Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

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

I have a Seydel deluxe steel in PC tuning, half valved. I love it's sound - but I feel it could be more responsive. The slide assembly im not thrilled with. It's got a long travel on it, and gets off track easiky. An aftermarket mod like this would make such a difference.

I know what you mean... That traditional multi-part slide assembly is prone to leakage. Try using slider oil on the slider, and Vaseline between the stationary parts, to improve the airtightness.

Besides the integrated mouthpiece/slider, I have designed a low profile two-piece 'self sealing' slide assembly for the Hohner 270/Seydel Deluxe type of chromatic, but never publicly released them. Maybe it's time to look into that.

I'm interested in trying this out for the Game Changer Harmonica. I notice, if I play it with out the mouthpiece, I can feel the reeds more during bends and such.

The mouthpiece it comes with is already pretty shallow, which is good, but I'm curious just how close I can get to those reeds.

One question - it seems with this design on the Game Changer, that pushing the slide in would shift the hole 1 off to a spot where no reeds would play. If you wanted to play 1 blow and then 1 blow slide-in, you would actually need to shift to hole 2.

The alternative would be to design it with the slide pushing in from the left side. That'll be a big change in the way I hold the instrument! Another alternative would be retuning so that each chamber's reeds swap with the chamber below it. That is probably the answer via a lot of blue tak.

I'm curious what thoughts you all may have had concerning this. Ideally I'd like to engineer it so that the function is very similar to the current design, just with less distance to the reeds.