Giant Saliva Quality Awards

[Winslow Yerxa <76450.3230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

TO: internet:harp-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

======Chris Michalek writes:

     >I am going to publicly attempt Giant Steps on the diatonic
     >for the first time.  Wish me luck!

You gone need it, bro. Even Toots is wary of this one. Seriously
though, that's fantastic, Chris. Do you plan to do it all on one
harp, or play three harps tuned a major third apart to cover the
three tonal centers in the tune - or some other scheme?

=====Rhonda Reiser (Hi, Rhonda, glad you made it) write about saliva
problems when she started tongue blocking.

The fact that it didn't happen playing puckered means that
something about all this new tongue activity is stimulating the
saliva glands. It might go away once your mouth gets used to it.
I occasionally have saliva problems, usually if I've been eating
chili peppers or have just brushed my teeth - again, unusual
stimulation. Maybe you could drink some warm chamomile tea or
something soothing.

Any dental technicians out there with additional insight?

=====Harvey Andruss mentions the Malcolm Baldridge Award. I always
wondered about that one - it seems like the very first recipients
were old-line carriage trade companies like Cadillac and Xerox -
the kind of people George Bush feels at home with. By the way, I
didn't mean to diss the CX-12. It's a nice little harp - great
design, and plays and sounds decently. I'm just a little
skeptical about awards.

As to the micromarketing, the U.S. buys 70 percent of the world's
harmonicas. Hohner USA knows this, and refused to buy the modular
versions of the most popular models. I wouldn't call this "micro."
As to the solipsism and pigheadedness, all I'll say here is that
Hohner has a cluster of great products that happens to be a
phenomenal cash cow. This has allowed them to make colossal
blunders and still not learn from their mistakes. They seem to be
a bunch of provincial characters who have only a dim awareness of
the outside world, and arrogantly believe they can dictate to the
world what it will buy and what it will play. The incident at the
factory is only one of the many Soviet-style graces exhibited by
Hohner when it hosted the World Harmonica Championships last
year. Next year, it will be Tombo (Lee Oskar's manufacturer) in
Japan. It will be interesting to see how they do it.

As to the old machinery, well, Hohner has been making harps the
old fashioned way for nearly 140 years. Something's bound to wear
out eventually. And when your Model T breaks down, you might be
impressed by a shiny new Edsel . . . .

=====Charlie Sawyer asks if a reed can go out of tune SHARP.
Hmmm. Did you tune it earlier, Charlie? I've had the experience
of tuning a harp, have it play great, then be out of tune half an
hour later. I play it for awhile, put it away, come back to it
days later, and it's back in tune.

I asked Joe Filisko about this, and he said it had something to
do with having to flex the reed after tuning it - I don't
remember the precise nature of his reply.

let's say the harp was new out of the box when you played it, and
the factory tuner had tuned it, and had gotten the pitch sounding
right, but without flexing (by running air thru it - they don't suck
on them, they use machines). By playing it you might have given
it its "final" pitch, which happened to be sharp of what the
factory tuner heard. I don't know how plausible this is, but it's
a possible explanantion.