RE: Leo Shi Bass

[Pat Missin <pat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scorcher wrote:
>
>Pat,
>In that earlier post you referenced, you said:
>
>> Of course, you could also buy two of them, raise all the notes on one
>> of them by a semitone, hinge them together and you would have a good
>> single reed chromatic bass at quite a reasonable cost. I must admit,
>> I'm quite a fan of the single reed bass sound (I love my Tombo
>> Contrabass even though it only goes down to a baritone C), but I can
>> never bring myself to pay the prices that people ask for a second hand
>> Hohner 264. This might be an affordable alternative - I'd be very
>> interested to hear from anyone who tries one.
>
>Pat, would it be feasable to add the second reed plate to the bottom of this
>harmonica (convert it from a single)?

Not really. At least not if you are talking about having both sets of
reeds played by the same mouthpiece. The comb is closed at the bottom,
so you would have to do some fairly drastic alteration to add a second
reedplate to it.

In the leaflet that came with the Leo Shi bass, there are diagrams of
several other similar harps. One of them seems to be an octave tuned
version of this sort of harmonica. I assume it has two reedplates and
this might be a starting point for what you are talking about, however
it starts on a tenor C rather than the low E of the "bass", so you
would not be able to swap reedplates between the two instruments.

 -- Pat.