[Harp-L] Into the Minefield: The Impact of Comb Material Composition on Harmonica Tone

[Gary Lehmann]

Combs don’t resonate, but reflective surfaces seem to affect tone. 
Metal vs wood etc
So much tone is the player!
Signed, Gary, who once had a comment on his YouTube channel that his sound resembled an asthmatic goat. 
Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 18, 2025, at 7:18 PM, meagher at xxxxx wrote:
> 
> Dear Harp-L,
> 
> 
> 
>              Long time no speak! I've been on this list for about 30 years
> now, but I haven't been super active recently. (For those who know me, I had
> a kid during COVID, moved to Colorado, and now I'm a full-time student in
> the Masters of Science in Recording Arts program at CU Denver, Go Lynx. I
> still play Dude Harps, which I love - shoutout to Steve Grimm if he's out
> there - and own more vintage amps and microphones than I'm willing to let my
> wife know about, many from our man Christopher Richards, shoutout to Chris.)
> 
> 
> 
> 
>              My program at CU Denver requires a research project for
> graduation, and it is with some trepidation that I realized that there has
> never truly been a methodologically rigorous double-blind study on whether
> humans - either laypersons or experienced harmonica players - can detect
> differences in harmonica tone due to differences in comb materials. I am
> contemplating conducting such a study, and I think it would have to happen
> where there is already a concentration of experienced harmonica players.
> which probably means SPAH. I'd probably want to rent a room and a fairly
> high quality receiver/amplifier for playback so that every test subject
> hears the tones in the exact same listening space with the exact same
> acoustics, etc.
> 
> 
> 
>              At a high level, I guess I'm asking whether SPAH attendees
> would be willing to spend maybe 10 minutes (or even 5) participating in the
> study. I don't have a big budget but I suppose I could incent people
> somehow, although I fear that for statistical significance I'd need an n
> that's quite large, potentially making compensation an expensive
> proposition. If that's the case, I might have to restrict it to just two
> comb materials - wood and plastic - rather than wood, plastic, and metal.
> 
> 
> 
>              Anywho, I don't wish to revisit the epic flame wars of the
> late 90s and early aughts, but I did think that maybe it would be fun if we
> could definitively resolve this longstanding question. If you want to reply
> off-list with any thoughts, suggestions, or just ad hominem, hit me up  at
> meagher at xxxxx <mailto:meagher at xxxxx>  or evan.meagher at xxxxx
> <mailto:evan.meagher at xxxxx> . I think it would be cool to get AN
> answer, irrespective of what answer it happens to be. Happy to discuss the
> proposed methodology, which gets super complex if we rely on a player to
> produce more sophisticated tones than a simple bellows, since you have to
> try to make the player ignorant of what kind of comb he or she is playing,
> which means attempting to mask differences in weight, texture, smell, etc.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Evan Meagher
> 
> 
> 
> p.s. I've also proposed a second part of the study that won't be human
> perception but rather will use measurement microphones to see whether there
> are quantifiable differences in frequencies produced by different combs.  
>