[Harp-L] New tuning #1

[jross38@xxxxx]

So I’ve been musing a lot on new tunings and have been trying a couple out.

This is all made possible by Brendan Power’s Modular Reed Harmonica:

https://www.brendan-power.com/ModularHarp.php

This amazing harp is absolutely brilliant—you can swap reeds out in most any realistic configuration and it just plain works.  Simply an amazing design, and unlike the similar All-American Bakelite (see archives) it plays and feels like a standard harp and has fewer chamber resonance issues.  Just amazing.

So, I was thinking about the fun of stacked sixths on a harmonica, and particularly the excellent “C6” tuning and it’s related Powerchromatic tuning.  These are both 4-hole repeated tunings like solo, and obviously derived from that:

C6 

Blow:  CEGA
Draw:  DFAB

Powerchromatic

Blow:  CEGA
Draw:  DF#AB

They are fun, but got me thinking about the drone available, ie the doubled A.  It’s not as useful in many ways from a chording perspective as the drone in standard tuning or similar tunings based on that.  True, it’s the fifth of third position and now you have fourth position as a happier tonic (having its minor triad A-C-E available and it’s drone) but somehow that doesn’t seem as useful for chord/rhythm stuff.  But it is fun to have both major and minor triads together, ie I(M)and iv(m) easy to switch from.  So it got me thinking—what if we added another drone note, and which.

And that led me to this, which I’ve not seen before. It can be read variation on stacked major sixths, as the Powerchromatic is, but I think it reads and plays better as a major I think over a minor seventh:

Blow:  CEGA
Draw:  DFAC

As you can see, there are now two drones, and you have four triads available.  Chord rhythm stuff is massively fun, with useful and logically related chords.  It really has several keys on which you can center yourself—basically C, D, F, G, and A are all easy to play in with some useful bends and such.  Consider F, you can bend the major third down and also bend the fifth down to the fourth, and you have the following triads: I, iii, V, vi.  In D you can bend the tonic, fifth and the minor 7th to the minor 6th (D reads now less Dorian and more Aeolian), and you have minor tonic and fifth chords.  I’ll let you consider other positions as well.

However, the harmonica is not properly diatonic as the seventh is now only available through bending.  And this is a limitation in some ways, as it in many ways hampers melodic playing—much like the lowest octave of a standard diatonic, the reliance on bends to get notes of the scale can kind of make a same-ness to various positions.  And, unlike the standard tuning the repeated octaves enhances this same-ness, and with it a sense of unintentionally amorphous tonality.

But, that’s the trade off, and for anyone trying this tuning I would suggest considering it as such: a chord harp with the ability to also solo and riff.

I tried this on the Modular Reed first by swapping out with extra reeds I bought for experimenting and liked it so much I changed a Seydel 12hole harp I had in C6 to this.

A suggestion I might make, though I have not tried would be to consider starting the harmonica on the fourth hole of the pattern above—this way you would get the minor triad in the blow lower, which could be nice.  But then the first three draw notes are CDF, which isn’t ideal.  And that led me to another tuning I think I like even more, which I’ll post about later.

This wouldn’t be hard to make from solo tuning, btw, if your familiar with retuning.  The hardest part would be lowering the first doubled C down to A, but that’s not a ridiculous amount to retune.



Jonathan R. Ross