Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

BASIC IDEA: To gather, compare and analyze four "slideless" tunings in terms of their diatonic, chromatic and chordal capabilities. I encourage forum members to share their thoughts on the relative merits of these AND related tunings. 2017-09-21 (7).png 2017-09-21 (2).png 2017-09-21 (3).png

NAME: Not yet sure. Thinking about “Goldschmidt/Sowards Gen. 3 with PowerChrom octaves” BASIC CONCEPT: In the original “Goldschmidt/Sowards” tuning, I distributed the twelve semitones of an octave among three banks/layers of reeds, and among four channels/holes of the harp. There were no missing sem...

A forum member pm'ed and asked if I would share with them the original "spreadsheet" for a tuning that I diagrammed. That way they could fiddle with it and explore their own tunings. I'm delighted to do this for any forum member, but understand that I use MS Word, not a ss. Just pm me the name of a ...

I encourage you to look at the tuning above.

Then, to borrow from Rod Serling: "Submitted for your approval ....""

NAME: Not yet sure. Maybe "7th Heaven Blue Dozen"? BASIC CONCEPT: For blues in G, it sure would be nice to have the full I, IV and V chords, as well as their dom7 variants, as well as at least one full and proper G minor hexatonic "blues" scale. The "standard" Richter diatonic harp lacks many of the...

I think I got this working now. I'm not entirely happy with the right half of the harp, because it does not have any tasty draw bends. What makes this harp cool though is that there is a 7th for each of the I, IV and V chords.

Newer, better diagram below:

NAME: Not yet sure. Thinking about “Goldschmidt/Sowards Gen. 2 tuning” BASIC CONCEPT: In the original “Goldschmidt/Sowards” tuning, I distributed the twelve semitones of an octave among three banks/layers of reeds, and among four channels/holes of the harp. There were no missing semitones and no re...

Just now I replaced the original diagram with a corrected diagram. I updated and corrected some small things in the body of the original post.

I have not yet made a careful tally of the types of chords.

So sorry. Just noticed that I omitted F# three times. I'll try to fix it all tomorrow. I am certain that the the error is not catastrophic to the model.

NAME: Not yet sure. Thinking about “Goldschmidt/Sowards Tuning”. BASIC CONCEPT: We often hear something like this: “Slide/chromatic harps are for melodies, and diatonic harps are for melodies and/or chordal harmony”. Of course there are wide exceptions, such as the Suzuki SSCH-56 Chord 56 model. But...