Hi, I have been working on a document covering Tremolo's for a while. (I have to do something for the department in between :-)
I started it after a request by Karl Olson (HI KARL, O.K.?)
It has done what most of these things do and grown organically on it's own!
The article is intended for publication in a well know folk music mag in the U.K. and will/does cover a range on things to do with harps, not just tremolo's after all.
I don't want to repeat work that Jack Ely has done on the net already, and anyway, I could not do the job of writting a basic intro to harps anywhere near as well as he did.
Some of this I have posted before, however....... It's not really finished (if these things EVER can be said to be finished). But I will post what I have so far. GORDON JACKSON. ENJOY.
ALWAYS keep your harmonica in the case it came in. It prevents it from being clogged up with bits of fluff, dirt, the debris from your pocket or handbag, and that little lump of chewing gum that still had some mileage left in it, when you put in in your pocket last week.
NEVER play the thing after eating unless you clean your teeth first. Bits of caviar and smoked salmon do NOT improve the instrument when firmly wedged under reeds.
DO NOT play with the harp facing the floor, it will soon reach the high tide mark inside the instrument and interfere with the tone.
WARM it between the palms of your hands for a while before playing it. The reeds are more delicate than you think, and on cold days, particularly if you intend to start bending the notes, you may crack one or more of them by neglecting to do this.
DON'T blow too hard into the instrument. This is a VERY common error when first learning. You can and probably will strain or crack one or more reeds when putting undue pressure on them by hard blowing.
If a reed is not sounding when you blow it, it is more than likely that you are not blowing it in the correct way, and probably blowing too hard as well. This is especially true for hole / reed No.2 blow AND draw. It is the most difficult reed to get a pure sound from on ANY harmonica.
PRICES. (What we are MOST interested in after all)! Prices vary from as little as 1 pound, upto 400 pounds for a Honer Amadeus Chromatic. Or well over 2000 pounds for special ones made of silver! If you are really rolling in money Honer will make a chromatic with gold cover plates, but don't ask me how much that would be! At the end of the day, you get what you pay for, and for the cost of about 12 to 20 pounds you will get a good workmanlike instrument, that will give years of musical use and pleasure if looked after.
Having said that, there is a school of thought that classes the the mouth organ along with the banjo and the bodhran as possessing no musical merit whatsoever.
Cue for a joke: What's the difference between a tramploline and a bodhran? You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline. No, I didn't mean that really, some of my best door mats are bodrans.
Let's define a few terms now.
HARMONICA. A mouth blown free reed (the reeds vibrate freely in air ) instrument. Unless otherwise stated, the words, HARP, HARMONICA, MOUTH ORGAN, GOB IRON, MOUTHI, MOOTHI (Scottish that one) TIN SANDWICH, MOUTH TRUSS, and MANCHESTER SAXOPHONE, MOUTH HARP, LOUISIANA SAXOPHONE, all are interchangeable. I will probably only use the first three really!
THE COMB. The comb is the plastic or wooden bit that the reed plates are set in. It is the thing with all the little square holes in that you blow into. The comb can be made from aluminum alloy in more expensive ones, but tends to be more common in straight diatonics like the Suzuki Pro Harp.
There are no hard and fast rules about whether to use wood, plastic or metal as a comb material. I would say plastic is better than wood, as the wooden comb needs to be played regularly to make the wood swell with moisture, sealing the gaps in the instrument and thereby giving a better tone. Plastic gives a better seal to start with and is more comfortable on the lips. If a plastic comb harp gets really yeucky and gungey, you can give them a good soak and clean without problem. Wooden combs are much more difficult to clean. They tend to pick up all sorts of strange or unpleasant flavors which can leave nasty tastes in the mouth too.
Lots of older players swear by wood though, saying the tone is better, at least for some things. Maybe, maybe not, I am no expert. There really is no accounting for taste (pun intended) and habit has a lot to answer for at the end of the day.
DO NOT dip wooden harps in beer or water as folklore sometimes suggests. What happens if you do, is that the comb swells and forms a good seal right enough, but when you finish playing and put it away, it shrinks worse than before, causing bigger air leaks and a drop in tone quality. Beer etc. would coat the reeds over a period of time, which would alter the pitch, go mouldy, and gum up the reeds. MORAL, either play a wooden one on a VERY regular basis, or buy yourself a plastic one.
REEDS. These are small tines of metal, usually brass, sometimes bell metal, riveted at one end onto the reed plate. The reed plate is usually made of brass. When you blow or draw into the mouth piece air passes over the reed in the reed chamber causing the reed to vibrate, thus creating a sound. The reeds are of different lengths, longer reeds give lower pitched notes, higher reeds, higher notes. Just like other instruments in fact. That's physics at work again folks!
Bell metal tends to give a brighter tone and is, as a rule, more durable than brass. Many experienced players prefer the more mellow or "warmer" tone of brass reeds. You have to experiment yourself, and see what you prefer.
TREMOLO. "A rapid variation in either volume or pitch, giving a tremulous effect to a note"...(Penguin Dictionary). Actually, tremolo is more correctly a rapid VOLUME fluctuation. The tremolo arm on an electric guitar for instance, should really be called a vibrato arm. A full discussion on this is not relevant here however. If you are interested, look up "modulation", "tremolo" and "vibrato" in a music dictionary, or even books on electronics .
TREMOLO MOUTH ORGAN. A free reed instrument, with pairs of reeds played simultaneously. The reeds are slightly detuned from each other. (See below for a more detailed description).
TYPES OF HARMONICA. There are three main types of harp, with some subdivisions.
1) CHROMATIC. The biggie of the family, single reed with a slide to allow the player access to semi-tones, (the black notes on a piano). This lets you play in all the musical keys, some with more slide movement than others. More slide moves equal harder to play keys as a rule. Not that hard to learn to to play in two or three keys, and worth the initial cost of the beast in terms of the very wide range of music one can play on it. You can play anything from nursery rhyme tunes to symphonic works. Irish music and slow airs are good subjects for it also.
The cheapest chromatic is the Tower brand in the of Key C only. Made in China, Cost 5 or 6 pounds. The sound is a bit thin and tinny, and it's a little flimsy in construction. They are in tune, and in in concert pitch though (well mine is anyway). At this price, you have to get one. They are a bargain, cheap enough to allow you try out a chromatic without spending a fortune.
2) DIATONIC SINGLE REED. Diatonics are made in all the major keys. They are the standard tool of the bluesman and rock musician is the 10 hole diatonic, most often the ones made by Honer. The Honer Special 20 would be a good one to choose at about 14 pounds. Cheaper, but just as good is the Tombo Folk Blues, or the Lee Oscar also by Tombo at about 16 pounds. The Huang Silver Tone costs about 6 to 7 pounds and has the honor of being recommended to me by Brendan Power, get one today! Also a very cheap and cheerful Honer at around 3 pounds. The Suzki Pro, designed Brendan Power, will cost you about 40 pounds!
This type of harp will allow a player to reach (some) notes that are not actually present on the instrument by a technique called BENDING.
Bending adds expression to music, gives the blues harmonica wail that we know and love (or hate) and lets you play tunes that would not be possible on that instrument due to the lack of said notes without bending. Bending is not achieved by blowing harder, it is just a different way of using the lips and mouth cavity to bend the reed causing it to vibrate more slowly thereby lowering the pitch of the note. (See a good book on the physics of sound for a description of this effect).
MINOR TUNED DIATONICS. These are a subdivision of the standard diatoninc harp, and look the same too. They come in several tunings:- The natural minor tuning, the harmonica minor tuning, and then odd ones like the Lee Oscar Melody Maker, and the Honer Solo tuned ones.
3) DIATONIC DOUBLE REED. The TREMOLO and the OCTAVE being the main types.
THE TREMOLO. The tremolo sound is achieved by setting two reeds up, one above the other in the comb, and tuning one reed of each pair to concert pitch, and the other slightly higher than concert pitch. The further apart the tuning in a reed pair is, the more "wet" the sound is said to be.
The Honer ECHO 54 is a double sided (one key on one side a different key on the other) tremolo at about 35 to 40 pounds. The BANDMASTER is made in what was East Germany and costs about 14 pounds for a double sided C/G. A very cheap single sided Hero made in China in key C only can be had for around 3 pounds. I have one and it's not bad at all really.
THE OCTAVE. An Octave tuned harmonica has a double reed chamber, one set above the other in the same way as the tremolo, the difference being that the two reeds concerned are tuned an OCTAVE apart rather than just being detuned. This give a very loud, clear, almost strident tone.
I use the tremolo tuned ones for dance music. Which is I believe what they were intended to be used for when they were created.
I play English (morris) dance music, Celtic, Northumbrian dance and folk music on my Bandmaster.
If you want to hear a tremolo being played in Northumbrian folk music at it's very best, try and get hold of any recordings of The Shepherds (Trad. Northumbrian dance music). Or Jez Lowe and the Bad Pennies. (Trad. and contemp. folk music).
For Irish music, I have a cassette at home called "LARK IN THE CLEAR AIR" (I think)! It's described on the cover as music for small instruments. Some tracks are better played than others.
The Shepherds are all retired Northumbrian shepherds. They also stopped performing as the Shepherds a while ago, as they are not getting any younger. Will Atkinson plays Honer tremolos and he is now 81 or 82 years old! The other two instruments are Northumbrian Pipes and fiddle (violin to some of you, but fiddle to the rest of us :-).
They did in fact perform together last August at the annual Whitby Folk Festival (Yorkshire, U.K.) but it seemed to be a special event, as they were not billed as the Shepherds, just under their individual names.
BANDMASTER REVIEW (SORT OF). Will Atkinson and Brendan Power gave a mouth organ workshop at Whitby last year, which I was lucky enough to attend.
Will was really impressed with my Bandmaster. Especially as it costs about 16 U.K. pounds rather than the Honer Echo's 35 to 40 U.K pounds.
It's a very loud beast (useful outdoors and in a band) and is not as "wet" a sound as some of the Honer ones. Having said that,my F Golden Melody tremolo does not have a very wet sound, in fact it is lovely. My Honer Band Harp on the other hand is so detuned it sounds awful, out of tune almost, if I play slow airs on it.
The Bandmaster is extremely robust and best of all, it is tuned like a chromatic, so you get the full range of three octaves. For Irish music, this is considered by many as being one of the most important features.
I only wish Bandmaster made a D/G tuned one as well, as most folk/morris is played on D/G instruments.
For the sake of completion and before some else tells me, Irish music and slow airs are often played on a chromatic (as Brendan Power does), and some folk is very nice on a diatonic like the special 20, or the Honer Pro harp.
PLAYING TECHNIQUES. Well, really just a few little thoughts on the matter.
Out of all the cases of new harps returned to shops as faulty, the biggest number turn out to be cases of a novice player not being able to sound hole No.2 in the blow or draw position.
If you are having this problem, try breathing in or out through the nose at the same time as blowing the reed with your mouth. This is good practice on ALL notes anyway, just to you get used to the small amount of air needed to make a pure tone.
Nine times out of ten this will cure it, it's then down to a little practice. When you tell folk this they don't belive you, they KNOW it's a fault on the harp. Once you get them to try it though, they usually say something like, "well, I never, would you believe it"? I even got this response from a member of staff in a well known local music shop. So trust me.
A good beginning exercise it to sit, or maybe lie on the bed nice and relaxed, hold the harp in your lips, and BREATH in and out gently, breathing through a small group of notes at the same time, rather than trying to get a sound out of a single note.
This should give you a good feel for the amount of air needed to play the beast. Don't concentrate a great deal on it, just relax and breath through it. Do this in different places over the range of the instrument. It will also help give you some idea of the range of notes and sounds that can be made on it. (Bending techniques aside).
If a person starts to play with a tremolo first, there can be the problem of always playing more than one note at once. I mean adjacent notes here, as you always play two notes at once with a tremolo. This tends to happen a lot, and some people seem to play them like that all the time, a bit like playing in chords in fact. This is mainly due to the "full, massed accordion band" type of sound that this instrument possesses. This full sound can confuse some folk in that they play two or more adjacent notes and it sounds O.K.
It lacks definition or clarity of sound however, and the result can be a muddy, cluttered tune. This is rather wearing to listen to after a while for some, and hard on the ears for others. I know, because I was one of them, and only playing a standard single reed diatonic mouth organ showed me the error.!
On the other hand, due to the way the notes/reeds are laid out on a tremolo you have got almost twice the distance between the notes that you are playing at any one time. This gives you a better chance of hitting the note you want successfully first time. (I hope what I said there was clear, it seems a bit odd now it's written down ).
Also, because you are playing two notes at a time (one above the other) you need a lot less breath to play it and get a good tone. So again, the tremolo can be found to be easier to play than a straight diatonic.
MUSIC TO PLAY ON A TREMOLO. As I said, dance and folk are suitable. There are other sorts of music too of course, but I'll stick with what I think I know best on the harp.
I personally do not think Slow Airs are suitable for playing on a tremolo. The detuned nature of the reeds causes a modulation (tremolo see?) of the notes played, a sort of "warble", a beat note really, if you like. This tremolo/warble speeds up or slows down from note to note. Up at the top end (higher notes) of the instrument the tremolo effect can be very much faster or slower on two adjacent notes.
This is very noticeable sometimes, and on slow tunes tends to create a very over sentimental, Victorian style of warble. Try it out on a tune like "There's no place like home" and you should hear it very clearly. You may even like it. I find it obnoxious, and it can sound quite out of tune up at the top end as well.
The sound of a tremolo is (usually) louder than a 10 hole diatonic due to the playing of two notes at once. It also has a fuller sound, because of the detuning between the notes.
This makes it an excellent choice for playing in a group along with other small acoustic instruments such as, dulcimer (all types), fiddle, flutes, (all types), but nicest with wooden ones to my ears. Tin whistles, the smaller sorts of bagpipes (without the need to amplify the harmonica to make it heard), the Clarsach (small celtic harp of the kind carried by the old Bards), jews (jaws) harp, any small sorts of light percussion and drums, bohdran (or dead goat as we in the know fondly refer to it), etc. Concertinas, and a long list of others, which I'm sure you can come up with.
By the way did you here the joke about the bohran player and the rubber glove? Well maybe not then, this IS a family magazine after all.
Dance music of the sort mentioned above is very rhythmic by nature, and instruments like the Anglo Concertina, Button Key Melodion and Accordion are commonly used for this sort of music (along with flute, tin whistle etc.).
These bellows operated instruments are rhythmical too, particularly the Anglo concertina and the Melodion as these are both tuned diatonicaly. This results in a lot of "push/pull" activity on the bellows, which in turn results in a very rhythmic feel to much of the music played on them. If you bear this in mind when thinking about playing dance music on the tremolo harp (playing dotted notes kind of style) then you should be well on the way to a good feel for the music.
"A foot on the stairs", was how Will Atkinson described it to me. This was after he asked me to play the "Keel Row" (a Northumbrian dance tune) at the work shop. After I played it he said, "Aye, well enough, but it's a dance tune mind, ye should play it more like this". He then played it with a strong dotted note feel, very rhythmically, and got me to play it again in that way. That's when he said I had a foot on the stairs.
It's a very humbling experience in front of two harmonica masters from different eras and schools of playing, and the rest of the people at the workshop. I learned my lesson well because of it though!
BENDING NOTES ON A TREMOLO. DON'T TRY IT! Don't even THINK about it.
It is a trick worth learning (on a suitable diatonic) as it can add great depth of expression to almost any piece of music that you can play on the harp. Just don't try it on a tremolo, that's all. They simply are not designed for it, as if ANY harp was in the beginning! Really though you will only put the reeds well out of tune at best. At worst you can crack one or more reeds. Don't try it on a diatonic-octave tuned mouth organ either, for the same reason.
END NOTE. No I don't just play folk, I do jazz guitar, some rock, and compose synth music, and sometimes even convert traditional folk songs into thrash music, in the Oyster Band sort of way (gasp, shock, horror).
I can be reached via E-MAIL for those of you on line at the following address:-
GJacks~k.ac.bradford
If you didn't understand that last bit don't worry, you are MUCH better off without computers anyway. If you didn't understand ANY of the article at all, well you're in good company, my mother wouldn't have understood it either, and re-reading it i'm not all that sure I do.
