A new 10-hole Richter accordion-reed harp is coming along - the comb is designed and made, reeds prepared (Hohner, from one of their small boxes), and I'll assemble later today. Despite the 16mm wide reed blocks, I've come up with an interesting comb design that gets the mouth hole spacing down to 9.4 mm, the same as a chromatic.
There's great potential for making unusual harmonicas using standard accordion reeds, because:
1. Since they come in double reed units, which can be configured with others in any combination, the instrument size, range and scale possibilities are enormous.
2. The reed pairs come in a huge number of note combinations: same notes, semitones, tones, thirds, fourths, fifths apart....
3. They can be blow/draw or draw/blow units depending on which way up the reed block is placed on the comb.
It goes on... once you start thinking about it, the sky's the limit! I want to try making bass and chord harps with them, because the reeds have such a rich, loud sound. It's an intriguing new area of exploration.
I'm taking some accordion-reed harps, along with a lot of other oddities and one-offs, to next weekend's Harpmeet in Sweden. Before the festival I'm looking forward to spending a couple of days tinkering with Joel Andersson in his workshop, should be fun
