Customised harps

["Stephen Shaw" <moorcot@xxxxxxx>]

>>>Rainbow Jimmy wrote:
Since I love Lee Oskars straight out of the box, they do everything I need, 
is there an advantage to custom harps? None of my harp heros use custom 
harps. Granted there wasn't much for custom harps back when Paul Butterfield 
and Sonny Terry played, but Charlie Musselwhite and James Cotton play stock 
harps and sound great.>>>
>>>>>I don't mean to sound snide. Has anyone bought a custom harp and 
>>>>>prefered the store bought?

Rainbow Jimmy>>>>>

....and Chris Brunner wrote:
I think the message coming out of the recent thread regarding embossing and 
custom harps is not that it is easy to turn an out of the box harp into a 
harp as good as those produced by customisers, it's more that you can fix 
your own harps and return an unplayable dog back into a decent 
instrument.>>>>
>>>>Maintainence on your harps is no substite for a customised harmonica, I 
>>>>certainly can't claim to be able to set a harp up for overblows or do 
>>>>embossing or any other of the things that customisers can do for their 
>>>>customers, but I can fix most of the regular problems that happen to out 
>>>>of the box harps.>>>

I would like to know what kind of people actually decide to buy custom 
harps.  Just professionals?  The rate I get through harps, especially 
Special 20s (two months per harp if I'm lucky), would make buying custom 
harps a very expensive option for me (I don't make money from playing the 
harmonica - you hear that, Mr Taxman?  ;-)  ).  And once little things start 
needing adjusting, a bit of fine-retuning here, a bit of gapping there - 
then it isn't really a custom harp any more is it, unless I send it back (at 
frequent intervals?) to the customiser?  So I'd better have customised spare 
harps too?  I can get my Lee Oskars and Special 20s to such condition with 
my own usual bits of low-tech tweaking - including "Paddy-Richtering" my 
harps - that any faults in my playing are 100% me and 0% the harp.  So how 
much would I gain from the extra financial layout?
Of course I want to play better - but at what point does the law of 
diminishing returns set in?

Please note the question marks. I am a relatively impecunious amateur 
harmonica player but I want to keep improving.  Perhaps a customised harp 
would be a real revelation to me, but I can't afford to buy one to find out!

Steve Shaw.




Want more than the blues?  Try Irish!
http://mysite.freeserve.com/trad_irish_harmonica

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