[Harp-L] Re: Jerome's post on Special Tuning Questions

[martin oldsberg <martinoldsberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Baker wrote about country tuning (CT):
"I've been using this tuning regularly for nearly 25 years and don't understand why it  
isn't far more popular than is."

For me there is a very short and simple reply to this: MONEY.
CT in 2 pos is truly a great alternative to slightly sour OB´s on 5D -- or those forced octave leaps people use to avoid them. But in order to take full advantage of CT you have to have one more set of harps. That costs. Especially if you find it hard going to keep the first set in playable condition.
  If blues is your basic idiom pos 1, 2 and 3 goes a long way; and I´m not sure that the raised 5th is welcome there, so they cannot really replace standard tuning. 
  I own two or three CT tuned harps and I´m a bit bewildered why I don´t use them more, but it could be some perverse notion of Richter puritanism (if that´s what it is). So instead of grabbing a CT I tend to go for alternative positions -- which may have its secondary advantages in forcing you to avoid your most tiresome clichées. 
  But in some cases, "Misty" is one, it´s hard getting around that it was written for a country tuned harmonica. Erroll was a pioneer in that field. (Although this lady plays an impressively clean version of it on straight harp: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHxfdfeiEf8)
 
Cheers,
Martin