Brendan Power

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THE PROBLEM

I became known for playing traditional Irish music on the harmonica after the release of my 1994 album New Irish Harmonica. It featured a new tuning for playing the music on diatonic harps, which I whimsically called ‘Paddy-Richter’. In the two decades since, Paddy-Richter Tuning has been adopted worldwide as one of the primary tunings for playing Irish music on the harmonica. Many learned it from my popular instructional book Play Irish Music on the Blues Harp.

That's very gratifying, but on a personal level I became more and more frustrated with a single glaring issue ALL harmonicas have with playing Irish tunes. The harmonica is a linear instrument with a single point of contact: your mouth moving along a horizontal playing surface. That’s fine for tunes which move progressively up or down the scale in easy steps. However when you get rapid repeated wide intervals between notes, the construction of the harmonica becomes a real problem! You end up jumping around all over the harp with your mouth; at high tempos this is frankly impossible to do fast, smooth and clean.

Irish dance music was formed over centuries by players of other instruments: mainly the fiddle, Uillean pipes, flute and whistle. They are NOT constructed in a linear mode. For them, it’s no problem to jump a fifth, a seventh… even an octave, and back to a pedal note in rapid succession. For example, on a fiddle it’s merely a matter of rocking your finger over a few millimeters to an adjacent string and back to get a smooth, fast wide-interval jump: so easy! Because these rapid wide note jumps have such a cool sound and are simple to play on the traditional Irish instruments, they’re used widely in Irish tunes of all types: reels, jigs, hornpipes…

Up till now there’s been no easy way to play tunes with these fast wide jumps on the harmonica. The only possible route has been a technique known as ‘tongue-switching’, where the player gets the wide intervals by playing them from the left and right corners of their mouth and flicking their tongue side to side. However this is a very difficult technique to master, and requires one to be an expert with a tongue-block embouchure. As a result there are very few players who are any good at it. And even then if you listen closely, the notes can sound a bit blurry. That’s because, since the tongue is being used to actually isolate the notes, it can’t be used to tongue selected notes to get a sharper attack when you want to. Using the lipping embouchure plus the button on the Irish Session Harp allows this flexibilty of expression.

THE SOLUTION

Like most players of Irish music, I prefer the lipping embouchure. So I wanted to find a way to keep my way of playing but also get those fast wide jumps! After a lot of thought, I finally got inspiration from another free-reed instrument: the Irish button box (also known as melodeon, or Irish button accordion).

It’s constructed with two rows of buttons, each in a different key. Irish button boxes come in two formats: with the two keys a semitone apart (B/C or C#D), or in the two main keys for Irish music (D/G). The D and G scales in the D/G box have many duplicated notes, but use different bellows actions for the two rows. Thus Irish button box players have the option of playing a tune all on one row, or crossing between the rows to grab the same notes in a more convenient location whenever they wish.

It’s this “Crossing Rows” concept that gave me the inspiration for the Irish Session Harp. Instead of playing two different harps in Paddy-Richter tuning to cover the Irish repertoire (one in G and the other in D), the Irish Session Harp combines them both in one harmonica. On the G/D version you have the G Paddy-Richter scale with button out, and the D Paddy-Richter scale with button in. The D scale is a fifth higher than the G. Thus with a simple press of the button, you instantly get a fast, smooth fifths interval!

This new type of twin-key construction in one harmonica overcomes the problem of the single linear scale. Instead of having to jump around with your mouth on one harmonica to get wide note intervals, you simply keep your mouth in the same place and press the button. It’s SO much faster, smoother and EASIER! Having this new capability (literally at your fingertip!) suddenly makes all those great Irish, Scottish, American & Canadian fiddle tunes with fast wide jumps accessible to us harmonica players! It’s a real game-changer.

Although overcoming this problem of rapid wide-interval jumps was the main reason I created the Irish Session Harp, it has two other huge plus points as well. Here’s a breakdown of the four key advantages it has over all other harmonicas for playing Irish tunes:

1. Two Primary Keys in One Instrument
Because historically tunes were largely composed on the fiddle, Irish tunes are mostly played in fiddle-friendly keys. Over 90% are in G, D, Em, Am. Standard harmonicas are in one key, so you normally have to switch harps when the key changes in a set of tunes. But the Irish Session Harp is two harmonicas in one! It comes in two versions: G/D and LowD/A. The G/D has a G Paddy-Richter scale and a D Paddy-Richter scale built in. This means you can play the vast majority of tunes on a single harmonica: simply press the button to change key! To see how the two scales line up, here's the Tuning Layout for the Irish Session Harp. (MAKE SURE TO READ THIS PAGE to understand why there's a small alteration on the slide-in scale).


2. Fast Wide-Interval Jumps are now Easy!
Many Irish tunes feature passages with rapid jumps between a pedal note and other notes a fifth, sixth, seventh, even an octave apart. Unless you're an expert tongue-switcher, at the speed of a typical session these fast wide jumps are frankly IMPOSSIBLE to play clean and smooth on standard harmonicas. Sadly that has cut out an awful lot of great tunes for us harmonica players – but no longer! On the Irish Session Harp, getting rapid wide-interval jumps is as simple as pressing a button – literally!


3. Two Places to Play Tricky Passages
Most tunes have easy bits and difficult bits! On a standard harmonica, you only have one place to play each note and phrase. If a certain passage is particularly awkward in terms of breath & hole changes you just have to suck it up, grin and bear it. But no longer! Using a similar concept to Crossing Rows on an Irish button accordion, the Irish Session Harp gives you two keys in the one instrument - with similar scales, but different breathing patterns. So if a part of the tune is awkward on the G scale, you can push the button in and play the exact same notes with an easier, smoother breathing pattern on the D scale. It can make a huge difference to the comfort and speed with which you can play fast Irish tunes.


4. Inclusion of a Crucial Extra Note
There's a fourth very cool advantage of the Irish Session Harp over other diatonic harmonicas: it gives you an extra note beyond the main mode that's used at critical points in a significant percentage of Irish tunes. To be specific: in the key of G or Am you have a C natural between the B and D notes. But quite a few well-known Irish tunes depart from the strict mode at a certain point and change it to a C#. That switch has a big effect on the flavour of the melody, and you can't play the tune correctly without it. But now the Irish Session Harp gives you that ability, and opens up access to the many cool tunes which use this note switch. Simply press the button in to play the relevant part of the tune on the D harp, and the C will automatically become a C#. I show exactly how and when to do this in the NoteFlow TAB for each tune with this crucial note change, in the NoteFlow Catalogues.

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THE AMAZING NOTEFLOW TAB SYSTEM

NoteFlow is a groundbreaking new tablature sytem for harmonica that makes learning fast and easy! I worked closely with Eddy Jay (the designer of NoteFlow) to add multiple new features and capabilities to make it incredibly effective for harmonica. There’s never been anything like NoteFlow before - you will be amazed at how intuitive it is! The best way to understand it is to see and hear it in action via this introductory video

Although NoteFlow will play on your phone, it’s optimised for laptop or PC. Please use those platforms when learning the tunes – it will be far easier!

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The standard Irish Session Harp is two Paddy-Richter scales a fifth apart. See the diagram for the simplified tuning layout in both versions (click to enlarge image). (Due to the unique comb and slider system for the Trochilus harmonica, the reeds for each key actually cross over between the two reedplates. This diagram shows the basic functionality).

The observant ones among you will notice that in hole 7 of the slide-in scales, the draw note has been flattened by one semitone. Using the G/D harp as an example, the C# of the D major scale has been lowered to C natural. This gives a correctly pitched slider jump when the harp is being played in the primary slide-out keys of G and Am, which both have a C natural in their scales.

It doesn't affect playing tunes in D with the button in, because they will all be based in the lower two octave up to hole 6 draw, the B5 note. This is the highest note found in 99% of fiddle tunes - because it's the highest note fiddle players can reach in first position.

YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THE LOGIC OF IT ONCE YOU START PLAYING ALONG WITH THE NOTEFLOW TUNES. So please overcome your initial consternation and accept my assurance that it's actually a big PLUS for the Irish Session Harp, which will become clear once you start learning tunes on it.

If you need that missing C# you can bend 7 blow D a semitone down to get it – so the note IS still available. Likewise for the slide-in A scale on the LowD/A version of the Irish Session Harp: the missing G# is available by bending the 7 blow A note down a semitone.

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Since Paddy-Richter tuning has become so widely used by Irish harmonica players, the Irish Session Harp comes as standard with two Paddy-Richter scales in the one harp. The two current models are G/D and LowD/A.

However there are a couple of other tunings that are also popular for playing Irish tunes: Easy Third and Solo Tuning. These also work great as Irish Session Harps! That’s because the big advantage of having two primary keys in the same harmonica apply to Easy Third and Solo just as well. They will also benefit from being able to play fast wide-interval jumps and the option to choose an easier alternative position for tricky phrases.

Currently the Irish Session Harp is not made at the factory in Solo Tuning or Easy Third (hopefully that will change in the future). Therefore the only way to make them is by hand-retuning a Paddy-Richter ISH into Easy Third or Solo. This takes time and considerable skill, as several reeds need to be retuned by multiple semitones. It can be done by you, if you’re already experienced with retuning reeds to that extent. If not, we offer these alternative hand-tuned Irish Session Models at a higher price (see buying options).

See the diagram for how Easy Third and Solo Tuning look in the G/D version of the Irish Session Harp (click to enlarge image). (Note relationships between the two scales are the same in the LowD/A Version).

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Playing demos