I’ll go into details later, but first, why not simply experience what this harp sounds like via two recordings I made with it? The chords that this harp produces include one major chord and one minor chord, but with extension notes above and below the chord notes that make for some unusual and beautiful sounds. And sometimes, even though a harp is designed to give a particular set of individual notes, it ends up plays some really unusual and cool chords. I go in the opposite direction, Sure, I check out all that stuff, but the first thing I do is check out what chords the harp will play. Now, give an alternate-tuned harp to most harp players, and they’ll look for what notes bend, what scales it plays, and what cool licks they can play. (I’ve since replaced the comb with a linen Blue Moon comb that approximates the original appearance, and am working on replacing the bad reed, though it’s hard to match the reed size with the required pitch.) I held on to it because I love the unusual chords it produces. It was a nailed-together Marine Band with a wood comb that was musty from what seemed to be mildew, and one of the reeds was cracked, but that wasn’t why I kept it. (At the bottom of this page I give links to the videos where I explain and demonstrate each tuning.)īut I kept the most unusual Magic Harp for myself. I figured the tunings out pretty quickly, and later, when I was back home in San Francisco, I sold four of the harps via Facebook Live posts where I played the harps and explained their note layouts. When I arrived at the Harmonica Collective teaching event in New Orleans a few days later, Jason handed them to me and said, “Here, figure out how these are tuned and let’s sell them.” They had been offered for sale on eBay and were acquired by Jason Ricci. In early November of 2018, I came into possession of five Magic Harps, all built for a single customer by customizer Jimmy Gordon. They aimed to have the Magic Harps commercially produced, but that didn’t happen, and the few Magic Harps out there were built by custom harp builders. The inventors were Pierre Beauregard (founder of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra) and Richard Salwitz (aka Magic Dick of J. Every Magic Harp tuning gives a unique combination of chords, by design and not as an afterthought.In the one I’m featuring in this post, it occurs only twice over a span of nearly four octave, but it does repeat. In some Magic Harps, the layout repeats every octave. The tuning layout repeats, instead of changing every octave the way it does on a standard diatonic.In every hole, the draw note is always higher in pitch than the blow note (unlike standard tuning on diatonic harmonicas where, starting in Hole 7, the blow note is higher than the draw note). Not quite – though we can all wish! Back in 1993, two harmonica players from Massachusetts patented a system of harmonica note layouts (or tunings) that they called “Magic Harps.” All the note layouts have three things in common: One informed (and anonymous) source said "his 45 rpm was his first and only album.Uh, what’s a Magic Harp? Is that a harp that will magically make me an awesome player? Songwriter Juke Joint Jimmy is a legendary figure with the Geils crew, having also written "Cruisin' For A Love" and "It Ain't What You Do (It's How You Do It"). Playing against Seth Justman's honky tonk piano, Peter and Jay stay back so that Dickie can do his thing. Where a Stevie Wonder will make the harp a sweet sounding instrument helping him rejoice sentiments like "I Was Made To Love Her", Magic Dick does the opposite, burning sounds into the consciousness as deftly as any great lead guitarist. Covered by harp player Mike Stevens on a 1992 release, this was the song that really put Magic Dick on the map as the quintessential rock & roll harmonica man. It's a short ( two minutes, twenty-one seconds) but lively cover of a Juke Joint Jimmy tune which allows Richard Salwitz, a.k.a. Geils Band's second disc, The Morning After, with a killer live take on their third lp and first stage recording Full House Live. The studio version of "Whammer Jammer" is on the J.
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