Re: Funny thing about learning bends...

[Russ Bradley <wbradley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Soaking diatonics used to be a fairly widespread practice for people 
into blues harp.  Legend has it that Rice Miller (Sonny Boy II) did it.  
Tony Glover recommended it in the first book I ever saw on playing blues 
harp.  (He claimed to soak his in vodka.)  He claimed it was mandatory 
for acoustic harp in order to get necessary volume.  The water (or 
vodka) caused the wooden comb to swell, making the harp more airtight, 
thus requiring less wind for volume, making bends easier, etc.
Then at some point in time, the practice started to be frowned upon 
(maybe around the time the cost of a Marine Band climbed past $10?).  A 
soaker ceased to be hip and was considered a hoople.  People started 
noticing how much it shortened the life of the harmonica, as well as 
causing the wood comb to swell past the cover plates and rip your lips 
up.  I suspect it was a combination of the rising cost of harmonicas and 
the growing number of high quality plastic comb harps which led to the 
decline of this practice.
Never heard of people doing it with chromatics, though.

Russ

Keith Freeman wrote:

>As a novice who's only been playing a few weeks and having difficulty with bending I'd 
>decided to concentrate mainly on learning the layout. I'd just been thinking to myself, 
>learning these bends is going to take a while...
>
>Well, I'd washed the slide of my cheapo Swan chromatic (unvalved) in water, and there 
>was still a lot of it in the harp when I started playing. I thought, what the hell, it'll get 
>blown and sucked out, I'll just keep playing. A lot of draw notes were stuck because of 
>the water, but as they started to come free and I played on regardless, I noticed a funny 
>thing - they were bending by themselves! I took advantage of this, of course, and 
>introduced bends left right and centre, wherever they were easy. Now that the harp's 
>dried out I have a lot more bending facility than I did before!
>
>Obviously this might not be something you're going to want to do with your gold-plated 
>super-harp, but it seems like a neat shortcut on an expendable one. I haven't read 
>about it on either the chromatic or the diatonic reference site, so I wondered if anyone 
>has had this experience too?
>
>-Keith Freeman
>
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