nacoran
2606 posts
Aug 23, 2010
6:47 PM
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So guess I power-washed one of my favorite harmonicas the other day and the machine destroyed my 7 hole blow. Fortunately I've got a spare in the key, but it's the principle. :( So, I thought I'd start this thread and ask you what are the most stupid or spectacular ways you've destroyed one of your harps?
Points will be awarded for technique, effect and humor.
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Nate
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TahoeMike00
82 posts
Aug 23, 2010
6:54 PM
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Attempting/testing the Steven Wright harmonica playing technique. Blow notes were awesome. Draw notes.. well, somewhere along Interstate 5 near Sacramento, there lies a true C FLAT harmonica.
Luckily it was only a 'BluesBand'
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The more I learn about harmonica, the more I learn how much more there is to learn.
Last Edited by on Aug 23, 2010 6:55 PM
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eharp
756 posts
Aug 23, 2010
6:56 PM
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trying to clear a reed while doing 50 mph with a screw driver without removing the covers.
i've run a couple thru the washer without problems.
heck- i sometimes clean them by putting them in the dishwasher.
("no heat dry")
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upstate
6 posts
Aug 23, 2010
7:29 PM
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i was hitchhiking and had a couple harps in a backpack and the top came off the suntan lotion. i rinsed them off 100 times but never got rid of the taste
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OzarkRich
248 posts
Aug 23, 2010
7:49 PM
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I gave a harp to one of my kids.
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Ozark Rich
__________
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Ozark Rich's YouTube
Ozark Rich's Facebook
Last Edited by on Aug 23, 2010 7:50 PM
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KingoBad
347 posts
Aug 23, 2010
8:40 PM
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I dropped my favorite harp getting out of the car. I though I would just close the door before it fell out into the dirt. Well... I caught it alright. Looked a bit worse than OzarkRich's harp above...
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Greg Heumann
725 posts
Aug 23, 2010
8:43 PM
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Honestly, there's nothing inherent in going through the dishwasher or washing machine that should hurt your harp (unless it has valves). Have you taken your harp apart? I'm willing to bet the only problem with the 7 Blow is a trapped piece of lint.
I did manage to destroy all the wind savers in a Hohner Chromonica 64 by leaving it in a very hot car.
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/Greg
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nacoran
2608 posts
Aug 23, 2010
9:04 PM
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I found it when it started clunky in the dryer. I think maybe being smacked around knocked the reed out of alignment. I plinked it a pushed it for a bit and it's working know.
Then of course there is the time I tried to see if you could bend a reed plate and make a round harmonica. (It was a Piedmont with a blown reed, so all that was left was to let it take one for science.) I don't think I did the experiment with enough precision to prove conclusively that it wouldn't work, but I'm not sure even if I had that doughnut shaped harmonicas would take off (the reeds were running perpendicular to the way they would in a pitch pipe).
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Nate
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conjob
77 posts
Aug 23, 2010
11:21 PM
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i've wrecked 2 as a result of always having one in my pocket. the first one fell out of my pocket on the dance floor at my friends wedding and several people stepped on it. the second one went into a house fire with me (firefighting is my day job) and although it still works fine i cant get the taste of burnt plastic out of it so i cant play it.
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eharp
760 posts
Aug 24, 2010
3:59 AM
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had a burning desire to play harp, huh?
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The Gloth
450 posts
Aug 24, 2010
4:04 AM
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My first harp, I had it in my back pocket and I was sitting on a chair, swaying back and forth. The harp fell off my pocket and was crushed under the leg of the chair.
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http://www.buddybrent.be
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jbone
382 posts
Aug 24, 2010
4:19 AM
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i decided some years ago to try sealing the pearwood comb of my 270. took it apart, heated beeswax, and dipped the comb. let it set up. realized there was a lot of excess wax on it, nore than i could scrape off with an exacto knife, so i preheated the gas oven to just warm. so i thought- the thermostat was bad on the oven. i don't know how hot it actually got but i did learn that pearwood will warp very easily in heat!
i had also decided to drill and screw the plates to the comb, and didn't lay out one hole properly. when i drilled it, it broke through one of the reed chambers and cracked the comb. i had figured that if i could get some screws and nuts through the reed plates and comb, i could persuade the whole mess to come back together.
wrong. so very wrong. i ended up with a somewhat dali-esque paperweight! when my wife saw this she just tsk-tsked and let me order a hering 7148, just that once. i couldn't bear to see the mess that had once been a perfectly good chromatic and it went in the trash. that was the total end of my sealing/drilling/tapping adventures on any harp.
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Buzadero
501 posts
Aug 24, 2010
7:53 AM
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Uh boy. My best story for this topic needs to be told delicately:
Back sometime in the early 80's, the worldwide oil business situation caused many of us working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico to get painfully slow. Times were tough. Myself and a couple of friends decided to pool our resources and make a trip to the West Coast since we had heard that the Santa Barbara Channel was having a bit of a mini-boom. So, we packed up and headed west.
I'm originally from San Diego and was still pretty well networked. So, from a payphone somewhere along I-10 I had made some calls trying to drum up work. Mind you, if you remember payphones and their inherent frustration, you had to pump coins in them for any long-distance call of any real length. So, from a highway phone, I was trying to find work for my merry band of itinerant and migrant wet workers. From a call to a small harbor services company, I learned of a dredging job in Los Angeles. So, we continued off towards the sunset.
The dredging job never materialized, and we were essentially stuck en masse in Southern California. I swallowed my 24 year old pride and dragged everybody to my mother's house and mooched a meal for the bunch of us. My mom discreetly slipped me some money and gave me the concerned mother boo-boo eyes and we were off.
There we were. Unemployed, an old Ford van full of smelly wetsuits and dive helmets, some duffels and scattered food wrappers from gas stations from Louisiana to California. So, what did we do? Of course, we went to Tijuana.
Being the only one of us that had ever been to Mexico, it fell upon me to Pied Piper my troupe across the border. So, we soon find ourselves in Mexico, drinking cheap beer and tequila and having a great old time. As I was from San Dago, I spent most of my summer weekends in Mexico all through high-school, surfing, selling fake hash to Marines out of the Camp Pendleton boot camp, and haunting the boulevards of Tijuana and Ensenada. I grew up on and was raised with a love of the Mexican culture and love interacting with the people. Over the years, I had developed quite the repertoire of Mariachi and Ranchera tunes on harp. It started back in Junior High as a cheap way to ingratiate myself to the parents and grandparents of my Mexican-American friends. In true Eddy Haskell flagrancy, I'd get the smiles and the invites for some of those fine Mexican dinners and Sunday picnics. Later, I developed the ability to surprise a Mexican bar or streetcorner band by playing right along with the old standards. Once I found out that a direct copy of Big Walter's Cucaracha could get you free drinks for quite some time, my catalog of Mexican music took on a life of its own.
Here we are, whooping it up at a bar on Revelucion Blvd in downtown TJ. Bar band is playing live, tequila and beer are flowing, strippers are working the stage and prowling the tourists. My friends are drinking way too much and I'm working the music thing to the limits of what kind of free alcohol I can get out of it. Good times. I'm like a god among my people.
Now that you have the picture. Imagine if you will, a stripper with inordinate talent and stagecraft sitting at the edge of the stage........"performing". One of her colleagues is bantering with me right next to the band at the side of the stage. All of a sudden, in what was meant as a playful move, the girl I'm sitting with grabs one of my harps and tosses it to the girl on stage. Everybody starts hooting and howling and.....as only a true performer in command of her audience can do.....causes my harp to slowly "disappear". As you can imagine, this flairful and truly dexterous move elicited significant audience response. As much as the place erupted in applause, I got slapped on the back as if I was somehow part of the heroics. I wasn't pleased. Especially, when our entertainer proceeded to stand up and continue on with her "routine". She finished up and soon another girl was taking her turn in rotation on stage. At the time, I was pissed off. Harps were cheap, but not that cheap. And, like now, every one had its own personality and emotional attachment.
I didn't see that harp again until about a half an hour later. The little magician went back up to do another round and was able, to much fanfare and applause, to very dramatically and methodically produced my poor harp and toss it to me.
I still have that silly thing. However, I have never played it since.
Delicate enough?
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~Buzadero
Underwater Janitor, Patriot
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Greg Heumann
728 posts
Aug 24, 2010
8:00 AM
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Delicate, yes.
But EEEEEEEeeeeeeewwwwwwwww!
(Strenuously resisting the urge to make some awful jokes.....)
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/Greg
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toddlgreene
1700 posts
Aug 24, 2010
8:46 AM
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EDITED for taste...and to comply with the ever-expanding creed of the forum.
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Crescent City Harmonica Club
Todd L Greene, Co-Founder
Last Edited by on Aug 24, 2010 9:02 AM
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toddlgreene
1701 posts
Aug 24, 2010
9:06 AM
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Shame on me, Buz.(tee hee)
I wish i had a wonderful story of harp destruction and/or defilement, but the best I can do is what has happended to the harps I've given my kids...I've had to clean them out a few times, removing all manner of kiddie snack items-goldfish crackers, oatmeal, grits, vienna sausages. At least I think that's what that muck was.
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Crescent City Harmonica Club
Todd L Greene, Co-Founder
Last Edited by on Aug 24, 2010 9:06 AM
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KingoBad
349 posts
Aug 24, 2010
9:31 AM
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Buzadero,
Great story! That harp has lots of Mojo... I'd keep it as an unplayed charm forever! Emphasis on unplayed...
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Old Dog
72 posts
Aug 24, 2010
10:08 AM
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Conjob... was it a Firebreath?
Sooo tempted, Buz, but I just can't say it!
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I used to be young and foolish. Now I'm not so young.
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DeakHarp
169 posts
Aug 24, 2010
11:58 AM
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In my early years of playing harp and up till the late 90's I used to be able to venture into places like yur harp was ....The girls love harp players .... But i never in my day let the harp do the work for me ....lol
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Have Harp Will Travel
www.deakharp.com
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walterharp
434 posts
Aug 24, 2010
12:29 PM
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Something tells me nobody will top Buzadero in this thread!
Last Edited by on Aug 24, 2010 12:29 PM
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JimInMO
82 posts
Aug 24, 2010
12:42 PM
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Well, this is pretty mild but my pocket experience is: I wear a vest with a the harps to be used in a particular set in one pocket and extra guitar picks in the other. Got in a hurry and put the harp back in the wrong pocket and the next time I tried to use it there was nothing doing on the 4 5 6 and 7 holes. Now I don't play that hard and didn't think I could blow all those reed all at once. Took it apart the next break and removed the Dunlop Tortex .80mm pick that was jammed in there. Went shopping for one of those pick holder thingy's that attach to the mic stand but found a cup holder that attaches to the stand. It hold 4 harps very nicely.
Last Edited by on Aug 24, 2010 12:43 PM
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99
9 posts
Aug 24, 2010
12:45 PM
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oh my!!
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nacoran
2615 posts
Aug 24, 2010
1:03 PM
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Walter, not unless someone has a harmonica that was hit by a meteorite or trampled at Pamplona, and even then there probably would have to be more to the story than that!
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Nate
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Leanground
112 posts
Aug 24, 2010
2:28 PM
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well told Buzadero...does this lead to the TB or LP question?
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Leanground
113 posts
Aug 24, 2010
2:33 PM
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I lost a Hering Black Blues in G from my coat pocket last winter...when I realized it was gone I tried to remember where I could have left it, no luck
Each night after my boxer "Cotton" and I would walk by a snowbank that the dang dog would stop and paw at for no apparent reason until the third night it dawned on me and sure enough...there was my harp
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earlounge
144 posts
Aug 24, 2010
2:53 PM
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The bass amp rattled a beer right off the ledge and into my harp case :/
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boris_plotnikov
219 posts
Aug 24, 2010
11:35 PM
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Once I clean my Special 20 in Bb and dry it by towel. 4 blow reed was suddenly captured by towel's hair and broken.
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Excuse my bad English. Click on my photo or my username for my music.
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