[Harp-L] Customizers and Marine Bands

[Richard Sleigh <rharp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Reasons why most customizers work with Marine Bands:

The Marine Band is still the most widely used harmonica for blues,  
and the history of the music is full of classic recordings done on  
the Marine Band. It has a lot of momentum going for it.

On a purely practical level, if you customize harps, you better be  
ready to replace reeds. That is 360 reeds if you count 18 keys from  
lo D to high G, times 20. So you need to have a lot of reeds sorted  
and ready to go.

Keeping an inventory of reeds for just the marine band is a lot of  
work. Doing the same for other harps creates whole new levels of  
complexity. It is hard to get paid for finding, sorting, and storing  
reeds.

I have tried other harps and there are some great harps out there.  
I'm just not ready to start going through the process of getting set  
up to repair a lot of different harps.

I think the manufacturers can make it easy for techs to repair their  
harps. The question is - do they want to?

Richard Sleigh

shop address:
205 E. Pine Street
Philipsburg PA 16866-1623

814 342 9722 (w)
http://www.customharmonicas.com/
http://isthmusofchristmas.com/
http://www.myspace.com/richardsleigh
http://www.youtube.com/rsleighharp