wowyzowy12
11 posts
Feb 16, 2011
3:53 PM
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Hey Everybody,
A subject i have been intrested about for a long time. Did Old time players adjust or tune their harps??/ From Sonny Boy I or II ,Sonny Terry ,Big Walter, Little Walter..etc , just a few important names to mention but ofcourse not excluding anybody else.
Any Knowledge or information would be appreciated .
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groyster1
861 posts
Feb 16, 2011
4:13 PM
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probably did not need to,hohner was better quality then was it not?
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Littoral
273 posts
Feb 16, 2011
4:34 PM
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I read kudzu filed his reeds everynight.
Sorry, sir Adam, but that was a reach.
Still reading and really enjoying the book.
As to the question, I doubt much tweaking was
done back in the day but I would also love to find out more.
Last Edited by on Feb 16, 2011 4:34 PM
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zipperhead16
24 posts
Feb 16, 2011
5:04 PM
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I'm sure they did. Probably just to gap the harp to their style of playing or sharpen it though.
The old ones did play better. I got a pre-war MB in c that plays like butter, but the James Cottons and such would still blow one out in a couple of shows. Why doll one up your going to throw in the trash or audience?
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chromaticblues
602 posts
Feb 16, 2011
5:21 PM
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Chromatic players have making adjustments since the 1920's. Chromatic harps have always been relatively expensive. Diatonics were thought of as throw away instruments for 100 years. I'm sure there was some poor blues man that bought a new harp and it didn't work as well as most new harps do and probably pryed the cover off and gapped the reeds. As far as I know people didn't start working on there own diatonics untill the 70's.
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nacoran
3814 posts
Feb 16, 2011
6:20 PM
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I wonder when the sanitation laws came around. Was there a time you could test your harmonicas before you bought them?
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Nate
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waltertore
1078 posts
Feb 16, 2011
7:07 PM
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the blues harp players I was around- sonny terry, james cotton, lazy lester, carey bell,junior wells, bill dicey, charlie musselwhite, never mentioned anything about that. Walter
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walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,600+ of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Feb 16, 2011 7:08 PM
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HarpNinja
1116 posts
Feb 16, 2011
7:49 PM
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First off, the harps aren't made the same way or with the same material anymore. Secondly, I am sure most just grabbed new harps as most were Marine Bands and I am sure many players had easy access to them...if one went bad, you just grabbed a new one.
It isn't really an apples to apples comparison, but in general, I'd say no...and that they probably had better harps than today's similar OOTB harps...Meaning old Marine Bands were more likely to play better.
That being said, specific to Hohner, I think a decline in quality led to a lot of buyers tinkering...quality has then improved in many regards and for the old style, many OOTB harps work wonderfully well.
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Mike
Quicksilver Custom Harmonicas
Updated 2/1/11
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Matzen
18 posts
Feb 17, 2011
3:42 AM
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Sure... harps were adjusted by soaking them in a pint of beer!
Last Edited by on Feb 17, 2011 3:42 AM
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hvyj
1245 posts
Feb 17, 2011
5:39 AM
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I recall reading somewhere that some experienced old time players would use a penny to emboss reed plates. The technique was referred to as "The Magic Penny."
I also read that when Paul Butterfield was in his prime he'd try 8-10 Marine Bands in a particular key before he'd find one that was of suitable quality to use for performance.
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chromaticblues
603 posts
Feb 17, 2011
6:05 AM
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I also heard a similiar thing about Paul Butterfield. When I first started playing he was still alive and told someone during an interview that asked him a question about weather or not he did anything special to his harps. He said no, but most of them aren't good enough. I go thru about 100 harps a year! This question and response is taken from questioning about the early part of his career. So were talking about harps that were made in the late fifties and early sixties.
Harp Ninja is right about harps coming from the factory needing less adjusting (Gapping). Also I neever see old Marine Bands with the reeds curled up like a banana. Now having said that. What I do see is pits in the reedplates. I have never seen a new Marine band that is actually difective! The peole that set the reeds suck at it yes, but the combs are cut better today than they have ever been. The consistancy in reedend to reedplate is better now also. The one thing that is not for the better is the coverplates that have the star of David on the bottom plate IMHO are better than todays. Weather pre or post WW2 (open or closed flaps) I just like them better. Those harps also had stiffer reeds. There are pros and cons to that. They will last longer, but are a little more difficult to munipulate. Once you get one broke in and you get use to it it's a beutiful thing. They sound mellower than new Marine Bands. I just got done customizing a "G" harp that is brand new never used before with a star on the bottom plate. When I first played it it startled me. I have never heard a G harp that had that much power before. Must be the stiffer reeds work better on lower keyed harps. Man what a recording harp that thing would be. This was after I sanded the shit out of the comb and all the other stuff, but still I do that to all the harps I work on and I haven't ONE play like that. So I don't know maybe there is magic in those old marine Bands!
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waltertore
1079 posts
Feb 17, 2011
6:13 AM
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I remember as far back as the early 70's going in the music stores to buy harps. I had to go to Manny's in NYC to find all the keys I wanted. They got to know me and would dump a pile on the counter and bring out that little air testing machine. I would take a few minutes going over each, if it sounded good on all holes. I would say at least 20% I would go through had something was wrong with it. Of the ones that sounded good from the get go, I would wittle that pile down until I found ones that sounded great. It would often take me an hour or more to get a set of harps that all sounded good when you asked to test it. By good I mean in tune and ease of playability. It took a long time to figure out what those little machines put out and how that would equate to blowing with your mouth. Those machines had a single hole and multi hole setting. Most music store guys would set it to the multi hole and wham bam through the harp in 2 seconds. I got some mean looks in music stores around the country when I said I wanted to run the machine. Such fragile egos so many music store salesmen have! That was about it with harp adjustments other than soaking them in water when they started to go bad and shaving the wood down. You make due with what you got. One good thing was they were $5 each! Boy that brought back memories. I am sure in 40 years they will be way more advanced than what we have today. Walter
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walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,600+ of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Feb 17, 2011 9:50 AM
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thechangingcolors
28 posts
Feb 17, 2011
6:51 AM
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"probably did not need to,hohner was better quality then was it not? "
just out of curiosity, since i know nothing of the subject, can anyone explain why or what caused the decrease in quality? i mean over time surely the technological capability to produce them has either stayed the same or increased, so why do they make lower quality ones then they used to?
Last Edited by on Feb 17, 2011 7:14 AM
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toddlgreene
2587 posts
Feb 17, 2011
6:53 AM
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Where y'at, BBQ Bob? You answer this one best.
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Todd, the conservatively liberal moderate of the moderators
Eudora and Deep Soul
Last Edited by on Feb 17, 2011 6:56 AM
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Andrew
1306 posts
Feb 17, 2011
7:22 AM
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"can anyone explain why or what caused the decrease in quality?"
Apparently it was the goddam commies who ran Seydel into the ground. Unfortunately, the guy who told us that didn't say who ran Hohner into the ground, lol!
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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chromaticblues
604 posts
Feb 17, 2011
7:46 AM
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@ Andrew How much money do you think Hohner made last year? When was the last time a harmonica manufacturer made more money?
As Toddl said Bqbob has already posted on the subject extensively!
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Greyowlphotoart
474 posts
Feb 17, 2011
9:44 AM
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'Did Old time players adjust or tune their harps??'
No I didn't:)
I started buying harps in the mid sixties,Hohner Echo Super Vampers. You were not allowed to play the harp, The guy just whipped out these purpose made bellows and did a blow and draw on each hole, then chords and I usually said 'fine that will do' if all the notes sounded. Unfortunately that procedure didn't guarantee a good harp and sometimes I was disappointed. If only I'd known then what I know now!! A little gapping would have made those lemons playable!!
Just for fun I recently asked my local music store to check a Marine Band out with the bellows before buying and the guy brings out these beat up old bellows all bound up with duck tape to repair the leaks. The resulting test was laughable sounding like an 4 pack a day smoker trying to play the harp.....Wheeeeeeeeze.
So I look at the guy with a 'is that supposed to be an accurate assessment of the harps playability' expression on my face. He responds with 'must get some more duck tape' :)
Anyways I can buy these MB's for under £20, which believe me is good in the UK cos we're usually ripped off big time with harps.
I have also taken two harps back to this store and had them exchanged for new ones cos I wasn't happy with them, so that can't be bad!!
Grey Owl YouTube
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Last Edited by on Feb 17, 2011 9:50 AM
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nacoran
3817 posts
Feb 17, 2011
9:50 AM
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Andrew, I think it was the lazy bourgeois several generations removed from their working class roots.
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Nate
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barbequebob
1552 posts
Feb 17, 2011
9:58 AM
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Those old MB's used bell metal brass and I have several of them, some almost in unplayed condition, and they outplay jsut about any stock harp I've ever played, bar none. That brass was a real bitch when brand new and really required the break in period, which is a bane of controversy (the closest thing to that now are the SS reeds on the Seydel 1847's in that respect), but once they're broken in, they held up much longer than any other brass ever made.
Joe Filisko's personal research on Hohner dates Hohner's quality slippage starting somewhere in the 60's, as the popularity of the instrument was declining, and didn't begin to increase until the popularity of The Beatles (NOT blues to white audiences as most people believe), that harmonica sales began to increase again, and I remember as a kid seeing Beatles model harmonicas from Hohner (yep, that's right, and they made tons of novelty harps over the years).
Part of the old MB sound were the height and openness of the old cover plates and the ones made prior to the 80's are FAR more wide open than what they are now and that alone made them play louder and brighter.
Until the last 5 years, the last really great stock of Hohners was in 1978-79, and in 1980, the really big, rapid, horrible quality slide began much more in earnest and often times covers weren't aligned properly, the cutting blades for the combs weren't sharpened frequently enough, saw marks on the combs, causing air leaks were common, bad rivet jobs, and that's just the beginning.
Once the last Hohner, Frank Hohner was out of the picture, they began to retool in 1995 and gradually things got better.
I remember those bellows and I have one of those. The Super Vamper was the MB with a different cover plate until they finally began selling the MB worldwide.
During the 70's and 80's, Hohner's biggest selling instruments were NOT harmonicas at all, but a keyboard instrument called the Clavinet, made popular by a very famous chromatic harp player named Stevie Wonder and concentrated more on that than on the harmonicas. Besides, they are the single largest musical instrument maker in the world, as they also make keyboards, drums, accordions, melodicas, some amplifiers, and guitars (and pretty good for short money deals like some years back, I check out a Hohner Les Paul Gold Top clone with P-90 pickups on them that sounded great).
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Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA
http://www.barbequebob.com
CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
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Andrew
1309 posts
Feb 17, 2011
10:07 AM
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Grey Owl, exactly how do you get MBs for less than £20 in the UK?
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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MP
1432 posts
Feb 17, 2011
10:16 AM
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i remember that bellows thing with the tape all over the cracks!
i would bum out the sales guy by asking for 5 or more harps all in the same key and insist on operating the bellows myself.
i'd use the single hole setting on every hole on every harp. then i'd narrow it down to 2 of the better harps and go for the loudest one.
my first harp was 3.64 after tax. i modified it by painting the covers red. that was a bad idea but it scrapped off easily. i gapped the reeds with a gas station screw driver (i raised them). thing never did work right after that.
this early effort was about '72. i did soak a lot of harps in gin and club soda w/ a squeeze of lemon. that worked way better than the gas station screwdriver technique.----------
MP
doctor of semiotics and reed replacement.
"making the world a better place, one harmonica at a time"
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Greyowlphotoart
475 posts
Feb 17, 2011
10:17 AM
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@Andrew
I buy them from my local store Bonners in Eastbourne. As I have bought a lot of stuff over the years I get a discount. One day one of the guys I know well in the store saw me buy an MB and ask for a discount and he said 'let him have it for £19.70'. So every time I buy one now i present my old receipt and get it for the same price:)
As I am really enjoying playing MB's I guess I should fill in the blanks quickly before I'm rumbled!!
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Andrew
1310 posts
Feb 17, 2011
1:15 PM
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Sheesh! I was in the music shop in Worthing a few years back and MBs there were the same price as in London. (I think it was £24 at the time)
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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groyster1
865 posts
Feb 17, 2011
3:07 PM
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@Andrew
I hope barbqbob answered your question as you seem to have taken exception to my statement about the quality of hohners declining over time
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walterharp
537 posts
Feb 17, 2011
6:51 PM
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maybe the answer is sort of no, because they did not need to. my guess is in the old days the harmonica tuners would just get rid of the bad ones, or recycle them for reeds, because the better ones were not quite so mass produced.
but then again, it would be fairly foolish to think that somebody who spent their life playing an instrument would not open it up and try to fool around to make it sound better
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Joe_L
1069 posts
Feb 17, 2011
6:59 PM
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Knowing some of the older Blues players and the way many lived, I would be surprised if they sat around tweaking harps.
Additionally, it seemed like many of the older Blues players that I was around would play pretty much anything right out of the box. If they needed a harp, they would go to the store and buy one. If the preferred harp wasn't available in the right key, they would buy what they could get.
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The Blues Photo Gallery
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harpwrench
445 posts
Feb 17, 2011
7:23 PM
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My uncle adjusted his Marine Bands in the 60's, and he was just playing guitar and racked Dylan-style harp. It's naive to assume nobody messed with them until the 70's. It's a guy thing to tinker with stuff and I'd imagine they've been poked around on with toothpicks since the beginning. I've had a whole bunch of pre-wars and my experience has been that they were just as inconsistent as any of the rest. But a good one was certainly a good one by anyone's standards.
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waltertore
1083 posts
Feb 17, 2011
8:40 PM
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harpwrench: I bet you are right. There is a certain personality type that has to tinker. My grandfather from Italy use to tinker on his old impala every weekend. The problem was he always seemed to have a few extra parts when done but the car always ran ok. I inherited that and don't mess with my harps-not enough parts in one to lose somwe and still have it run right :-)
Joe_L: Todays newer players that didn't get the chance to be around the old blues guys might come to the conclusion they weren't complete musicians because they played out of the box harps and didn't as a generation, do much modifications to any of their instruments/amps. What they don't know is those guys were beyond their instruments. They were a presence not an engineer. Their clothes, cadillacs, old buses, walk, talk, moves, were things that became more than their instruments. They were bigger than instruments. They were living art. Walter
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walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,600+ of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Feb 17, 2011 8:42 PM
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chromaticblues
612 posts
Feb 18, 2011
7:18 AM
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Yeah thats a good point Joe! Just because it wasn't documented doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Last Edited by on Feb 18, 2011 8:19 AM
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barbequebob
1555 posts
Feb 18, 2011
7:37 AM
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Even if the old guys did, most of them wouldn't tell you. In fact, any repair info on harmonicas was pretty much kept under wraps for decades no matter what kind of player it was, and even more so from the harmonica factories.
The first published repair info was from chromatic player Alan Blackie Shackner in his 1975 book "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About the BLues Harp & The Marine Band But Didn't Know Who To Ask." By comparison today, that info is hardly much of anything, but at the time, it was a game changer because none of it had ever been published before.
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Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA
http://www.barbequebob.com
CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
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barbequebob
1556 posts
Feb 18, 2011
7:41 AM
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Even if the old guys did, most of them wouldn't tell you. In fact, any repair info on harmonicas was pretty much kept under wraps for decades no matter what kind of player it was, and even more so from the harmonica factories.
The first published repair info was from chromatic player Alan Blackie Shackner in his 1975 book "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About the BLues Harp & The Marine Band But Didn't Know Who To Ask." By comparison today, that info is hardly much of anything, but at the time, it was a game changer because none of it had ever been published before.
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Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA
http://www.barbequebob.com
CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
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wowyzowy12
12 posts
Feb 19, 2011
12:20 AM
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@Barbequebob - Hey bob , thnaks alot for answering. Thats exactly the factualness i was looking for when i originally posted the question .I will look into theinfo/ names and books you mentioned as a continuing lead in my research.
Im not trying to badmouth hohnner or marine bands because its that sound of the instrumetn that i loved from the old records. But for the relatively short time that ive been playing my special 20 and marine bands seems to run into problems in a very short time, kind of dissapointing. But then again thats my experience. I havent played seydel yet but i hear nothing but incredible things about them.
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barbequebob
1560 posts
Feb 19, 2011
7:08 AM
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Sure, there are quality control problems that has plauged Hohner over the years, but every company has had them, but a pretty fair number of complaints too often have very little to do with quality control and more often than not, it's more of a playing technique issue than anything else. Believe me, I can clearly find things I don't care for with every harp maker no matter who it is and too many players just automatically blame the instrument for everything first and consider their playing technique as the real problem pretty much dead last.
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Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA
http://www.barbequebob.com
CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
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barbequebob
1561 posts
Feb 19, 2011
7:10 AM
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Sure, there are quality control problems that has plauged Hohner over the years, but every company has had them, but a pretty fair number of complaints too often have very little to do with quality control and more often than not, it's more of a playing technique issue than anything else. Believe me, I can clearly find things I don't care for with every harp maker no matter who it is and too many players just automatically blame the instrument for everything first and consider their playing technique as the real problem pretty much dead last.
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Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA
http://www.barbequebob.com
CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
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groyster1
870 posts
Feb 19, 2011
9:50 AM
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@barbq bob
there are many in this forum complain about their harps going bad quickly yet others the harps last and last so I cannot help but conclude that a lot of it is player error-thanks so much for the valuable info you provide to this forum
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ElkRiverHarmonicas
555 posts
Feb 19, 2011
6:03 PM
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Hell yes they did! Harpwrench is dead on. Just because people weren't setting up en-masse for overblows back in the day, doesn't mean they weren't messing with harmonicas. I'll back that up with some examples:
I have a Borrah Minnevitch lesson book from 1924, which was several years before he started the rascals. That was actually before chromatics became really popular, so it's all about diatonics. At the end, there is a description of GAPPING DRAW REEDS IF THEY CHOKE. In a BEGINNERS book! From 1924! He suggests using a pocket knife to lift the reed out of the slot very carefully. That is the oldest mention of customer reed adjustment I am aware of. There are probably earlier references in German.
Another example, Ernie Morris, he was the African-American in the Harmonica Rascals if you haven't heard of him before, had this really cool throat vibratto that he did. Borrah Minnevitch heard it and immediately snatched Ernie's harmonica, took it apart and spent hours trying to reverse engineer what alteration Ernie had made to make it sound like that. Of course, it was in his throat, but that example illustrates that people were making adjustments and alterations in those days. If they hadn't been, it certainly wouldn't have been the first thing that came to Borrah's mind.
Another example from the 1930s and 1940s. Another Minnevitch Rascal Leo Diamond did the repairs for the group. The moment a reed started to go flat, Leo would apply solder down the entire length of the reed to shore up the stress fracture. That lead band-aid would hold them over until they could find a replacement reed for it. It's not easy, I've tried to recreate it for fun a couple of times.
Joe Leone tells this story about being over at Jerry Murad's House and Jerry had this extreme collections of reeds that he had going for decades kept in baby food jars. The lids of the jars were nailed under the workbench, you screwed on or screwed off the baby food jars to get the reeds.
None of the above examples would indicate a culture of players who didn't work on harmonicas. I doubt serious players started making their harmonicas disposable until the 1950s or 1960s. People back in the 1930s and 1940s - especially true when the harmonica supply was cut off in the 1940s - weren't throwing harmonicas away, they were repairing and adjusting them. These people didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw old harmonicas out of. I've never seen Blackie's Book, but would absolutely love to, for the historical perspective.
Every modern harmonica lesson book, it seems mentions the old blues guys dipping their harmonicas in beer or whiskey and that it's a horrible idea and there's the maybe unintentional insinuation that they were dumbasses for doing so. I did quite a few experiments with this to see how it worked. This isn't something we need to do nowadays, and I'm not recommending anybody do it. There are far superior materials available to us for comb sealing. But for them it worked and it was the best they had. In both beer and whiskey, the liquid is soaked into the wood and the solids fill in the pores in the wood, making it swell less. This is especially true with bourbon. Bourbon leaves a thin film that not only fills in the pores, but has certain antimicrobal properties as well. They weren't dumbasses, they were geniuses who worked with what they had.
This is a question we need to pose to the old guys. There are several members of the harmonica rascals and harmonica gang still living. The Sgro Brothers, Al Smith, Bob Herndon are three that come immediately to mind. Especially Bob Herndon, he is the kind of tinkerer that rebuilds Harmonettas, I can imagine nothing more complicated. They didn't have internet in those days, and they kept a lot of secrets. the unforunate result of that is we often get the mistaken illusion that they did nothing at all.
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"There are only two things money can't buy - true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Lewis Grizzard
Last Edited by on Feb 19, 2011 6:25 PM
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ElkRiverHarmonicas
556 posts
Feb 19, 2011
6:08 PM
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Just thought of another one, Larry Adler used to take his chromatics to, I think it was Douglas Tate, for periodic tuning and adjustment.
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"There are only two things money can't buy - true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Lewis Grizzard
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walterharp
541 posts
Feb 19, 2011
7:12 PM
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so are we getting toward the idea that the white guys tinkered with their harmonicas but the black blues guys did not? i suspect that is fiction
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ElkRiverHarmonicas
557 posts
Feb 19, 2011
7:22 PM
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How did race get into this? That's poppycock.
Didn't I mention
A) Ernie Morris, who was black.
B) the old blues guys, most of whom were black. I also called them geniuses who worked with what they had... how that equates to white people worked on harps but black people didn't not, I don't know.
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"There are only two things money can't buy - true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Lewis Grizzard
Last Edited by on Feb 19, 2011 7:30 PM
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walterharp
543 posts
Feb 19, 2011
7:35 PM
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i did not mean to claim that, but the examples are mostly white harmonica players. my point was it would be wrong to assume that the pros, regardless of documentation or race, did not adjust the instruments they made their livings off of for the best performance they could get. sorry dave, i surely did not mean to make any accusations, just observations about data that are available versus things that have not been recorded.
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ElkRiverHarmonicas
558 posts
Feb 19, 2011
7:44 PM
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Thanks walter for clearing that up, sorry I took offense, race was the farthest thing from my mind when I wrote that.
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"There are only two things money can't buy - true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Lewis Grizzard
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