I am having a good deal of difficulty producing a tight seal with my hands around my harp. Let me preface this by mentioning that my fingers are extremely difficult to move around, and they are very bony due to the muscle atrophication that has occured as my condition has progressed. In a nutshell, my ulnar nerves have been damaged and they no longer tell my brain to pump blood into my hands. My hand and finger muscles are being starved to death.
Even with the muscle loss, I can still get a reasonable acoustic seal sometimes but not consistantly. I can't get it at all if I use the standard thumb and index finger pinch with thumb tip and finger tip at the same place on the harp. To get a seal on the left hand, I have to extend my index finger two full joints beyound the tip of my thumb. Otherwise the skin flap that used to contain robust muscle just hangs open, leaving a gap about the size of a half dollar that has been cut in half. I can seal my right and left palm edges together, and continue that around nesting my thumbs together in a parallel direction, with my right thumb protruding beyond the left so that the indentation in my right thumb is filled with the fat part of my left. The left bird finger sits behind the harp, preventing it from moving too deep into my cup, and it provides a place for my right thumb to try and seal things up. On my best day I get a decent wah sound opening either my right thumb or my palm clam shell. It's never consistent.
Also, putting one of Greg's hand made bullet mics into the mix makes getting a good seal impossible. Can you offer any suggestions to help my plight? Hands are fairly large, even with the muscle and nerve damage. The base of my palm to the tip of my bird finger is 7.25-inches, the bird finger itself is 3.125-inches, and my palm is 4-inches wide at the base of my fingers. Hopefully that is enought to work with.
Thanks for looking! I hope you can kame some suggestions to help a handicapped brother out.
That's a tough one. Instead of a technique solution you might need a gear solution. I can't find the link, but maybe one of the other harpers here will remember what I'm talking about.
There is a combination microphone/harp holder that someone has designed and patented. It's a piece of wood, but otherwise looks kind of like a vacuum cleaner tool. On the handle there are two holes, the outer one of which can be turned to expose more or less of the lower hole (it works kind of like a valve in a sink.) It let's you control how much air gets through. It might be a good option for you. Does someone remember what it was called?
I've seen some home made jobs. I think Walter Torre did something with a beer cozy to seal up the back of his harp for rack playing, and maybe the Suzuki Humming Pipe might be an option. I don't know.
Remember, sealing up the back of the harp to the mic is only half of the equation. The beer cozy and the mic mentioned above help with the rear. You can also simply get a little wetsuit material and some wetsuit repair glue and make a thingy that stretches over anything - the back of the harp and front of the mic, for example. As long as you can support the assembly in your hand, it works great. ---------- /Greg
The easiest to cup microphone I own is by far a shure 533sa also sold as a pe53. It is large enough to fit in the hand yet small enough to free up a lot of hand to cup tge rest of tge harp.
Easily my favorite stick mic the small heads are harder for me to cup on the 57/545 type Mics.
They can be had for the price of a used sm57 if you look. The high impedance one has a basic screw on amphenol connector.
Not as dirty as most bullets but a bit more than most vocal Mics I have tried. I dig it.
Kingly, thanks, that's the one! I'm thinking you could work the hole for wahs. I'd imagine if you were using it not as a rack but just to help with the wahs you could palm the holes.
I'm not sure if it would suit your particular needs, but it would be interesting to see that cuff replaced with something that turns more easily, with a spring to turn it back. If it had a separate way to tighten the default position and the spring driven holes you could set it one way and give and release partial turns for effect. The only question would be if there was a market for that, since it seems to be aimed right now at the rack player. :)
For the mic part of your problem, you could purchase a "finger" mic that slips between two of your fingers. I have one called "The Cherub" that sounds good. Microvox also makes a finger mic.
Greyowl - I use the same grip as you. But I have seen that everyone's hands and face are different - some people can get a good cup with the "two thumbs up" grip - I most definitely can't. I think it is better to state the goal - which is sealing off EVERY escape path for air so that 100% of the sound pressure is trapped in the chamber inside the cup. Of course if you are 100% successful at this (hard) and you use it 100% of the time - nobody will every hear you because at full 100% the harp won't play. But unless and until you can get there, you might not be hearing what it is all about. I will teach/demonstrate this at Hill Country Harmonica as well. ---------- /Greg
I shoot for a cup tight enough so that I have to loosen it up a bit or the high draw holes sound on low blows. Funny thing is most harps are too leaky to do that. I've got a Seydel that does it easily, and oddly enough, a couple Piedmonts. Go figure.
Maybe, just maybe, without getting in trouble here, its you, not the cupping or all the extra's your trying to connect with?...just play and impro and fit in with others, Lazy lester never bothered much with fancy stuff and did ok...imho.
I'm not all that sure that this will be of much help, but it can do no harm.
I can't tell from your post whether you've been playing for two weeks or two decades, so the following may or may not have occurred to you already.
You said that your condition has led to your fingers being very bony, which I understand to mean that there are gaps between them where the air can escape. My fingers are also fairly bony, but naturally so.
Now, most books on the subject suggest that you stick fingers 3, 4 and 5 of the left hand out in a straight line. I have never been able to get a seal that way; there are always one or two places between my fingers where the airs gets loose.
So, what I do is partially stack finger 4 on top of finger 3, and do likewise with finger 5 on top of finger 4. (Some players stack them under one another). Now, at least most of the time, there are no gaps where the air can get out. I think that is what Walter Horton did, but I'm not sure. You can easily check that out on YouTube. There's a video entitled 'Big Hands, Big Heart' or something like that. I don't think he played with his middle finger behind the harp, but I couldn't swear to that.
Next, I place the little finger of my left hand on my right hand, either on or near the crease where the fingers join the hand itself. My little finger lies somewhere around the base of the middle finger of the right hand, but I suppose that would vary with hand size.
My left thumb rests on the fleshy part of my right thumb, and the right thumb is wrapped around the front of the harp, resting on my face.
I can get a very good wah, but, like you, it is not entirely consistent. Some days, it is rubbish, and this has baffled me for a long time.
Two things I have noticed on bad-wah-days are these:
1) My hands tend to be fairly cold and dry. You know, the sort of dryness that makes rolling a cigarette, or separating plastic bags quite difficult to do without blowing hot air on your hands first.
2) It often seems to be the case - and I'm not sure about this - that wahs seems easier later in the day. That may sound bonkers, until you realise that your hands are slightly more swollen later in the day. At least that is what I remember hearing/reading, though I couldn't tell you where.
I should add as a caveat to all this, that the extent to which my right hand is bent back when wah-wah-ing sometime causes me some discomfort that really p*sses me off. But, I've not heard of other players having that problem, so hopefully, you won't either.
I hope that the advice in this thread helps you out. ---------- YouTube ditties
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2012 9:37 AM
Someone mentioned experience level... I've got ten years under my belt, but I stopped playing, concentrating exclusively on guitar for the next 40 years. Now I can't fret a guitar to save my life, but I've been trying to rekindle my relationship with my harps just to maintain contact with my one true love; the blues. I've also been messing around with an old nickel plated brass Dobro® with a nut extender to see how much of my bottleneck technique I can transfer to lap style slide guitar a la Kelly Joe Philips and Dave Hole. That's going better than I had hoped, so Don Young at National Resophonic is building a hollow square neck National Tricone in brass for me that should be ready next month. Jon Harl and Mike Fugazzi are teaming up on a set of Sydel Nobles for me that should be ready about the same time. Meanwhile, I've chucked all oif my old Hohner Blues Harps and begun playing Crossocers and Thunderbirds.
When I learned blues harp you have to understand... There was one book, "Blues Harp". That was my bible. Much like my other bible, "Masters of Instrumental Blues Guitar", it came with no music, just a discography that covered the examples in the books. My young friends used to tease me because my record collection didn't have anything they recognized. I still have these books, :-)
Greg Heumann has been a saint in helping me work through this disability. He has provided me with equipment to try out at no cost, just to help me find a quality mic I can work with. Things are improving rapidly since he reminded me to seal the volume knob hole on the back of this cocobolo masterpiece bullet shell. If this doesn't pan out he's got some other options up his sleeve for me to try. Thanks a million, Greg! I just thought the forum members deserved to know what kind of person you are.
Last Edited by on Apr 16, 2012 12:43 PM
Hey Harmonicnick, Do you have some specific suggestiond to go along with that recommendation? I;m only familiar with the thumb and index finger pinch and the two thumbs up style. What else do you recommend I try?
"don't bother with cupping". ".just play and impro and fit in with others, Lazy lester never bothered much with fancy stuff and did ok."
Come on guys, this guy is asking for help. Clearly he LIKES a hard driven cupped sound. I sure as hell do. I LIKE that sound, I WANT that sound. Anyone who knows how to play with a deep cup has much more dynamic and tonal range available during a performance than one who doesn't, pure and simple. We can ALWAYS loosen the cup! So don't tell TheKrowe to give up - what a silly thing to suggest. He is the only one to decide if and when to give up, and he hasn't yet. I say - more power to him.
I couldn't agree more, Greg. Musicians who carry on, despite their disabilities, have nothing but my greatest admiration. I'm no great musician. Nevertheless, I know how depressing a disability can be. Due to a slightly damaged pinky on my left hand, I've had to pick and choose, or otherwise alter, what I can and can't do on piano. It used to really p*ss me off, but I've just had to learn to get round it as best as I can. Fortunately, blues is very forgiving in that regard.
I truly do hope that TheKrowe can sort this problem out.
I wish I could add more to the problem at hand - no pun intended - but I don't know what else I can offer. ---------- YouTube ditties
Last Edited by on Apr 21, 2012 7:30 AM
