[Harp-L] Stretching Exercises



Interesting thread on stretching the pitch as you go up the octaves. When I tune a harp, I have the strobe tuner set at 12 cents sharp for baseline. i aim at getting 4 blow right on the money, 7 a TINY bit sharper and 10 a hair sharper than 7 I'm watching the pattern and it is moving SLOWLY to the right on 7, and a very small amount faster on 10. All the octaves have to be beat free from a light attack on through a heavy attack. In order to do this and compensate for reed variations, you can't just follow a formula. You have to play the octaves through a range of quiet to loud and then just "make it work" by raising or lowering one reed or the other. Then go on to the next octave. Blow one almost always has to be a bit sharp to make this work.

My stretching is within the 3 cent variation. It was cool to see the Iceman mention that studies show that most people can't tell a difference unless it is at least 3 cents or more.

Same process for chords. They may be textbook perfect formula wise and sound like crap. Reeds are ornery critters and since they mess with you, you gotta mess with them till they behave.

We all end up finding something that works for us by trusting our ears and being stubborn enough to keep tuning till we get the hang of it.

Richard Sleigh

P.O. Box 23
Boalsburg PA 16827

Join my list & get entertaining emails and special offers- go to http://rsleigh.com/ on the left hand side, give me your name & email & you're in!

http://www.rsleigh.com
http://www.customharmonicas.com/
http://www.youtube.com/rsleighharp














This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.