| The aim of this article
Playing chromatically on Richter based harps
is the current challenge in the harmonica world. New players
seek the new harmonica holy grail: being able to play any note
easily, as on a chromatic harmonica but to keep the diatonic
'blues harp' sound
The harmonica manufacturers and private customizers
have recently offered brand new designs or major improvements
of the existing ones as
Brendan Power explains in an article published in 2001 on Planet
Harmonica. There are now many different products and the
technique needed to play them can be very different from one
product to another. This, in addition to the fact that these
instruments are more expensive than the standard bluesharp,
make the choice of a new instrument difficult for the intermediate
player seeking chromaticity.
So we've thought of gathering the information
and proposing an at-a-glance view of the different products
in order to help the harmonica players in their search for the
"ideal" instrument.
These new designs can be divided into two categories,
as explained by Winslow Yerxa: "There's the physical
reed isolation category, represented by the overblow harp, the
Suzuki Overdrive and the Discrete Comb. Each gives some means
to physically isolate a reed so that overbending techniques
may be applied.
Within this category, the Bahnson harp
was designed specifically to facilitate overbends on a limited
selection of reeds: those that would supply the notes missing
from the chromatic scale. The Overdrive and Discrete Comb differ
from the Overblow in that they have no moving parts aside from
the reeds, and permit any of the 20 reeds to be isolated for
not only isolated-reed overbending, but for single-reed closing
bends as well. So that you could bend Blow 1 down for instance,
or bend Draw 4 down more than a semitone. This makes the Overdrive
and the Discrete Comb the only models that allow for all possible
bending reed behaviors to be accessed - isolated opeing, isolated
closing and dual-reed combination.
The XB-40 and the CX-10 fall into the added-reed category
though for very different reasons. The CX-10, like its predecessor
the Koch 980, is simply a Richter-tuned slide harp, accessing
additional notes through dedicated reeds or by standard dual-reed
bending. The XB-40 is unique in using dedicated enabler reeds,
placed entirely at the service of making it possible for all
primary reeds to bend as the closing reed of a blow-draw pair."
We hope this article will help you to find your way through
the different products. Something important to remember though
is that the technique is worthless if it does not serve the
music. There is a really danger to focus on the technique to
the detriment of the music. This is typically the case of young
overblowers wanting to play too many overblown notes just because
they're proud of being able to play them.
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