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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Working on Your Own Harps
Working on Your Own Harps
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Gnarly
Alternatetuning
3199 posts
Jul 14, 2025
7:31 PM
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Hi—
I do repairs and refurbishments for folks, but firmly believe that anyone who takes harmonica seriously (if that’s not too far fetched) should learn to do simple things to improve and maintain their instruments.
Gapping, spot tuning, and CLEANING are all important, and the player is the best person for the job—you know when you get it right.
If you screw it up, send it to someone like me (or Mike Peace, Fellow Okie).
I love the opportunity to stay in touch with musicians, and see some cool harps in the process—just received a Frank Huang custom 270 that is sooo cool!
Chromatics are fiddly, you might not want to work on them, but don’t be afraid to pop the covers off your Marine Band and see what’s under the hood.
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bandini
33 posts
Jul 15, 2025
8:30 AM
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I've increasingly come to realize that no one can gap my harps for me - I had to learn to do it myself, to match the way I play.
As I've become more adept at gapping I've been able to go back to playing marine bands again, because I'm now able to deal with their out of the box inconsistencies. I can take any marine band and make it playable for me.
Tuning is still difficult for me - I often wind up ruining a harp when I try to tune it. But fortunately, marine bands typically come in tune these days.
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Gerry
121 posts
Jul 18, 2025
8:59 AM
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I've been tuning all my harps to Paddy Richter and have learnt to gap, and emboss. In the last couple of years I've learnt to overblow/draw and you really do need to understand gapping to make it work. However, once the gaps are right it's a relatively easy technique to start. (Or a squeaky, squealy one if the gaps are off.)
Incidentally, I started on Hohner MS harps but now most of my harps are Seydel. The difference in brass vs stainless is large but the techniques are the same.
If I had to recommend a harp to learn tuning and gapping I'd suggest either a MS Blues Harp or Big River.
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florida-trader
1606 posts
Jul 19, 2025
6:37 AM
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I agree 100% with Gary. I didn’t always feel this way. Honestly, for the first 35 years that I played the harp, I never took them apart. Never cleaned them. Never blew out a reed, so I never had to worry about making repairs. And, I had no idea that they could be improved by making some minor adjustments. Then I plugged into the online harmonica community and started getting educated. And I will also add that until about 2008, I never really hung around with other harmonica players, so if there were people who were more knowledgeable than I was, I was not exposed to them.
Fast forward to today. My eyes have been opened. A lot of people still believe that when you buy a new harmonica, it should be perfect out of the box. Sometimes it is – if you are very very lucky. And a lot of guys simply adjust their playing to accommodate stock harps. That’s fine. But there is another option. You can easily adjust harmonicas to fit you – your approach to playing, your embouchure, your attack. It is a lot easier than most people think. You do not have to be a brain surgeon. Yes – if you want to learn how to build a Mac Daddy Overblow/Overdraw Supercharged World Beater Harmonica – it is going to take a lot of knowledge, practice and experience. But the basics are simple.
1. Flat sand the draw plate
2. Adjust the gaps
3. Tune
4. Bonus step – maybe install a custom comb
I won’t go into detail about how to do this stuff. There are hundreds of YouTube videos you can watch. Just take the plunge. Be gentle. Take your time. Start with your least favorite harp – the one that you never play anyway. It will probably become your favorite.
And oh yeah, one other benefit to all this is that your harps will be cleaner. Once you open one up and see what is inside, you will not want to let them get that dirty again.
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Tom Halchak
Blue Moon Harmonicas
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nacoran
10459 posts
Jul 19, 2025
11:58 AM
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At the end of the day there is no such thing as 'perfect' when it comes to out of the box because different people like their harps set up different ways. Customizing, whether you do it yourself or have someone do it for you, is getting it set up just for you.
It's like getting a new bike. You can buy a great bike at a shop, but you still want to adjust the height of the seat and handle bars to fit you... and maybe put some cool stickers on them to make them more 'you'. :)(
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Nate
Facebook
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First Post- May 8, 2009
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Gnarly
Alternatetuning
3202 posts
Jul 20, 2025
5:35 AM
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Winslow says the first thing he does is disassemble and reassemble the harp, and that the playability is improved by that procedure!
And Tom is so right, harps can get dirty and then you are going to put it back in your mouth—there are no germophobes in the Harmonica repair rabbit hole . . .
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SuperBee
7147 posts
Jul 25, 2025
3:59 AM
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I have to endorse the theme of this thread.
I started working on my harps because I really couldn’t afford to buy new ones every time I broke a reed. Harps were expensive in Australia long before the prices really started rising in the US. Back in 2011 a crossover was $60 at Rockin’ Ron’s but over $90 here, and (unlike today) the currency was pretty much at parity.
Ironically, in all the things I learned while mending and maintaining harps, I stopped breaking them. I have replaced maybe 5 reeds in my own harps since 2016. That’s allowing for forgetfulness. I only remember doing 3 and while I have a memory some find remarkable, it’s not perfect.
I think all the practice of playing with minimal breath while tuning harps eventually corrected my habit of playing with way more air than necessary.
One client of mine took my advice about maintaining his harps seriously and started doing regular cleaning of his harps. I have seen many occasions on the Facebook harp groups when he advises people to clean their harps and testifies about his experience.
That’s gratifying. He didn’t really break many harps so when he became confident about taking them apart and cleaning them many of his harp problems went away.
Mark Prados encouraged and inspired me to work on my harps and I tried to approach it the way Mark did. Mark used to sign off with a line I think went ‘Making the world a better place, one reed at a time’. We really tried to keep the price down so people could keep their harps going.
One thing Mark told me was don’t be afraid to say ‘no’ when I needed to. I hit that point where I knew I needed to say no but I found it very difficult because I had a lot of relationships around the country and overseas.
A couple of things which i don’t see mentioned often but which I think are helpful for harp work:
A quiet place, away from road noises, refrigerators, running water, washing machines, etc. these things play havoc when you’re trying to tune a harp if you are using a tuner without the benefit of a directional microphone.
Alternatively, a tuner with an external microphone that you can direct towards the work.
Great light. I found I’d always prefer to set up near the north facing window (southern hemisphere) because the natural light was so much better than any of the artificial light I had in the house.
I know some people really love using a file to tune reeds, and I accept the reasons they give, but for me I had to get a rotary tool when I started doing more work on steel reeds and soon I found I was using it on brass as well.
I don’t mean an engraving tool although I have found some very limited use for those little battery powered pen-style engravers.
I have a thing marketed for shaping acrylic fingernails. Mine has a foot pedal which is probably not necessary but I find it much better than using it without. It’s reversible and has adjustable speed.
The only downside for me was that I lost my fine filing skills after a while and felt a bit dependent on the nail drill, but the file skills come back pretty quickly when needed.
Last Edited by SuperBee on Jul 25, 2025 4:01 AM
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