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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Pre-War Marine Band Harps
Pre-War Marine Band Harps
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rbeetsme
320 posts
Nov 12, 2010
2:14 PM
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I know this is an old subject, but I wasn't paying attention till now. I've often heard that the pre-war MB harps are more desirable, why?, better materials?, better construction?, what's the big deal?
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arzajac
392 posts
Nov 12, 2010
3:16 PM
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If you join Richard Sleigh's mailing list, you get access to a document he wrote called the Marine Band Field Spotters Guide. In it, he gives a few details about how to recognize the different changes in Marine Bands over time. For example, if you are looking at an old Marine Band at a Yard Sale or at an antique shop.
According to him, those older harps make nice instruments to play in quiet environments, but his favorite harps to use for customizing are the ones made in the 60's - the ones that come in a box with the Hicksville, N.Y. address on the back.
As for pre-war Marine Bands, as I understand it, modern Marine Bands don't play as well as they used to. Modern customizers endeavor to make modern marine bands play as well as they used to.
Sleigh says that very old Marine Bands have thinner reeds than the later ones.
I have bought a handful of harps from that era (ebay). I can attest to the fact that most of the harps I have from the 50s or earlier play beautifully. Without doing anything other than cleaning them with an ultrasonic cleaner and making the comb usable, they overblow out of the box.
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Last Edited by on Nov 12, 2010 3:16 PM
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htownfess
204 posts
Nov 13, 2010
3:31 AM
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The main reason prewar Marine Bands play well is that they were gapped by hand to a consistent formula by workers who knew what they were doing and usually did a decent job. That formula was gapped somewhat tighter overall than what automated gapping has usually done since then, but the balance between blow/draw reeds is good so they don't feel too tight--response is good, so is bending, and there's usually an easy 6OB. For a one-size-fits-all approach, it really does satisfy a lot of players' needs. Those workers were supposedly on piecework rates and somewhat sloppier than a good customizer would be today, but a good customizer's Stage 1 model harp is indeed usually trying to emulate that purposeful gapping.
I haven't seen a bunch of examples so I'm making a hasty generalization, but I believe that the Seydel 1847 and Hohner Crossover are getting a final gapping check/correction by skilled workers. Reeds sometimes spring back to wherever they feel like after automated gapping, so a once-ever by eye & correction is usually needed to make a contemporary harp play like it is supposed to, but that step costs too much time/money/training for manufacturers to do except on premium models. I think it's likely that delays in Crossover supply stem either from the use of that active quality control step or from the tuning scheme being checked likewise, rather than problems with the supply of combs/reedplates/covers.
Prewars did have tighter reedslot tolerances than the Dark Age harps due to fresher tooling; Hohner addressed that around the turn of the century. Different reed alloys were also used so you had some different reed profiles (i.e. Sleigh's remark). But the hand gapping made the biggest difference by far.
I think Suzuki has got an edge in automated gapping these days. I haven't looked in a Manji yet, but the way people describe their response, I'm betting they're coming well gapped from the factory. When the Firebreath/Pure Harp came out, it was obvious that Suzuki had raised the bar on gapping production harps well.
One facet of prewar MB performance that struck me recently is that if you look at the playing pattern indicated by corrosion/marks on the reedplates, it's clear that they were usually used to play tongueblocked first position, you'd guess standards and such, so holes 4-10 get the most work by far. Today's MB buyer probably plays blues and mainly on holes 1-6. The prewar player deposited the most moisture in the upper end of the comb where there's more wood, and I daresay their comb swelled more evenly than the modern player's does. Today's blues player may be breathing into the sectionally skinny end of the comb so much that it outswells the top half and their harp doesn't seal up as evenly overall as the prewar player's did.
Too, there was a problem for a long time with the rivet divot on the 2 hole in modern MB combs--you could see daylight between comb/plate there on every new longslot MB, and swelling couldn't seal it up.
If you gap a Marine Band Deluxe to the prewar pattern, it can rival a prewar in a blind test. A Stage I harp from someone like Buddha or Joe Spiers should actually do the prewar thang better than the average prewar, since those customizers are taking more time and being meticulous rather than tolerating a little sloppiness in the interest of piecework speed.
My opinion, anyway. Others know more about this than I do. But no voodoo involved in prewar magic, just skill, IMO. Watch Joe Spiers' Youtube series to learn gapping by response/sound, and you can make today's Marine Band play like it's supposed to. Hohner studied prewars hard to figure out where they'd gone wrong since then, and has gone a long way to reclaim that old standard. It's a lot easier to deal with a Deluxe, though--bear in mind that the prewar workers didn't have to disassemble the harp to work on it, so structural integrity after gapping was probably better than today's average nailed stock MB would be if you took it apart to gap it and nailed it back up. I don't think an unsealed MB comb is necessarily so bad if you can just encourage its wood to swell up evenly. But a lot of blues players don't play the whole harp enough to make that happen.
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nacoran
3227 posts
Nov 13, 2010
12:12 PM
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Pat Missin has a good article on identifying MB's over
here:
http://patmissin.com/ffaq/q38.html
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rbeetsme
321 posts
Nov 13, 2010
3:58 PM
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Lots of good info here, thanks.
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chromaticblues
277 posts
Nov 13, 2010
6:39 PM
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I'd like to put my two cents in here. I hear so much about how great old Marine Bands were. I have bought a few MB's on ebay (more pieces of shit than I'd like to admit) hopeing to find that old magic. These are just my personal findings I'm speaking of. Nothing else. To me they seem smoother less raspy, but not as loud. I'm assuming its because of different materials. I don't really know! I do know that my harps play 50 times better than any old harp I have bought and did the same work on I do on all my own. I also have to say not a single harp I have worked has come out as good as my own! Thats because my harps are Marine Bands!
@htown No Crossovers and Manjis are not gapped worth shit! I don't believe there is a harp made that has skilled people at the end of the line. I do believe old harps were more consistent than anything made today, but I do not believe that new MB's are not capable of being GREAT harps when everthing is done that the factory dosn't have time to do.
Also Manji's aren't better harps then crossovers. Everyone has there opinion. Everybody plays the harp different to. So I should say to me the crossover is better.
Also I agree with you about the comb swelling. What I do is take it apart and soak it in food grade mineral oil for a week. Then I sand it flat and nail it back together. If nothing is wrong why do you need to unscrew it?. I also don't believe in taking a harp apart once its right. I don't know why, but my harps play better as time goes by. They are easier to play now. I'm not sure whats going on there, but I'm not complaining! Maybe because they are nailed together they are sealed up and have 0 air lose!
The Moral of this story is I think we should all make our own decision on what is right for each of us and maybe not believe so much of what the experts say! I think having a collection of harps would be cool, but don't believe we can't make good use of the harps being made today!
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oldwailer
1413 posts
Nov 13, 2010
7:01 PM
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@chromaticblues, Interesting post--and it makes some real sense. Is there a drying period after soaking the comb? How could you clean the harp without taking it apart?
I don't mean tpo pry into your secrets--unless you feel like sharing. . .
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chromaticblues
279 posts
Nov 13, 2010
7:36 PM
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@ oldwailer I just wipe it off real well. let sit for a day wrapped in a paper towel wipe it again then sand it, wipe it down and put it together. Well maybe a couple more things!
Never play the harp after eating. I know it gets a little cheesy in there. I use to take a small screw driver and pry the funk out, but I just don't look in there anymore. My harps are so air tight I don't play hard enough to suck the cheese out. We all know that feeling when something hits the back of your throat. So I understand why that is important to people. I believe not taking it apart is the key!
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htownfess
205 posts
Nov 14, 2010
5:13 AM
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@chromaticblues: If you read my post again, you will NOT see me claiming that prewars are "great" or "magic". Please do NOT attribute that to me. What I said is that they've got a good setup formula, decently (not perfectly) executed.
It's possible to gap a harp to a certain level of performance strictly by eye, without playing it. Harmonica reeds are traditionally made to make that process possible, even though the reedplates are gapped by machines today. A prewar worker didn't even need to know how to play harmonica to do that, any more than the person wiring a 1954 Champ needed to know how to play guitar. The prewar Hohner workers just needed to know what the gaps were supposed to look like. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not going to tell you. Nor am I saying that the visual method is the only way to gap, so please don't get that wrong.
If you did know what I'm talking about, you'd have understood what I meant by skilled workers at the end of the line today. All such workers need to do is correct flaws left after the automated gapping process: spotting gaps that are higher or lower than they're supposed to be, and correcting those. That is skilled work, the same as wiring an amp is, but it's not harmonica customizing, anymore than wiring the amp is amp design/development. Yet it does involve time and money, so the factories don't want to do it.
"but I do not believe that new MB's are not capable of being GREAT harps when everthing is done that the factory dosn't have time to do. Also Manji's aren't better harps then crossovers": Sorry, but neither of those is anything I said so DO NOT ATTRIBUTE IT TO ME overtly or implicitly. I did NOT say a Manji was better than a Crossover or vice versa, or say that new MBs can't be made great by customising.
"Crossovers and Manjis are not gapped worth shit!": Which I guess explains why my G Crossover would hit the half-step 10B bends with ridiculous ease OTB yet not choke easily on 10B. Yet I don't think they're gapping Crossovers consistently, in the sense that some reportedly do a lot of overbends easily and others, like my G, aren't even close to overbending apart from the 6OB. My G Crossover was clearly gapped to a specific formula--NOT the prewar formula--in order to do precise bends easily, yet not blank out either, but the overall gapping was way too wide for anything but 6OB to be reliable. Despite the precise bends, I didn't like the feel of that harp, so I regapped the whole thing to a formula I like to use. But I wouldn't say that harp "wasn't gapped worth shit" just because it didn't suit me initially. Of course it wasn't set up for a specific purpose or individual the way a good customiser would do it, but it was fine execution of a useful general-purpose gapping formula, all the gaps quite good according to that formula. I know that when I see it; most people don't.
Customisers actually play harmonicas to fine-tune response when they set them up. The manufacturers have to set theirs up without doing that. What I'm talking about all stems from that difference. It's apples and oranges--and I've already gone far enough toward trade secret territory.
"but my harps play better as time goes by. They are easier to play now. I'm not sure whats going on there, but I'm not complaining!": That is almost certainly the effect of spit residue sealing up anything that needs sealing. Take apart a well-used SP20 or Oskar and look at the pattern on the reedplates if you want to see how that works. It happens on wood comb harps too. Residue can even tighten up the reed/slot tolerance itself a bit over time, and yet not stick the reed if you tend to play with a clean mouth.
I'd appreciate it if you'd point out where it was that I said "we can't make good use of the harps being made today," because I just don't see where I did. I don't have any special fondness for prewars, like using them as raw material for customising; I don't even own a prewar MB, just some Old Standbys.
If you weren't attributing to me the things I objected to above, then please start using the "enter" key and clearly indicating the end of any paragraph my remarks do figure in, when you've started said paragraph with my address. You'd do well to extend that courtesy to anyone else you address directly.
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chromaticblues
286 posts
Nov 14, 2010
4:55 PM
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@htownfess Sorry I wasn't aiming at you. Nor was I trying to be argumentive with you. Most of my post was general as far as what I've heard about old MB's being so much better than new harps.
I know you don't know, but I know what goes on inside a harp and I can reset reeds far better than any manufacturer does! I know every company has people that can do a great job, but the truth is a very large percentage of harps need alot of work. I have never been inside a harp factory so I can't say what should be done. Honestly I really don't care that much. I enjoy making harps work the way I think they should. The whole prewar Marine Band saga is something I don't usually get involved in because I disagree with general belief.
Again sorry if it seemed like I was attacking you!
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