Nice tune. I liked the background info too. Some of my friends had a cabin there. I have fond memories of playing a pickup game of hockey on the lake one winter around 30 years ago. We didn't have a puck so used a frozen trout.
It was fun coming up with a shuffle in a new twist on 12-bar (and 20-bar!) blues while exploiting the bending abilities of he XB-40 and trying to convey the feeling of playing in a small-town bar.
And also fun coming up with a visual way to relate the backstory of the song.
The XB-40 never did sell well, which is why it's gone. I'm wondering who else may have tried it and what their experience was like. =========== Winslow
Winslow- One of my favorite harp tunes! I pretty much learned to play on xb-40s. Once the prices started going up, I bailed and started playing Suzuki valved Promasters. My motivation was primarily economic, but I found I liked the smaller size, could play faster,etc.Promasters use a lot less air than the xbs, and I never liked the sound of the high end on the xbs as much as the low end.I ended up bartering all my xbs for some customizing and repair for my Easttop brass chromatics-Greg
While I was never in love with the sound of the XB, I found it to be the most powerful diatonic out there. I could make myself heard acoustically among 50 fiddlers, for instance - and without breaking any reeds over several years of that kind of projection. It also had much more powerful and flexible bending capabilities than any half-valved harp or the other X-reed harps.
I never had any trouble playing fast on XB-40s. I was sometimes playing very fast fiddle tunes and any challenges I felt were to my own abilities and not the harp.
But from the comments I'v heard, it seems I was in the minority. I think the instrument was just too alien to the experience and expectations of most players.
