Re: [Harp-L] Brass vs Stainless Steel




On Sep 5, 2008, at 7:06 PM, Vern Smith wrote:

You cannot just make a reed any shape you choose. There are the design constraints of width, length, pitch, and stiffness/ responsiveness. There is also stress distribution. You want to spread out the bending so that it does not occur at one thin place and overstress the metal.


Vern

Not in the least trying to be argumentative here Vern and all you other fellows, and believe you me, I have no reason to doubt your combined expertise on these matters...TODAY. But something has been bothering me over the years. In fact several things. One of which is:


Do you think the people/person/entity ? who originally came up with the harmonica considered ANY of these things?
Me? 'I' think they looked at music boxes and trialed and errored until they came up with a workable prototype. MY suspicion is that they copied the Chinese.


Another is: Does ANYONE think that this business about tuning was really as involved as everyone is making it out to BE?. Me? 'I' think that they originally tuned the same way an organ is tuned. What's THAT tuning? I don't know.

I feel like the proverbial neanderthal Geico caveman sitting here on my lanai with my sabre toothed kitty, sipping on a Mojito. I mean, you guys are SO far over the rainbow in advanced thinking, I feel like an absolute dunce. I pick up a spl-20 and I play it. I have NO idea of what kind of tuning it is. If it starts to sound sour, I take an emory board and give it a touch up. If the slides stick on my chromos. I clean them. If a windsaver buzzes, I change it.

When I was a kid, we didn't have any of this. I think everyone is over thinking this. I think people are taking something that worked in the FIRST place, and trying to justify WHY it works. I mean, I like explanations as well as the next guy, but some of this stuff is way deep and (frankly) over my head.

Now here's what I found out about steel. I once made a reed from a Schick copper clad steel razor blade, and while I left the bottom alone, I had to shave the top so much that you had to keep chap stick on it to keep it from rusting. It was fine as long as you played it, but let it alone for a week or two and the reed froze up. (edges?)

Same thing happened with a Gillette super blue blade. Then the Wilkinson sword stainless. It DIDN't freeze up but I had to thin the reed so much to get it to sound on normal human pressure and not breath from a wooly mamouth, that the reed eventually failed. It was LESS than paper thin. In fact, I sliced my finger working with it. It was taking me 2 1/2 hours (or more) to make-seat-tune these reeds.

Conclusion: I'm not trying to cause trouble here, but I would have to study..really really study a harmonica before I plunked down my money. It's not that I'm cheap, it's not that I'm poor. I'm merely a pessimist. I'm not trying to blow my own horn here, but I have tried everything and would have written a repair book if it had ever entered my mind. All I see when I read the current stuff is the same stuff I have been doing for years. In fact, I have procedures that still haven't been revealed.

smo-joe (aka Obese Harpo)



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