Re: [Harp-L] Re: The Future of Blues Harmonica?

[mik jagger <harpomatic@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sonic, Martin, Winslow - I'm more in tune with ALL your points here, this sounds like a more unified, a more "harmonious"(pun intended) slightly modified message to manufacturers, which goes something like this : we welcome any and all innovation, but please do not disregard  "costs" as an important area of innovation, as well.  Try to innovate the affordability factor.  Sonicviz nails it on the head: "I think the biggest barrier to adoption is simply price. It's basic economics." Simple idea, I just felt it was not communicated here, I guess that's what surprised me here: XB40 dies out due to the "basic economics" and Sub30 comes in at such a price increase? I just saw that as a fundamental miscalculation of the basic equation. Some guys here state they'd pay more for an instrument - of course it is a valid statement, customizers charging whatever they want to charge are not only valid, but are WONDERFUL to have amongst us ! But, here is a "BUT" : if
 you want to deliver more "good" to more "people" if you keep the retail price under control. May be even make more dollars along the way. Isn't that "basic economics" as well? Wouldn't hohner do better if they sold 50 million of xb40 per year for $30 bucks each? I don't know about actual numbers that are part of equasion, but you get the idea(I hope). See it this way - bigger hohner, with more parts, german labor costs was half the price of the "next xb" from Suzuki - less of everything, and so much more expensive? Due to which factors the powerhouse that Suzuki is, they could not manage that part of the equation better than Hohner? Hohner just failed because of that. Seems suicidal, and sad especially because it is such a good idea to keep on going in that direction. I only can explain it by some kind of delusion that occurred as a result not realizing that "I'd pay more" signal represents  tiny slice of the market, despite being so much  more
 prominently expressed. The other, "I would NOT pay more" signal is just not being expressed in the same way, so they thought it does not exist. It exists - it is expressed in the failure of XB40, in my mind only due to the price. As I write this, I realize what really went beyond all reason is this: if Suzuki offered the Sub for the same price of hohner - that would be "not smart", but to go for so much more for a "lesser" version felt a bit like an insult to our intelligence. C'mon - is it that much more expensive to mass produce?  I think the $185 harp will hang in there as another novelty harp in their showcase, it will not fail in that way - another "decoration" in their indeed rich and wonderful portfolio, along with that tremolo chromatic for   $1,300.00 and it may be totally worth it for the company to look that great - more sales of the entry level products. This is also basic economics - "flagship" models get you in through the shop's door,
 but the mass/best seller is often the cheapest entry level model.  Great for Suzuki, somewhat "good" for us, "harpmaniacs" - the most dedicated players will save whatever amount to play their "ideal" harp. If I was forever stranded on a desert island without a harmonica and a mermaid offered to sell me a $1 Johnson harp for a million dollars - I'd buy it, but... We are too few... It would not be "good" for a triple/quadruple/sympathetic/enabler reed design. It will not make a dent in the "harp land", same way the chromatic tremolo harp did not. Figure out the price, and I believe it will, even in it's lesser form like Sub30, the fundamental idea is that good. Come on guys, do it for us!!! Do it for the instument, for the music!!! You'll make money too. For it to be the future of diatonic, let alone "blues" harp (true "blues" in it's essence, being the music of the "less fortunate") - you have to put it in more hands, that's the idea. Not going to work
 at $185, not $120, got to go lower than hohner at least. It's that simple for the product that offers less... 

Sonic is correct about a sweet spot : about $40. Look at it this way: Hohner doubled the price with a slight but still significant "plus" when it doubled the number of reeds, fattened the comb( isn't it made in two pieces?) as compared to their regular good diatonics, and that felt somewhat reasonable. Reasonable to us few here, but not the "critical masses". Twice the "harp" in the XB model - twice the price, a "plus" also makes sence - set up expenses, novelty factor - seems reasonable, but even reasonable did not work! Raising their prices was the opposite of what needed to be done. Now, the Sub is only "1 and a half" the regular diatonic, why not make it $30 + 15=45 kind of deal?  Consider this other approach, commonly utilized when a manufacturer wants to get their product into as many hands as possible: introduce the product at below the cost prices and Then increase them gradually, up to a mutually reasonable level. But that takes "bigger balls",
 to put it in less scholarly terms. companies do it every day - from Amazon(kindle) to a new local pizza shop that offers a slice for a dollar, instead of usual $2, an "introductory price", so to say. this is the strategy chosen, when one believes in their product. Believe me, Suzuki can afford to do it, evidently it is simply not their intention. The Sub at $135 is a novelty item in their portfolio - whatever investment they made into the model is small enough to be totally worth it, it will sell more $30 harps... But it will fail to make a real dent - xb40 evidently did. Too bad, because the sympathetic reed idea is unique not only to free reed instruments, but to harmonica specifically. Accordeons do not bend. Only harmonicas do. 


While I'm on the idea, a question: can you set up two reeds say, an octave apart and have a bending range of an octave?




________________________________
 From: sonicviz <sonicviz@xxxxxxxxx>
To: harp-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Cc: "harpomatic@xxxxxxxxx" <harpomatic@xxxxxxxxx>; "harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx" <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>; martin oldsberg <martinoldsberg@xxxxxxxxx>; martinoldsberg@xxxxxxxxx 
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 10:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Re: The Future of Blues Harmonica?
 

xposted my reply here from triple reed thread as I just read this and fully agree with Martin's post (as well as being a LO player myself)

I think the biggest barrier to adoption is simply price. It's basic economics.

The mass market sweet spot imho is ~sub 30-40 Dollars. 
Sure some people are happy to pay $200+ for a harp, custom tuned or otherwise, but they are the 5% not the 95%.
[I have a Super64X myself that cost me an arm and a leg many years ago, but that was an exception for me]

As
 a regularly gigging indie musician I standardised on Lee Oskars for 
simple economics of replacement, even with self maintenance & 
tuning.

I honestly think Suzuki  are using the wrong strategy to jumpstart this new design.
I
 understand the economics of tooling etc, and I don't know the break 
even point of the Sub30 but I see the future of Harmonica, blues or 
otherwise, in high quality low cost harmonica's, not premium 
instruments. I'm not sure the market is big enough to use a premium to 
low cost over time strategy - isn't that what the XB40 proved already?

my 0.2 yen.


On Saturday, September 15, 2012 10:30:26 AM UTC+9, martin oldsberg wrote:
Oh no, Mik, in your dreams maybe. First, I blow out LO´s on a very tiresome level -- esp. in latter years when their quality seems to have gone down. Not proud of it, but can´t help it. 
>  Second, they cost at least $55-60 over here. 
>  Third, I was asking for a harmonica where it was possible and easy to change individual reeds -- that is w/o any customizing craftsmanship competence, like you change strings on a guitar, say.
>  THEN I´d be willing to pay a whole lot more for a harmonica. A whole lot more. And the first time buyer could have the option to buy the cheaper variant with not changeable reeds etc. 
>  It´s not Gödel´s theorems we´re talking about here, it´s nuts and bolts and such stuff.
> 
>And don´t try to tell me that, if the pressure had been there, the R & D departments of the larger harmonica companies wouldn´t have been able to come up with an idea for this during the 150 or so years of production. (Heard of "Harrison Harmonicas"?) 
>  I know why they haven´t. But it´s just like the automobile industry, they´ve been going on and on with the gasoline engines, knowing very well that it is not going to last, and now, with knives to their throats they are slowly trying to cough up something different. I´ve heard it from the horse´s mouth. (I live in Volvo-town.)
>  It´s not because there is some conspiracy of evil men trying to make life bad for us consumers, it´s in the nature of the economic system. (And then, fabulously enough, we have people here on the list -- who should represent an informed category of customers -- who are saying more or less that the industry should RAISE the price of harps. Jeez.)
> 
>/Martin
>    
> 
>>Martin - Lee Oskars, at $30 a pop, are great diatonic harps(subjective opinion), and last forever(objective fact)...
>"If they made a great diatonic harmonica that Lasts or where it was Possible and
>even Easy to change individual reeds, I agree, $300 would be a great deal." 
>

I happen to be a huge fan of the XB-40. Out of the box it's just fine, though I can't resist tweaking it.


By the way, the XB-40 is NOT a triple reed harp. It's a quadruple reed harp.

The Sub 30 gets the form factor down to standard diatonic size, and I think Brendan and Suzuki have done a great job in achieving those 
goals. However, this means sacrificing the greater flexibility of the 
4-reed design and forgoing the huge sound of the XB. 


Still, the extreme flexibility of the XB is something many players can't 
handle - the XB is too much harp for many - too big, too bendy. For me 
those are positives, but clearly the marketplace and I don't inhabit the same space on this particular matter.

Is triple or quadruple reed design the future of blues harp? 


Hohner thought so and came a cropper. The obvious marketing angle of bendy =  
blues turned out to be the wrong way to sell it. The truth is, the XB-40 is too different from the standard diatonic for traditional blues. 


The XB is brilliant for other things, such as Celtic music, but either that market is too small or too few discovered its virtues - myself, James 
Conway, Marko Balland, Steve Shaw and maybe a few others are the ones I 
know about, in addition to Rick Epping, who developed it. 

So how will the Sub 30 fare? Right now price is prohibitive and the early examples haven't been ready for prime time, at least out of the box. Brendan's own tweaked ones are much nicer (I speak from direct experience). 


Overblow players complain that the new bent note locations are disruptive of 
their existing knowledge. And here's the real problem, whether you 
overblow or not. A new harp with new capabilities requires new skills. 
Players prefer all gain with no pain, and new designs offer the gain but also require work, and require the player to disturb their established 
habits. Will players see enough that's compelling in a new design to 
fork over cash and do the work of acquiring a new layer of skills?

Time will tell.
 
Winslow Yerxa
Author, Harmonica For Dummies, ISBN 978-0-470-33729-5
            Harmonica Basics For Dummies, ASIN B005KIYPFS
            Blues Harmonica For Dummies, ISBN 978-1-1182-5269-7
Resident Harmonica Expert, bluesharmonica.com
Instructor, Jazzschool for Music Study and Performance


________________________________
 From: mik jagger <harpomatic@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx" <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 10:52 PM
Subject: [Harp-L] tripple reed -specific
 
Here is a phenomenon I'm still trying to understand, I do find it fascinating and very harp-specific: 

I
 agree that triple reed design is brilliant, and a future of diatonic 
harp, no matter who thought of it first. For many years now, I've been 
playing xb40 hohner, first 3pple reeded harp I was ever introduced to. I
 have nothing but love for this harp that delivers every wonderful thing
 that it promised, and more. ("More" would be the fact that in hohner's 
case, you could not really count on longevity, but my xb took years of 
hard daily play ever since it came out, and sounds brand new till this 
day) . I remember all the excitement and anticipation around its 
introduction. Now there are 2 pieces of news in the "harp-land" that 
happen to coincide, thus prompting me to post my questions:
1) XB-40 is "out"
2) Sub30 is "in"
Usual
 excitement follows. Nothing is wrong with that, I'd like to get a piece
 of that, too. But as I find out, the new
 harp is a) smaller (good), but offers less note choices by bending less
 and not on all the holes, less responsive out of the box, and 
significantly more expensive on top of that. further, the design is not 
AT ALL fundamentally different from the XB40.
Here are the issues I still cannot put together, and therefore, I am compelled to ask fellow members for  help:
1)It
 seems that the "world", or harp community at large did not vote with 
their cash for the initial triple-reed offering by Hohner. (true/false?)
2)
 the next, inferior offering by Suzuki, despite an unexplainable  week 
and feeble "buzz" on harp-l, will surely die out, if it continues to 
exist in its present form. (true/false?)
................
So here 
is a thing that, out of  very "harp-centric" curiosity,  I'm trying to 
understand.  Perhaps, the majority opinion (as unexpected to a fan of 
3-reed design, as I may be) is that a "triple reed" is NOT the
 future of diatonic! If it is so, if such opinion is out there, and even
 especially so due to it  being majority opinion, I would really, 
sincerely like to hear it being expressed. Not for target practice 
purposes, but for an indeed live and informative dialog - I'm really 
curious what makes others tick, especially if they indeed are different 
from me. 

Or, I could re-phrase the question as " so how many people love their XB-40 out of the box?"
Or,
 ask the same question in these words" what is it about our community 
that makes us resent true innovation?" I bet it is the same "thing" that
 makes us hate Sugar Blue and john Popper, while loving Jason Ricci...
Sorry
 to ruffle feathers along this complex journey to getting an answer to a
 question that now seems to be more complex than I thought at first. 

Thank you moderator and harp-lers for your patience,
Michael, therefore "Mick - I am (but Jagger - I am not)"
 Korosty.