Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Brendan wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2024 1:11 pm Nice ideas

The C/F combo certainly is good for enabling easy wide interval leaps with the slider. However, I wonder how easy it would be to jump around when you're aiming for a draw bendable enharmonic of a blow reed on the C harp.

For example, this one:

The 2nd position 4 is now accessible as nice draw that bends all the way down to the flat 3 with the slide in.

Whilst in the flow of your 2nd position playing on the C scale, you'd have to jump down two holes from the 4 slide-out to the 2 slide-in to get that draw bend on the C note. And then immediately jump back to the G blues riff it was part of, on the C slide-out scale.

I'm getting a headache trying to visualise that! No doubt with practice it would get easier though, and the easy wide intervals are a good incentive.

Bringing this back up as I just saw some great playing of yours on some harmonicas tuned in fifths!

Sunny recently made me a Trochilus tuned in fourths: slide-out is a G and slide in goes up to C.

I've been playing around with it a bit, it does open up some cool new possibilities, and gives some natural reed note alternatives to the -2" bend and -3" bends in holes not too far away.

But yes jumping 2 holes or more tp hit a natural reed note to the jump back is a challenge and breaks up phrasing to much in some cases.
I've found it easier to ascend vertically *same hole using the slide) then go back down and ascend horizontally with the slide out, then ascending vertically again, etc to create melodic contours, or use the slide for large leap decorations rather than trying to use it to avoid bends and overbends.

With while Irish and fiddle music, how do you generally incorporate the slide with a fourth or fifth up tuning? Looking for some new ideas / inspirations.

It's interesting stuff, alright

On the Irish Slide-Diatonic tuning in fifths, I'm not going for bluesy bending but more trying to make the traditional fiddle tunes easier to play. There are several advantages:

1. Wide fast intervals jumping up a fifth or more and back to the pedal note can be played on the same hole, or an adjacent one. Much easier, cleaner and smoother than jumping around horizontally on the harp with your mouth!

2. The two keys (eg. G/D, or low D/A) are both useful in themselves. Generally in an Irish set of a few tunes, there will be key changes. In most cases, sticking with just the one harp in two primary keys will cover them. The thumb button can be held pressed in when playing the higher key.

3. After playing for a bit I found another nice function: playing in the same key on both reedplates. For example, on a G/D harp, it's easy to play in G on the D reedplate. That gives one useful options for playing the same phrase in a different place. For example, if the tune rises awkwardly into the high octave on the G plate, often I can simply push in the slide and play the same phrase in the middle octave on the D reedplate. I'm using that a lot in 'The Boys of Ballisodare':
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM3zBofI ... AwM3J4Zw==

4. Often the same pitch in the two reedplates is on an opposite breath. That means an unbendable blow note in the G plate will generally be a bendable draw note on the D plate - and vice versa. This means the missing chromatic pitches can be got with bending the other reedplate when necessary.

It's still early days exploring this harp, but already I wouldn't want to play Irish tunes on a standard one. The next step is make a DoubleChrom in fifths, to give me all the advantages above - plus slider decorations. That project is well advanced, but getting good response with two sliders is a challenge...