|
Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
? for marine band 1896 fans
? for marine band 1896 fans
Page:
1
groyster1
589 posts
Dec 19, 2010
1:03 PM
|
back in the heydays of rice miller,walter horton what did these guys do when they bought a new mb1896? did they tweak it gap it before they played it? or were mb1896 superior back then so you did not need to-Ive got an interview of deford bailey and he said soaking was popular to make the harps tighter and less leaky
|
arzajac
408 posts
Dec 19, 2010
1:18 PM
|
I believe that when Joe Filisko started customising harps, he was striving to turn a modern out-of-the-box Marine Band into the calibre instrument that it was back in those days. He has a collection of untouched (un-customised) Marine Bands from the early 1900s. Apparently, they play like world-class harps.
So as far as I know, Marine Bands were much better back then.
I had a "mouse-ear" Marine band in my hands for a short while. It was too covered in dried spit to tell how well it played and I was too inexperienced to even think about opening it up to clean it. I do have a number of Marine Band and Marine Band equivalents from the 50s and 60s and they do play extremely well.
----------
|
barbequebob
1465 posts
Dec 20, 2010
7:49 AM
|
Joe Filisko was the first to custommize diatonic harps and he introduced the very first one at the 1991 SPAH convention. Prior to that, the ONLY custom harps available were chromatics.
Joe traced Hohner's quality slippage to somewhere during the 1960's, but I know it REALLY got even worse from 1980-1995. I have several pre-WWII MB's, including the mouse eared ones from the early 1900's and they were always superior instruments, part of it being the brass that was used, which hasn't been made since prior to WWII and the covers were more wide open in the back, the wood for the combs allowed to age for a longer period of time.
Most of those old players played them right out of the box, but overall, they were far superior than much of what you see and the thing some players have asked, "did they play custom harps back then?" The truth is that there were NO custom diatonics in their day and Joe Filisko had the first ones back in 1991 and his day gig at the time was being machinist.
----------
Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA
http://www.barbequebob.com
CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
|
Post a Message
|
