Re: Calling all Piggyback players

[Pat Missin <pat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Uncle Ed wrote:

>Not having Missin's dexterity, I suppose I could
>learn to juggle the harps while playing and work that into the act... 

Dexterity is nice to have, but not absolutely essential. One time
whilst playing an Arabic pop tune at a British harp festival (with a
couple of my biggest harmonica influences watching me) I fumbled one
of the changes between a C major harp and a G harmonic minor. Not
quite enough to throw the tune completely off track, but enough to
fluster me and cause me to hit a bent note badly off pitch during my
moment of panic. 

For the next few days this bugged me until I realised that the
difficulty in getting smoother changes between harps was because you
were handling two things instead of one, therefore the two harps
needed to be joined together. Out came the BluTak (the sticky putty
for fixing posters to the wall).

A rolled out piece of BluTak put between the two harps allows you to
handle them as one unit, eliminates the possibility of clanking the
covers against each other and allows you to adjust the angle between
the two harps for optimal shifting from one set of holes to the other.
It also makes it easy to use two harps cupped into a microphone. Or
three harps.

BTW, if this is "cheating" what about chromatic players? I mean, a
chromatic is really just a pair of diatonic harps, but they go to the
extreme of building them both into one body and using a button
operated gizmo to swap between them. If that isn't cheating, I'd like
to know what is...

See y'all at BHF.

 -- Pat.