Bike&Harp
37 posts
Aug 02, 2016
8:50 AM
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Have any of you experimented with this? It seems to make the blow notes much louder. You can also bend all the blow notes 1 to 6. I'm thinking of trying it when i buy my next harp. I don't know about the valves sticking though and causing problems? Anyway for now it's just something i'm contemplating. If there are drawbacks to the half valving i might not bother.
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SuperBee
3959 posts
Aug 03, 2016
3:55 AM
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I've only had Suzuki valved harps.
I devalved some but they were still just awful imho so that's all.
I can't believe halve valved harps are as bad as my experience led me to believe. When I was taking lessons from Jimi Lee, he was just starting to play with them in preference to overblow technique. And he can overblow with aplomb.
So I expect the stuff he was using was better than I was using but I'm really aware he has skills I am miles away from so it just could be valves require subtle technique.
Sorry, that is probably not much help. I'm a dinosaur anyway, I've decided. I'm just gonna be happy to play like Portnoy, sonny boy, Walter, jimmy cotton etc.. That is enough for me.
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Bike&Harp
38 posts
Aug 04, 2016
8:26 AM
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Thanks Bee. I don't know, it's something i will probably try in the future at some point.
I bought a Rocket in Bb and received it today. Out of the box it played badly. So i took it apart and checked the gaps. I was horrified at the way Hohner has set this up!! I swear the gaps were about 6 or 7 times the width of a reed on the low reeds and not much off of that on the high one's. I gapped it to overblow and overdraw pretty quickly but can't get 7 OD yet as i just did it very quickly.
Anyway it sounds really cool now. But it brings up an interesting point i think:Does Hohner not consider guys who don't know anything about the intricacies of harps and how to adjust them? What if i was the type of guy who said "oh this is a brand new harp i don't want to mess with it"? For someone who knows zilch about the technical details that would mean they had a harp that played like a lemon out the box and they'd be stuck with it like that.
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SuperBee
3964 posts
Aug 04, 2016
3:36 PM
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It's people on a production line. Maybe it's espionage from seydel. Maybe an uncaring employee. Maybe someone was away that day. Maybe old stock from early 2015 when they made a lot of badly adjusted harps because they listened to bad advice from 'customers'.
Hohner know about reed offsets. I wouldn't really be surprised if my 'espionage' thought was true.
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Bike&Harp
39 posts
Aug 04, 2016
5:18 PM
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LOL! Yeah maybe! I kid you not this was the widest gapping i've ever seen on a harp. I opened it up because i said after playing it "What! This can't be the Rocket harp they were all raving about! It doesn't sound like anything special at all." I was intrigued at how it was gonna be gapped. I had my suspicions however because it was really airy and not the volume they said it was capable of. Then i took the cover plates off had a look at the gapping and knew straight away. It sounds incredible now!
Speaking of Seydel: I bought a Seydel Powerdraw direct from Seydel and it was much better set up from the factory. In fact i could have left it the way it was set and been quite happy to play it that way. The only reason i opened it up was to set it up for OB's.
Maybe an email to Hohner's customer service department is called for. This was gapped so widely it wasn't even funny!
Last Edited by Bike&Harp on Aug 04, 2016 5:21 PM
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SuperBee
3967 posts
Aug 04, 2016
8:50 PM
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i dunno if you know the story of the Rocket and the change of name for the Special 20, so i'll give you my recollection of how it played.
When Hohner introduced the Rocket, they decided to use the same reed plates for it and the Sp20. good idea i think, why reinvent the wheel? this is why many think of the Rocket as a kind of 'special 20 Deluxe'.
at the same time the rebadged the special 20 as 'progressive' instead of 'marine band'.
in order to use the same reed plates on both models, they had to change the drilling to permit the rocket covers to be fitted. no big deal.
all this was fine except fot the fact that they coincidentally decided that they had been setting the reeds too close. apparently they had customer feedback to this effect. so they decided to listen to the feedback and began selling the sp20s et al with much wider gaps.
thats the official story. it seems unlikely to me because they had been doing really well for about 6 years with their gaps and suddenly changed to unfeasibly wide gapping. what you describe sounds like what i also saw.
as you can imagine, complaints flooded in. those of us who were used to dodgy setups just reset the gaps and continued as always but there were ludicrous claims about the ruination of an iconic product due to the rebadging or the drilling of extra holes, and claims the harp was being produced in china, made of different brass. you name it, somebody claimed it.
it was just bad offsets.
anyway, a bunch of harps were produced before hohner stopped it.
i couldnt believe the stories and even though i didnt need any harps i went to my local music store and bought 2 sp20s, ensuring they were badged 'progressive', because i wanted to make sure i got the 'bad' ones.
they were hard to play. i took the Bb apart, i saw the gaps set as you describe in the rocket. i reset them. i didnt reset the arcs etc. that harp instantly became one of the best-playing harps i've ever had.
The Db was the same but i didnt even bother restting it. its still in pieces waiting for me to make a video about it, but ive lost interest in the video.
i also had a set of 5 marine bands i bought super-cheap on amazon. brand new but they had the exact same problem.
it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that hohner would have implemented these gaps as a matter of policy. they are impractically huge.
anyway, they stopped doing it but there are still harps in the supply chain from back then no doubt. or maybe the rogue element which caused the problem back then is at it again.
i wouldn't hesitate to send them a message. they do know how to gap harmonicas for general use. i know there are personal variations and no exact one size fits all solution, but ime there is a middle ground which suits the majority of reasonable players reasonably well, and of course hohner know this. which is why i suspect rogue employees or a breakdown in communication perhaps. maybe industrial unrest.
of course i don't actually know anything and am just wildly speculating. but that was crazy back in early 2015 with all the nonsense people went on with
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Bike&Harp
40 posts
Aug 05, 2016
5:39 AM
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Thanks Bee. No i didn't know the whole story of that. I just heard they were gapping them wide because people were complaining that their harps didn't work. It seems a shame that they decided to set gaps like that. As you say they are impractically huge and totally inefficient. I'm not exaggerating when i say my first thought on playing the Rocket SOTB was "This thing sounds like crap! Where are they getting all these rave reviews from?" But after a simple gapping it now plays beautifully and sounds incredible. I really love it.
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