Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

Thanks for joining us Burke, I always enjoy reading your thoughts in emails and other forums. I will emphasise to Easttop again the importance of maintaining standards with tuning. Bit it's good that more and more players, not just harp techs like you, have the skills now to fine tune and gap their ...

Winslow, if you know Harland could you make him aware of this forum and invite him to contribute? Or please send me his email address and I'll do it. It would be fantastic to have someone like that here to let us know about some of the weird and wonderful harmonicas produced in the past. It could be...

Well done on being pro-active, looking forward to hearing it

Thanks for that fascinating historical detail Winslow. You state: "The other main ways of building a harmonica, the Wiener (Viennese) and Knittlinger, put blow and draw reeds side by side so as to have two complete sets of reeds (one set on each reedplate) and always sound two reeds (two blow or two...

Nice one :) I see you're left-handed playing a standard right-handed chrom. Was it strange/annoying having to learn that way, with low notes on the right? Last year I created a bunch of left-handed combs for various chromatic models, including the CX-12: http://www.brendan-power.com/combs-lefties.ph...

Glad you're liking it Sachlaw. If they are of any help, there are a bunch of videos on the AsiaBend page of my website:

http://www.brendan-power.com/harmonicas ... p#asiabend

The board Admin David Ireland has just shown me how to input harmonica tunings with clarity on this forum. It's really easy, even I can do it! Since alt tunings will feature quite a bit here I'm sure, here's how it's done: 1. Select the </> symbol in the button above the text box. 2. The words (code...

We all know the story of how Richter tuning, created by a German in the 19th Century to play oom-pah music on the harmonica in 1st position, turned out to be magically wonderful for playing wailing , soulful Blues music when the harp was played in the 'wrong' key. 2nd Position blues harp was born, a...

Thanks drumonica. If you don't mind me asking, what's your area of interest?

Jim Antaki is someone I admire: a true harmonica innovator who has a day job as a world-renowned biomedical engineer. He's created many original harmonica products, and has been working for more than 20 years on his ELX electric harmonica: a Special 20 with optical sensors under the covers that sens...