HARMONICA WORLD 11Feb/March 2014

Diatonic Single Reed Harps

• Imperfect Chromaticism.Nowadays we can get the missingchromatic notes with bending oroverblows, but even the bestplayers have difficulties withintonation and articulation.Keeping the small size, great toneand expressiveness of thetraditional 10-hole harp plushaving all chromatic notes built inwould be a dream.

• Limited Bending. Traditionalharps bend only to notes inbetween the main notes. The XB-40 bent maybe too far for manyplayers to control accurately.Could you get a combination of thetwo degrees of bending, plus allchromatic notes built in? Wow,what a harmonica that would be!

Double-Reed Tremolo and OctaveHarmonicas

• No Bending. Tremolo and Octaveharmonicas have an appealingsound of their own, but thosedouble-reed notes can’t be bent.Could they be?

• Limited Chromaticism. TheSuzuki SCT-128 is a laudableattempt at making a tremolochromatic, but could a better onebe made? What about an Octavechromatic? That would be nice!

Chromatic Slider Harmonicas

• Limited Bending. Because theyare fully valved, chromatics onlyhave isolated-reed bendingavailable, not the far more

expressive interactive-reedbending of the 10-hole harp. Aslider chromatic with that bluesytype of bending on all notes wouldbe an awesome music machine.

• No Whole-tone Slider Trills.Anyone who listens to classical,folk/world music, jazz, rock orvirtually any other musical idiomwill know that whole-tonedecorations and trills are essentialparts of most musical genres. Thechromatic only gives semitonetrills. That’s a limitation thatneeds to be overcome, any seriouschromatic player would agree.

Bass and Chord Harmonicas

• Too Large and Cumbersome.These are the biggest and heaviestharmonicas of all, but do they haveto be built and played like that?Watching players get around thesethings is almost comical, withmassive jumps from end to end.Should you have to be acontortionist just to play nice bassand chord parts on mouth-blownfree reed instruments? Surely not!There must be a better way tobuild and play these coolharmonicas.

These are just some of the thingswrong with current harmonicas.But problems create opportunities.They’re what inspire me to designand patent new harmonica designsto overcome exactly these issues.The first of them should bereleased by the time you read thisarticle.

www.brendan-power.com

What’s wrong with theHarmonica? by Brendan Power

Last issue I wrote about the richand fascinating history ofharmonica patents from the 1830sto the present day. It’s probablytrue to say that every patent dealtwith what the inventor saw as agap in the market left unfilled byexisting models, or a perceiveddeficiency in harmonicas currentat the time – usually both.

That could range from the trivial,from giving the world the firstbanana-shaped harmonica (howcould we have lived without it?), toincredibly complex and quiteradical re-inventions of theinstrument altogether, such as DPHorsley’s Adjustable ChromaticChord Harmonica (the example Igave in the last issue).

One of the essential criteria forgetting a patent is to show that thepresent invention does or createssomething NEW. That can be, andmost often is, a smallimprovement to existing designs.It’s very hard to create somethingtotally from scratch, as ChristianBuschmann, Sir CharlesWheatstone and other pioneers ofthe 1820s did with the firstrecognisable modern harmonicas.

All current mouth and bellowsblown free-reed instruments areessentially just developments oftheir early breakthroughs, theresult of many incrementalimprovements over nearly twocenturies, all documented in a

10 HARMONICA WORLD Feb/March 2014

plethora of patents.

But that certainly doesn’t meanwe’ve arrived at perfection – notby a long chalk! If you consider theharmonica objectively, all types ofit, it’s obvious it still has manydeficiencies and limitations. AndI’m not talking about the lack of astarfish-shaped harmonica,although there may well be one!I’m talking about serious, criticalthings the harmonica simply can’tdo, or is rubbish at.

What’s wrong with the harmonica?An awful lot! Consider theseissues with current instruments:

All Harmonicas

• Low acoustic volume comparedto most other instruments. Trycompeting in an Irish or Bluegrasssession without blowing out reeds!

• Hard to make fast, smoothwide-interval leaps. I liken harpplaying to playing a piano blindfoldwith one finger. As with the piano,the harmonica is a lateralinstrument, spaced over ahorizontal interface with low notesto the left and high to the right.

Making a smooth jump fromextreme low to high notes andback again in a high speed phrasewith perfect legato phrasing issimply impossible - but pianistsand violinists can do it with ease.That's a serious generic deficiencyof the harmonica right there.Perhaps there is a way toovercome it?