Re: [Harp-L] Re: Prices of Harmonicas

["Bill" <bill.eborn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was chatting to my Sax playing mate the other night. I was moaning about 
how much I need to spend to equip myself with harps of the quality I need in 
order to play the way I want to. Then there's mics and amps and leads and 
pedals and all the rest of it.  £500 for a top quality instrument like a 
Gregoire Maret chrom, £140-200 odd for a custom diatonic, he said it's £3500 
for a Selmer Mark VI and then there's reeds and your lucky if you can get 
one in a packet that works - blah blah.  But I'm sure if I'd have been 
talking to a double bass player or guitarist or a drummer or whatever, they 
would all have been moaning just as much.

The big difference from my point of view is that my mate gets lots of work 
in Ska band brass sections and with benefits can eek out a sort of living 
because of it.  If I want to get busy i have to put a big effort into 
promotion, develop a repertoire over four or five different genres and sing 
as well and then front everything myself.  Or I can do what I'm doing now 
and work full-time and desperately try to find time to practice and pray (he 
says as a devout atheist) that i can keep sane, stay awake and not let 
anyone down at work and then play the odd gig for pennies.

Joe wrote:
"England is hurting today because they made their stuff SO good that it 
rarely broke. Their 'lifetime' of use meant that repeat sales were non 
existent."

Sorry Joe, if you think that's true you should check out the Austin 
Allegro - absolutely bloody awful, or Triumph or Norton motorbikes, 
magnificent thunderous beasts beloved by people who really enjoy getting 
greasy fingers and a labour of love just to keep the things on the road. As 
opposed to Japanese motorbikes - ultra reliable, just press a button and off 
you go!

I think the reality is more to do with an all pervasive class system, where 
the people that ran things lived completely seperate lives to everyone else 
and considered themselves inherently better than the people they managed 
because of it and the way that then translated into industrial relations and 
distracted from innovation. Then came the 80s, Thatcher and Moneterism and 
industrial collapse but don't worry we've got lots of marketing and 
insurance companies and we did have lots of call centres but people are 
cheaper in India now.....

The rivers are cleaner though!

Bill