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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Harps Aren't Supposed to Bend?
Harps Aren't Supposed to Bend?
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Littoral
612 posts
Sep 08, 2012
6:35 AM
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It's a question.
Harps were not designed to bend, at least that's what I have understood, so far, from the history of the harmonica. The fact that they do bend (with the opposite reed!) is a serious physics conundrum -AND at intervals. If anyone has any historical information as to who can be attributed to the bend component of the design I sure would like to know. Is there another instrument that does anything close to what harps do with bending like they do? I don't think so.
Whoever figured it out deserves a Nobel Prize for Physics. It's certainly a stretch to say that it was an "accident" but that's my opinion, for now.
So?
Last Edited by on Sep 08, 2012 6:36 AM
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Rick Davis
651 posts
Sep 08, 2012
7:50 AM
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Gary Smith says we destroy the harps a little bit every time we play them.
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-Rick Davis
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Gnarly
328 posts
Sep 08, 2012
10:06 AM
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Define "supposed".
The music for which the Richter tuned diatonic harmonica was designed is first position, so bending the notes was not part of the design.
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Littoral
613 posts
Sep 08, 2012
3:31 PM
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"supposed", IT WASN"T INTENTIONAL, richter harps bend by accident, they were not designed to bend.
Of course they DO bend...so was it an accident?
Does anyone have any historical evidence that they were designed to bend?
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groyster1
2007 posts
Sep 08, 2012
3:45 PM
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some old literature I have from hohner says that bending/choking the reeds decrease the life of harps...but its necessary to play cross harp...
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laurent2015
413 posts
Sep 08, 2012
4:27 PM
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I find it's a very good, clever and opportune question, since I previously asked it (hem...)
Seriously, I once bought a harp that I couldn't bend, even after tweakings, and claimed for a replacement.
I had to explain to the supplier what were the bends on a harp, and he eventually agreed; I have however to precise that my complaint had been sent in a very short time after the purchase.
This german (huge) supplier would have been of bad faith in case of negative response, because there's a sound sample for most of harps, and there are bends in these samples...
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nacoran
6066 posts
Sep 08, 2012
5:46 PM
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This sounds like a question for one of our resident harmonica historians. If I had to guess who might know the answer it would be Dave Payne, or Adam. It's also the sort of thing Pat Missin might know. If it happened before recording became commonplace though the answer may be lost to time.
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Nate
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SuperBee
554 posts
Sep 09, 2012
3:16 AM
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The fact that a harp laid out with a blow/draw arrangement will produce a compromised note would have been well known by the time the richter scheme was adopted. I bet. I have no doubt about that. The question really is whether it was envisaged that a richter tuned harp would be played that way. It probably wasn't the "intention" but it wouldn't be surprising that people would do it if they could. People are inventive.
It's pretty clear Apple didn't intend batteries in iPhones to be replaceable, but of course they knew people would do it. That's why they put a sticker with "do not remove" over the top of a screw. The "warranty sticker". I think the richter tuning is all about chords. The fact that the intervals between blow and draw notes which result can be obtained by bending is just a natural consequence. I don't think it's part of a grander scheme. I'll eat my hat if it is, and post photos.
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The Iceman
457 posts
Sep 09, 2012
8:19 AM
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One of my earliest lectures/seminars (I believe it was at a SPAH in 1996 or so, was one I called "Diatonic Paradigm Shift - the instrument touched by GOD" or something like that.
In it I outlined the 2 Paradigm Shifts that I perceived happened to the diatonic (remember when Paradigm Shift was the latest business term?).
In original design, diatonic was conceived to be played in what we call 1st position, although at that time there was no positional concept. It played chords on the low end and had a diatonic scale in the mid to upper range (encompassing "given" notes but inferring that there were all those "missing" ones) - all designed to play the "pop tunes of the day", which was German oompah style stuff based on chords I and V.
First paradigm shift (IMO) was when diatonics were picked up by black slaves in US at that time and they approached it by inhaling the chord as the I - thereby putting it into a I, IV chord frame. It was during this period that someone inhaled and made a note bend down, creating that very human vocal effect of moaning that was ingrained in the black slaves' cultural musical expression of how they felt in their hearts.
This discovery of "bending" also started to create through technique some of the "missing" notes inherent in the original design and Richter tuning.
The second paradigm shift was the advent of finding the last remaining "missing" notes - OB and OD, not invented by but really disseminated by Howard Levy.
So, currently the diatonic is capable of all chromatic notes (granted that they are created by techniques developed and more extreme than in the eyes of the creator of the diatonic) even though it started out as a limited instrument.
Somehow, all the notes (chromatically) were always in there. It just took a few generations to find them, so I like to call it "The Instrument Touched by God".
I don't know of any other instrument that has evolved in a similar fashion (as well as any other instrument that can be played by inhaling).
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The Iceman
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ElkRiverHarmonicas
1288 posts
Sep 09, 2012
12:05 PM
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My guess it was it very early. However, for most people there was no need.
In first position, the notes are there already. The 1-3 holes are there so you can tongue-block octaves - that is the sole reason they are laid out like they are. The middle octave was for your melodies. I don't care how much you bend, the notes simply are not there.
You don't actually have a need for these notes until players move from first position. Most stayed in first position. The exception would be guys like Gwen Foster who played blues in first position, but the inherent quality of bent notes is they are rarely on pitch and that wasn't much good for melody playing.
Those people struggled with that until the 1920s - you see that in the "How to play harmonica literature" you see references of how to get around these notes (for contests, you didn't play songs which needed them). You don't see the chromatic show up in literature until the 1920s, even though the basic 260 chromatic debuted in 1910. But I'm going off there. My point is - all the efforts into getting these missing notes played is the story of the chromatic. There have been chromatics as long as there have been diatonics. James Bazin in the USA was making a chromatic around the 1830s and its not long after the harmonica is reintroduced in America during the 1870s that you start seeing patents for chromatics.
However...
I have no evidence of this beyond the circumstantial, but I think you would have seen cross harp by the 1880s - as soon as they start working their way into American string bands.
Back in the 1940s, my grandfather, having zero exposure to harmonica, bought one to tune his guitar. It was a D Marine Band. He used the 1 draw to tune his E string on his guitar. He heard an A chord on the draw and realized that if he had an A chord, it was obvious that he had a D chord on the blow, he could play the harmonica in A.
Within a few years of his returning from the Korean war, he quit being a man of many instruments and devoted himself mostly to mastery of the mandolin. He didn't play harmonica for very many years, and didn't listen to others playing the harmonica, thus when I talked to him about it years later, he was still stuck in his original mindset. He thought it was something unique he had figured out and he was telling me about it as if it was something I could learn to do.
19th century musicians were just as talented as we are, and just as intelligent as we are. If my grandfather could figure this stuff out, there is no reason to think that others couldn't have done the same before. What he did could have been done at any time.
The story - and it is just a story - that some former slave figured this out and everybody learned it from him isn't something I really buy into - I've considered putting it in my department of stuff that never happened page. I don't believe it had any racial boundaries whatsoever and this story originated from the same Hohner marketing department that brought us the Abraham Lincoln harmonica and Civil War harmonica body armor.
My grandfather, by the way, was white and he figured it out on his own. I believe that bending is so self-evident it was discovered by many people over the course of many years.
When we first start seeing rural recordings in the 1920s, 2nd position and bending was well-established. It had to have been discovered long before to have been done by so many people and it had more to do with the music they played than their race, although more white players still do first position than black. It sprang up - on recordings - from many musicians who were geographically isolated from each other. Then you have guys like Frank Hutchison, who was white and a bluesman, but never made the connection to play his harmonica with his blues. Gwen Foster had his own way of bending, I don't know anybody bending on the high end of the harp before Foster. That's one of the many little things I see that supports the idea it was invented by many, many people independently. From 1920s recordings, you notice it more wit
Last Edited by on Sep 09, 2012 12:37 PM
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Littoral
616 posts
Sep 09, 2012
12:33 PM
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Great info, all around.
So, regardless of who figured out the fact that they bend, they were not designed to bend? If this is true then it's magic. Or, like Iceland says, Divine Intervention.
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ElkRiverHarmonicas
1289 posts
Sep 09, 2012
12:50 PM
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They were designed not to bend. However, the science of how reeds interact with one another was very well understood. When was the Tremolo invented at the Thie factory in Austria? Maybe the 1850s? Tremolo is as much of a magic thing, if not more, than bending.
In my earlier post, I wasn't going against Iceman's paradigm shifts - I just don't buy into the slave-exclusive thing. For one thing, all this could not have taken place until more than a decade after all the slaves were freed. Slaves had no harmonicas. Even if harmonicas were widely available in the U.S. at the time - and they weren't - if you are so poor that you don't even own yourself, you don't have money to drop on harps, which, unlike string instruments and drums, aren't something you can make yourself. The exception would something like a fiddle, which would have been a gift from an owner at some point and passed down from generation to generation. Even that would have been fairly rare. Those unfortunate people had virtually nothing.
We could build on those with these other paradigm shifts:
The tonal paradigm shift - and this was in how harmonicas were designed to change tone- was in the 1890s.
The chromatic harmonica (you could throw the orchestrals in there, too) was a huge shift in the 1920s.
The Chicago amplified sound was a huge shift in the 1950s - and you could make a case for Charlie McCoy introducing this to white society in the 1970s as being another one.
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David
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At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong.
R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne
Last Edited by on Sep 09, 2012 12:55 PM
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timeistight
827 posts
Sep 09, 2012
12:46 PM
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I don't think guitars, trumpets, saxophones or Hammond organs were designed to bend notes either, yet they all can to one degree or another. Where there's a will, there's a way.
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RedRooster
1 post
Sep 09, 2012
2:46 PM
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Whoever invented the electric guitar had no idea what astonishing innovations Hendrix and others were going to come up with.
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