[Harp-L] Performance setup - hearing and feedback

["John F. Potts" <hvyj@xxxxxxx>]

There is a well known harp player (I forget who) who has said that if  
you can hear yourself when you are comping you are playing too loud.  
When playing in an electric/amplified environment you've just got to  
accept that there will be occasions when hearing yourself may be a  
problem.  Often bands that play too loud get too loud because one of  
the musicians can't hear himself well enough, so he turns up, then  
another musician turns up, and so on, until the whole band is too  
damn loud.

I'm not a fan of bullet mics for a number of reasons, one of which is  
that many of the more popular commercially available bullets are  
feedback prone.  A fairly reliable method for controlling feedback in  
a live performance situation is to use a mic with a volume control,  
set the amp's volume at the "sweet spot" (which may be pretty high)  
and backing off the volume on the mic itself to set performance level  
volume.  This reduces the output gain so that the mic is not as hot  
and will usually control feedback while allowing the player to get  
good tone from the amp.

The tone of some mics will degrade if the mic volume is turned down,  
but many (like Greg Heumann's Ultimate series mics) sound just fine  
used this way.  Some amps are just too high gain for the method I  
have described to work well for controlling feedback, in which case  
the player needs to swap out preamp tubes.  If your mic doesn't have  
a VC another way to accomplish output signal gain reduction is to use  
an MXR 10 band EQ pedal which has gain and volume controls and use  
those to reduce how "hot" the output signal from the mic is.  Of  
course, you can also use the EQ freq sliders to notch out the freqs  
that are feeding back.  But the gain and volume sliders are actually  
more useful than the EQ adjustments.

Personally, I am not a fan of harp specific amps and I don't like  
what the Kinder AFB+ does to my tone.  But, depending on what kind of  
tone you are after, some bass amps can sound very decent for harp and  
are less feedback prone than many guitar amps.  But if you are after  
a "crunchy" or distorted Chicago type tone, a bass amp is not going  
to give you that.

Hope this helps.

JP