[Harp-L] Gear Shaming Other Harmonica Players

[Steve Shaw]

Just stay away from Facebook, why don't you!  My harp choice has been a 35-year learning curve, filled with mistakes, cheap harps, duff harps and brilliant harps, and begod, I've been through hundreds (and I never like to pay big money, and I can set up my harps myself if they don't work well out of the box). But my harps are my mistakes and my choice and no-one else's. I can play fine, I'm no virtuoso but nobody tells me what to do!  If I didn't think I was having my own kind of fun I'd throw all my harps, mistakes and all, into the nearest skip. Expression in playing is down to you, by the way, not your harps. Harmonicas are just containers of flappy bits of metal, hopefully in tune, but your mouth is a very human means of expression. To hell with the naysayers!  

Steve Shaw

> On 5 Feb 2024, at 00:28, Amy Rister <amyrister02 at xxxxx> wrote:
> I don't know if anybody else has ever experienced this, but I get gear
> shamed every time I mention that I like a certain model of harmonica. I
> often get gear shamed by the Classic Marine Band Player's Cult (I call them
> that because they all play the original Marine Band, play exclusively
> tongue blocked Chicago blues, have a cult-like mentality surrounding tuning
> and comb material, and harass anybody that has a different opinion than
> them) every time whenever I say that I like the Golden Melody. They always
> tell me that the tuning on those harps suck, that I should be playing a
> Marine Band instead, and not use my Golden Melodies at all (which I had
> mentioned in the past). These people are the reason why I hate the Marine
> Band so much is because other than being terrible to maintain, the members
> of its fanbase are almost entirely made up of people who drag other people
> down. I even got bullied because I owned two good playing Chinese
> harmonicas, the Kongsheng Bluebird and the Golden Bird Parrott Tuning
> harmonica (which I received as a gift from my friend/teacher, Todd
> Parrott), and said they are "useless for expression". I don't know why
> "harmonica players" on Facebook are so up their own ass when they criticise
> my choice of harps, when I never did the same thing to them.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Amy Rister