Brendan Power & Alternative Harmonicas Forum

I would like to share some thoughts: 1. I love this forum and, like others, am indebted to Brendan's vision and generosity in creating and maintaining it. 2. I've now posted over 180 times. Most of those posts regard alternate tunings. 3. With my science education career cut short by a progressive g...

A "double-Richter- plus " format could be either to: (A) Repeat the first four channels at an octave lower, and delete the last channel, in a 13-hole body, or ... (B) Repeat the first four channels at an octave lower, and delete the last two channels, in a 12-hole body. Both of these provide three f...

I understand and respect all of Triona's comments on this topic. Thanks! I have now re-tuned the lower-left A to a B-flat. I would like to get the Easttop, but they are suddenly less available in the US and more expensive than they were a couple months ago. As I was re-tuning the A to B-flat, I was ...

I am a beginner at fine-tuning and re-tuning reeds. I started by trying various scratching tools. Then I had better success with sanding detailer sticks. Yesterday I tried this: 61O+rGvjC8L._SX463_.jpg in a rotary tool set to about 10-15k rpm. The "green bullets" (ha!) are rubber, and impregnated wi...

Please note that the major triads in the blow row align perfectly with those in the draw row. This makes for optimally fast and easy chugging between those chord pairs. The same is true of all the b7th tetrads. This tuning is also sports a number of triple-stop octave pairs, especially in the blow r...

When using a three-hole embouchure, this tuning has only one "sour zone". Playing 4-5-6 draw would sound bad.

Contrast this with tunings that have multiple such "sour zones".

I'm also seeing now that this basic tuning, in a 13-hole format, could sport a very nice double/repeated Richter octave a la SBS and Lucky 13.

This would not, however, result in an additional blues scale octave, because the extended area would be missing the B-flat.

I just noticed that if the partial Cmaj chord was extended for one more channel, then the minor hexatonic blues scale could be played for two complete octaves which have identical breath patterns . This seems almost paradoxical, because those two blues octaves span two different chordal areas of the...

I've got one of these in hand now and have played it a very short while. My initial impression is that I perhaps should have carried the pattern of chambers 1-7 all the way to chamber 10. In other words, Cumin Bob sans CoG. I'm starting to think that my own go-to setup for blues/pop/rock would be tw...

Clearly, our auditory system can distinguish and appreciate polyphony that is built on certain ratios of integers. Karl said: "Also, the ratio from the major 3rd to our subminor 7th is 7/5 = 1.4, which is the simplest (and therefore the smoothest sounding) ratio for the infamous tritonus, "the devil...