Re: [Harp-L] re: would this work - playing an octave gliss

[mik jagger <harpomatic@xxxxxxxxx>]

Winslow, your  gliss technique speaks of some serious skill and control you have on the instrument. Not easy to do, as I see. Thank you for sharing it. I see Cham Ber took an easier path. But you brought up another interesting idea that I often wondered about - this "slider bar" on the reed. I never heard of such a pitch pipe, did some search and found no info on it so far. However, I am not surprised that it exists, I was sure someone have thought of such a way to manipulate a reed, and I think someone may have patented something similar at some point in the past. I  experimented with using my finger on the reed as this kind of sliding bar, and it works, so I wondered if one day we may see a harmonica with sliding bar design, somehow incorporated into the action. I am no technician, but as a dreamer, I dream of a harp with something like stereo equalizer little levers protruding out of the coverplates - move them up or down to change the individual
 reed's tuning... I know, such simple idea would be extremely hard(or perhaps impossible) to produce once you get down to actually building one, but wouldn't that be cool? At present, I'd love to have at least this kind of tuning pipe,  kind of like a slide whistle, but with that "free reed" tone. Give me at least 2 octave range, and I would be very excited about such an instrument...


<<<I remember Cham-Ber explaining how he did the octave gliss, and I think (memory
is dim on this) that he used a tunable pitch pipe. Some pitch pipes have a
single reed with a slider bar that lets you slide it along the reed, raising the
pitch by shortening the length of reed that is free to vibrate. By starting the
reed at its lowest pitch and sliding the bar, you can play a continuous gliss.