Re: [Harp-L] PentaBender Tuning

[Roger Myerson <rmyerson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary, thanks for demonstrating the potential of the pentabender!
But where you credit me with inventing this tuning, I feel that I can 
only claim to have discovered it.
It is such a simple and natural way to design a diatonic harmonica that 
it is hard to believe that people did not see it much earlier.

Your "C" pentabender harp has a range of about 2.5 octaves. In this 
range, it has several nice properties:
(1) The blow and draw reeds are all tuned to notes in the C-major (no 
"risky" reeds tuned to notes outside the scale).
(2) Furthermore, every note of the C-major scale in the harp's range is 
available as a straight blow or draw note (no gaps in the major scale).
(3) In the harp's range, every black note in the chromatic scale is 
available as a simple draw bend (no need for overblowing).
(4) The notes get higher as you go from left to right, except that a 
high draw note in one hole may be repeated as the low blow note in the 
next hole to the right (no back-and-forth).

Remarkably the pentabender is the only diatonic harmonica tuning that 
has all these nice properties.  There is no other way to do it.
That is why I just feel that somebody else must have thought about this 
tuning some time before I did in 2014.

I am not very good at bending, and so I prefer to play fourkey tuning 
(in which the blow and draw reeds give us the notes of four different 
major scales, not just one).
But Gary you are proving that this is a tuning in which one can make 
good music!
-Roger

Gary's pentabender videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whd7uReUb7M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fukanhbAHiA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXxSilojhUo


--
Roger B. Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Economics, University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: 773-834-9071, Fax: 773-702-8490
http://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/