Favorite Affordable Diatonic
Hey Winslow (and Forum)
I'm playing Marine Band Crossovers in a weekend blues band, and I agree with Dave that these are the best. I blow out reeds like the rest of us and have followed this site to learn to replace them. My kit of Crossovers in seven keys is now about two years old. I know hear them going flat and feel I'll be replacing more reeds shortly. This really is not a permanent solution as the harps with replaced reeds just aren't the same. At this rate, I think I'll be buying a new Crossover per month, which isn't really affordable.
I like Special 20's for practice in the car but not performance necessarily. I think I prefer wood combs. I like the brightness and responsiveness of the Crossover as well.
What's your thought on an affordable alternative? Marine Band, Blues Harp.
Thanks.
Thank you for the very thorough answer. I'm taking that all in, especially the parts about techniques. Yes I do play to hard. I've also learned that my embouchure is not wide enough AND the muscles around my lips are too tight. More bad habits I need to break my body from doing. Things like this seen less daunting now though, three years into earnest playing. I can actually think and correct as I play a little now.
The breathing exercises are very helpful. Happy new year!
Thanks for reminding me about the lips.
Your lips have one job: to make a relaxed yet airtight seal that directs air where you want it to go without leaking.
Clamping with the lips will prevent the harp from gliding from hole to hole (and cause aches and friction burns).
Too tight a closure around the hole(s) with lips and/or tongue will prevent easy passage of air through the hole. This can degrade your tone and depress pitch when you don't intend to bend the note - resulting in flat pitch and strangled tone.
Always strive to keep your lips as relaxed as possible and to make the opening for a single note as large as possible. It's surprising how impossibly big that oening can look when you take the harp away fro your mouth and look in a mirror!
To illustrate, here are a couple of links to videos from Harmonica For Dummies, Second Edition
I'm going to challenge some of your assumptions before I give a direct answer to your question.
First, you're blowing too hard. That's why you're blowing out reeds. You shouldn't be blowing out so many reeds - as you already know, that bad habit is costing you money big time.
Little Walter is on record as advising to blow softly and let the amp do the work. Big Walter got a big sound but doesn't sound like he's blowing hard (I wish I'd asked him about that the one time I met him). Same is true for Dennis Gruenling and Kim Wilson. In fact, the only great player who does blow hard is Cotton. Does he need to blow hard to get his sound? Probably not, but I don't think he's about to change is ways at this point.
So how do you use air more efficiently?
1. Use less air to make the reeds sound.
Try the warm hand exercise (from Harmonica For Dummies, Second Edition):
Place the palm of your hand an inch in front of your mouth and breathe gently so that you feel the warmth of your breath but not the wind. That's all the air you need to get the reeds sounding. You may not want to play that softly all the time, but try it as an exercise - make a point every day of spending some time playing as softly as possible, and then try integrating that into your playing.
2. Keep your airways unobstructed for easy air flow.
Try playing a note. Continue breathing and remove the harmoncia from your mouth. Listen to the sound of the air moving as you breathe. If you can hear it at all, you're cramping the flow, which will stress the reeds. Get your tongue out of the way and open your throat so that the air can move noiselessly, without drag or obstruction.
3. Bend without force.
Just as you can play with minimal airflow, you can bend without increasing your airflow or hitting hard. Practice initiating bends while playing with minimal airflow. A bend that sounds like its being hit hard by a master player will not actually be hit with force - it's a matter of articulation, like the difference between "La" and "Ta."
Second, you can make replaced reeds work better than original reeds. Any time you replace a reed, you have to set it up. You can't just bung it in there and expect it to perform well. After the reed is installed and centered in the slot, make sure to set up the profile - the line of the reed relative to the surface of the reedplate. Profiling reeds is the majority of the work that customizers do, and you can do it too, at least well enough to make a replaced reed work as well as a new one, and probably better. Kinya Pollard authored a series on reed adjustment in the old harmonicasessions.com webzine. Why not ask him about them?
Third, how do you know that it's wood that makes the difference in the sound? Other design factors can be just as important - the design of the comb, airtightness, cover design, and the setup of the reeds themselves. The question of whether comb materials make a difference in sound is hotly debated in the harmonica community, and by accepting the notion that only wood-combed harps will sound good, you're locking yourself out of a huge set of possibilities.
OK, now on to give you a direct answer.
Basic Marine Bands have the same reeds as the Crossover. But they're sometimes less airtight, and, given that they're nailed together, are harder to work on. If you have a drill press, you can drill them out for screws and either re-mount them on the same comb (after flat-sanding the comb and the inner surface of the draw reedplate) or use them as replacement reedplates for your Crossovers.
Blues Harps have one construction problem: The reedplates are held on with only two screws, which makes them less airtight than other screwed-together harps (you can add them if you know how). The reeds, on the other hand, are more robust than the Marine Band series reeds, as they're longer. The modern MS-Blues Harp has a bigger reedplate footprint than the original (which was identical to the Marine Band in everything except the covers). It shares reedplates with the Big River and Cross Harp and is parts-interchangeable with those models and with the MS-Meisterklasse.
Sticking with wood combs, have you tried the Seydel Blues Solist Pro? Wood comb (non-sweling), brass reeds, and priced about the same as the Marine Band or Blues Harp. One difference: Seydel harps have wider hole spacing than Hohners, which takes some getting used to. But both James Cotton and Mark Hummel are Seydel players nowadays.