What is a "high end" harmonica?

High end can just mean expensive and really cool to look at :)

But it usually means more than that.

The most important thing about a high end harmonica should be how well it plays.

• Is it airtight?
• Do all the notes play evenly and easily, with good volume from soft to loud, throughout its range?
• Do the notes respond to a variety of attacks, from gentle to aggressive?
• If you play a chord, do all the notes sound at once?
• Do the chords and octaves sound in good tune?
• Are the bends easy to play and sustain at any volume level?
• Do the overblows and overdraws play well? Can you bend them up into tune, and maybe even bend them up to higher notes?
• Can you play really fast with all the notes sounding as soon as you need them?

Many of the items on this list are things we would like to expect from any harp, but the reality is that harps are manufactured to a price point, and that $5 harp will likely have none of the things on this list, while the $200+ custom will have all of these and more.

Identifying specific high end harps is not as straightforward as it might seem. Hey, just pick the most expensive one from each manufacturer; that one must be the best, right?

Wellll....

Two main obstacles exist.

One is user preference. Often, a newbie will pop up on a harmonica forum and innocently ask, "What's a good upgrade from the $5 harp I have now?" Typically, about 20 people wil answer right away, each one declaring that his (and it's usually a male) personal preference is the best possible choice. And maybe it is, for that particular responder. They may even get into arguments over why one player's choice is unquestionably the best and the other guy's is fatally flawed.

This is where the problem of naming comes in. I could name the Hohner Crossover, the Seydel 1847, or the Suzuki Manji and have some players strongly agree, and others strongly disagree. And guess what? They'd all be right! For themselves, that is. For you? Impossible to know until you try them.

A personal story: A few years ago, Hohner was exhibiting at the SPAH convention, not long after the Rocket model was introduced. Some players I knew were singing its praises, and Hohner had instruments you could try out. I tried the Rocket, and then the Crossover. The Rocket seemed – to me, and it's all personal – set up for loud playing at the expense of dynamic range (it didn't want to respond to soft playing), of subtle bending, and of overbending. The Crossover, on the other hand, was well set up for everything I wanted to do. And I have Crossovers in my kit but no Rockets. But that's just me.

Another is the post-factory optimization seller. You ask about availability online, perhaps thinking that this limits choice to stock harps as they come from the factory without further finishing - out-of-the-box (OOTB) harps, to use the common term.

It used to be that you could buy a stock, out-of-the-box harp, or you could buy a custom harp. When you think about it, custom should mean custom tailored to the preferences and needs of each individual player. But a number of sellers now do something that fall in between stock and custom, and I call these optimized harps. They take stock harps and do overall improvement and setup to make them perform better, play more in tune, and perhaps last longer. Greg Jones of 16:23 Harmonicas, and Ben Bouman in the Netherlands both come to mind. However, both of them work exclusively on Seydel harps.

An optimizer may go some steps further though. They may also:

• Offer levels of setup, like Joe Spiers does, or have ready-to-go harps set up for the heavy player, the overblower, etc.
• Build harps using replacement upgrade parts, such as combs and even covers for better appearance, greater airtightness. Andrew Zajac and Tom Halchak of Blue Moon Harmonicas come to mind in this regard.
• They may even go to the point of building whole new models based around a particular set of reedplates, with special comb, covers, and setup. Blue Moon is doing this with their limited-edition Jason Ricci harps, based on Jason's reedplates of choice, the Suzuki Manji. Across the Atlantic, Anthony Dannecker is building customs from the reedplates up as well with his Centurion harps.

There's also the matter of price.

Some pricey models, like the artist signature models from Hohner bearing the names of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Ozzy Osbourne, are purely display items and are built on harps that without the fancy graphics and packaging would be $40 harmonicas.

Other stock models may be high in both price and quality, but may not be as good an investment as an optimized harp. For instance, the Suzuki Fabulous diatonic model will run anywhere from a little over $200 to nearly $300, depending on the retailer. To be sure, it's much better adjusted overall than the mid-priced Manji, but what would that same amount buy you from an optimizer?

I know this is a long answer and probably not what you're looking for, but it's a realistic assessment of the multitude of good choices you have available.

Those Hohner tables are mostly nonsense, made for marketing purposes ("Wanna do this? Look, there's a harp for that, just buy it!") but otherwise useless.