway, so it'll take me a good couple of months to save up for it.)