[Harp-L] re: Seydel Concerto otave harp - liking it (Winslow Yerxa)

[David Payne <dmatthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Lemme start out with the âI am Seydel dealerâ disclaimer... 
The Concerto is one of the old ones, the comb is like the DDR-era combs, made from the same hard plastic. 
I've always been partial to Auto Valves, especially since I'm such a wood-o-phile, etc., and I was intially reluctant to try it, mostly because of the plastic, but I needed some octave harps and at $53, I started building my octave collection with those. Before I got the 48 chord, I was using a Vinetta in conjuction with octave harps. 
Winslow, if your Concerto is solo-tuned, it is probably before 2005 or so. The way I understand it, it was originally not a Richter note placement instrument. 

The Concerto is very responsive as far as Octave harps go. Again, dealer disclaimer, it is much more responsive than my Auto Valves. The trade-off is if you want to play it for something it wasn't intended for, like taking valves off the low reedplate and lip blocking to play it like a blues harp, the Auto Valve does work better for that. That's the basic role my Auto Valves have now. This could be different for somebody else's embouchure.

Those independent screws do make it tight. There's a lot of them. I mounted some on a sextet wheel and didn't have extra screws, so I removed four reedplate screws per harp and used those screws to mount them to the wheel and couldn't tell any difference in tightness. 

You can have a lot of fun with these and since the single note isn't as important, it's one tool beginners can use to learn their way around. When you mount them together, you can play a boatload of chords and also play somewhat chromatically. I've got one song I've been working on, an old West Virginia fiddle tune called âElk River Blues.â It's a minor song, you can play it on a Paddy Richter easy enough, with that three blow raised a step to seat the minor scale. 
But with Concertos mounted together, I can play most of the melody on a D in B minor. On the part with the B note â the âDoâ of the minor scale â I can switch to a G Concerto for that phrase. It wasn't hard when they are mounted in a circle of fifths. 

My video making has been thwarted by internet connectivity issues lately, but I've been planning for a while to do some kind of Concerto video and what you can do with it. I see a lot of possibilities in this chromatic Concerto thing.

They are available as singles, mounted in duos, fours, and sextets. The come in A, Bb, B, C, D, E, F and High G. That's eight keys, so obviously the sextet wouldn't have them all. So, I would assume that you pick which keys and what order you want on the multiple mounted sets and I would assume that's done in Germany. Perhaps The Great Rupert Oysler could chime in with an answer to that.

Dave
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Dave Payne Sr. 
Elk River Harmonicas
www.elkriverharmonicas.com