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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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