[Harp-L] switching blows to draws

Rishi Oswal (Rishió) email@xxxxx
Sat Jun 11 05:40:41 EDT 2016


Thanks Rick!

Mastering the notes I have on the Powerbender tuning (which I love by the way) will keep me occupied for the next 5 years and after that I will look into x-reeding it!

I did some stopwatch tests on blow/draw hold times and I take back what I said. I can hold the note about the same amount of time whether I'm blowing or drawing. I guess it just seemed like I was able to blow longer. I did notice that blowing does feel more comfortable than drawing and it seems easier to get a higher quality tone. I was curious about how it would feel to blow bend all the notes rather than draw bend and it's great to know that I can always do this just by flipping the reeds. 

That said, I'm still curious if there are advantages to draw bend over blow bend (easier vibrato?) before I go down a dark path that wires my brain upside down permanently! I've already gone done the Powerbender path and there is no turning back to Richter for me! 

--
Short & Sweet from Rishió
www.rishio.com

> On Jun 11, 2016, at 14:18, Rick Dempster <rickdempster33 at xxxxx> wrote:
> 
> ....Back again. It worked!! I just grabbed an Old Lee Oskar 'A' I had lying about, and reversed the plates. Didn't even have to drill any holes.
> Now  the 'E" (draw plate) is all blows, same bends as usual, and the 'A' plate (blows) vice versa.
> Now I'll just play it a bit and see if I like it. (Probably not; getting old and don't like change)
> RD
> 
> 
>> On 11 June 2016 at 18:34, Rick Dempster <rickdempster33 at xxxxx> wrote:
>> The most logical thing to do would be to try a 30 reed harp. A Sub30 tweaked by Tom Halchak, or Brendan Power & Zombor Kovaks.
>> I'm not saying these harps are without their problems (the biggest one for me being the limited keys available)
>> but that would be the most obvious thing to do. Otherwise you are going to have constantly to be customising harps yourself,
>> or getting someone to do it for you. At least Brendan, Zombor and Tom, are on the case with these instruments, have a lot of the problems solved,
>> and they are not impossibly expensive. Zombor and Tom have different approaches to valving the upper octave, which has been one of the remaining difficulties
>> with the Sub 30.
>> Of course you have not made it really clear if you had a tuning layout in mind here. Maybe you want the note layout of a draw plate (DGBDFABDFA - on a C harp)
>> turned into a blow plate, and vice versa. Hmm....maybe you can do that by just reversing both plates. I'm going to try that.....!! Back soon (no doubt bitterly disappointed!)
>> RD
>> 
>>> On 11 June 2016 at 18:01, Vern <jevern at xxxxx> wrote:
>>> 
>>> > On Jun 10, 2016, at 9:20 PM, Rishi Oswal (Rishió) <email at xxxxx> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >  …..I have a larger capacity to breathe out than breathe in…….
>>> 
>>> It seems to me that you can exhale exactly the same amount of air that you previously inhaled.
>>> 
>>> Vern
>>> 
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Short & Sweet from Rishió
>>> > www.rishio.com
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 


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