RE: [Harp-L] Bushman Delta Frost harmonicas in bluegrass




From: "tony" <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Cara's comments on the Delta Frost instruments, and the comparison with
Hohners, are useful, as she considers them from the perspective of fiddle
tune playing. Here the requirements are different than blues. The
instruments need to be loud, as bluegrass and Irish music is usually
acoustic. Also a fast reed response is needed, because the tunes are usually
swift. Hence any lag in reed sounding, which may pass un-noticed for blues,
is most apparent in fiddle tunes. Ideally the instrument should respond with
a relatively light breath pressure, as the volume of air prduced by the
player is divided between many notes.

When you're playing fast fiddle tunes you're playing a lot in first position (I'm talking about standard harps or Paddy Richter here, though I know Tony uses his altered tunings, and to great effect too), which means a lot of rapid air-direction changes in a very short time. Rapid reed response and the requirement for light pressure is paramount, as Tony says. You simply have to have your harps super-airtight and gapped appropriately. Speaking personally, I find I just can't get along with close gapping in this kind of music, so the overblows just have to go hang (just me, okay??). I find both Lee Oskars and Special 20s to be pretty airtight OOTB, though improvements are possible in the case of the SP20. When I got Tony Dannecker in the UK to set two up for me I noticed that he added two extra screws to hold the plates to the comb. This seems to be a simple enough improvement (why don't Hohner just DO it!) but it significantly increased the airtight feel of the harps to me. BTW, if you're in the UK and feel too impoverished to afford the big-name customisers, you should check him out - you pay hardly more for his improved Hohner harps than you would in a shop, and he'll retune them to your specs as well as make them airtight. Just as important is the evenness of reed response throughout the range of the harp. In this regard I have to say I've found SP20s to be better than LOs. I've had a couple of sets of LO A plates that I just can't get even response from, try as I might with my limited tweaking techniques. It isn't so bad as to be super-critical, but it's there. But once I've got the harps gapped the way I need them I can't detect much difference between LOs and SP20s in terms of rapidity of reed response. Set-up is everything, as long as the harp is of good basic quality to start with.


I think the XB40 falls down quite badly in the areas Tony was talking about. They are loud...but that's about it. They have a strangely dry tone (though whether listeners would pick up on that is another matter), but they certainly don't respond to light pressure and the reeds respond quite sluggishly. After a few minutes' practice with one of these I feel I've increased my lung capacity by about a litre, and If I then pick up a SP20 I'm in danger of blasting the reeds to kingdom come.

Steve






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