*** My store is not taking any orders today due to health reasons which limit to my productivity.
***
My custom harmonicas, combs and tools are made to order. If items are out of stock on my website, it's likely due to my workload is at the limit. Please see my dealers for all items I offer.
Maximum production times may be up to 16 business days for combs and tools. Current production time for custom harmonicas are shown on the top of the custom page.
Reeds are metal springs. They are made to convert the kinetic energy from the flow of air into decibels by vibrating though the slot of the reed plate.
Springs can last a long time. So can harmonica reeds. But there is no expectation they will last forever. They go out of tune and they break. A reed can be re-tuned without any loss of power or tonal quality many times before it fails.
With good technique, I feel it's reasonable to expect to have to adjust the tuning of your harmonicas every two months or so and you will have to replace between 1-3 broken reeds per year.
You can change harmonica reeds yourself. You will need tools to remove the bad reed and tools and supplies to attach a new reed. It doesn't matter which method you use to attach the new reed to the plate. Use a rivet, use a screw, buy a welding torch and weld it on. Pick the easiest, most accessible method and get good at it (Use a screw!)
To learn how to replace reeds can take practice. You must not only take off the bad reed and put in a new one, but you must not damage or warp the reed plate while you do it. You must also adjust the shape of the new reed so that it plays well. And once you have done that, you need to adjust the tuning of the reed since it will likely be off. Even the slightest change in a reed's placement on the plate will change the pitch.
You can scavenge reeds from other harmonicas of the same make and model to replace broken reeds. You must use a reed of the exact same size from the same slot of another harmonica. You may use a reed that is 1 to 4 semitones higher and tune it down. A really easy way to tune down a reed is to use BLUTAK:
It's more difficult to use a reed of a lower pitch and tune it up. It can be done. Don't try to raise it more than one semitone. Any more than that and you will not like the tone. And it's too much work to be worth the effort.
Hohner Marine Band type reeds use two different slot configurations. Long Slot are used for keys of C and lower. Short slot is used for keys Dd and higher. This can complicate things since the size of a 6 slot in a D harp is different than the size of the 6 slot of a C harmonica.
Still, you have lots of options. See this chart for Hohner MB, GM, Special 20 and Rocket reeds: Reed Chart Hohner
You can buy new reeds from the Hohner and Seydel factories. There is no such option for Suzuki nor Lee Oskar.
It's straightforward to buy packages of three reeds from the Seydel website.
It's easy to buy packages of five reeds from Hohner from their USA/Canada shop. Go to hohnershop.com
For the rest of the word, you need to use the hohner-cshop.de website. At the time I am writing this, the links to single reeds are broken.
They can be found as you navigate for diatonic harmonica, Marine Band type parts. They offer a product that is quite expensive which includes five pieces of all 20 reeds for a key.
I don't think that's a smart investment. Mostly reeds 4, 5, 7 and maybe 9 blow out the most frequently. You do not need to have five extra reeds for all the other holes.
If you select a key, you will be shown the individual notes and reeds on the bottom of the page. If you click on one of those notes, you should be able to add a pack of five of those individual reeds to the cart. But those links are broken.
I suggest you use the contact page to ask about ordering individual reeds. Specify the key, the hole and whether it's the blow or draw reed you need. If you want to use rivets instead of screws, ask them to supply you with some rivets. They usually can provide them in sticks of 50. They are excellent and you can use them on Seydel harmonicas.
The size of the top four chambers are significantly smaller in a Short Slot Dark comb™ than a Long Slot (standard) comb. This helps you match your embouchure to the resonance required to control the first semitone blow bend on the ten hole.
If you are struggling to hit that note cleanly in a higher key diatonic harmonica, don't be hard on yourself. It may not be your technique. It may just be physics.
The smaller overall space of the slot decreases the amount of compressible air in the system.
More importantly, the depth of the slot can affect what frequency is reinforced by the channel. The reed dimensions and weight distribution determines the frequency obtained when air flows through the slot and past the reed. But the slot itself can want to behave like a pan flute and the column of air can compress and expand at it's favourite frequency.
On the top end of the harp, it's difficult to compensate for that using your own embouchure alone.
The back wall of Short Slot combs' holes 7, 8, 9 and 10 are closer to the opening than those of a long slot comb. This changes the frequency that is reinforced to one that does not compete with that first semitone blow bend.
You can't change the laws of physics but you can change the slot sizes so that physics works in your favour!
Spiral tuning has the notes of the major scale alternating between the blow and draw notes. It provides draw bends and overblows from holes 1 to 10.
It also provides a lot of chords. You can add a major or minor seventh to many of the
chord triads shown here.
You can alter the tuning of a Standard Richter harmonica to Spiral Tuning.
Here is a visual aid to the modification:
Shown above are the offsets in semitones. You only need to lower the pitches. And you only need to modify 12 of the 20 reeds.
You can use solder. You can also use BluTak which is a very effective and stable way to lower the pitch of a reed by several semitones. It's the easiest method, too!
Second Position Spiral is another alternative where the tonic is the 2 draw.
The chords available are as follows:
Here are the modifications. You need to alter an extra reed:
Hohner has released a new altered tuning diatonic harp called PentaHarp.
In Pat Missin's Altered States list of altered tunings, this tuning is 11.15, "Blues Scale Tuning" which has been known since the 90s.
PentaHarp offers you draw bends from bottom to top. The same breath pattern is repeated and there are no blow bends.
You can order pre-tuned PentaHarps but it's possible to convert a Standard Richter harmonica. The conversion to PentaHarp is a pretty big job. The blow and draw reeds in four holes need to be swapped to avoid having to sharpen notes. It's much more effective to lower the pitch or reeds instead of raising them. The job is much easier and the reed playability will stay protected.
PentaHarp adds three semitones to the total range of the instrument compared to Standard Richter. We will add these extra semitones on the bottom end of the instrument, not the top.
So we will start with a harp that is three semitones sharper than the key we are aiming for and tune it down.
Here is a visual aid to the modification:
Alteration checklist:
1- Swap blow/draw reeds 7, 8, 9 and 10. This will really make things easier.
2- Perform coarse tuning adjustment. Lower pitch using BluTak or Solder.
3- Perform other customizing and improvements
4- Perform fine tuning. No major chords are present but there are lots of opportunities for harmony in splits and octaves. Tune all minor thirds to zero. Tune Fourths and Fifths to be in harmony with the tonic (Fourths are about -2 cents and Fifths are about+2 cents)
The Reed Plate Holder will help you hold the reed plate steady as you straighten it with the Reed Plate Claws. Once you get comfortable with the claws, you may no longer need the Reed Plate Holder.
It has two slots to accommodate many different sizes of reed plates. Use the smallest
slot that fits.
The Reed Plate Holder ships with a sticker on the under side. The adhesive will help hold the plate in place. Once it loses its stickiness, you can peel it off and replace it with any kind of tape you have on hand. If you no longer need the additional help from the adhesive, don't bother replacing it.
This design was created to open up the back area of the Hohner Golden Melody. There is less comb material in back of the slots and that shapes the sound differently both acoustically (in air) and cupped in a mic. I feel this provides more power which I attribute to less attenuation or kinetic energy lost.
"Gapping almost any harp will allow you to play overblows!"
True. But let's be specific about what we mean.
Almost any harp can play an overblow that you "wind up"; it's easy to play the overblow when rolling off the draw note. This isn't as big an achievement as some seem to think it is. Those kinds of overblows are very limited in their application because more often than not, you want to be able to play the overblow on its own as a single note.
A true test of a harp's "overbend-ability" is whether you can play the overblow from a dead stop. Gapping a stock harp tightly will not reliably allow you to play overbends from a dead stop.
The other thing about "just gapping" a harp for overblows is that gapping is a very crude way to adjust reeds. It only takes into consideration the height of the tip of the reed but it's the height along whole length of the reed that is crucial. In essence you need to consider the shape of the reed.
If you don't, sure you can slam down the gaps and crank out an overbend, but very likely, that's made the hole miserable to play. The instrument will only play with light breath, low volume and weak tone.
On the other hand, an Overbend harmonica with proper reed work will offer you full range from quiet to loud, rich tone and the regular notes, bends and overbends, all play with the same effort.
Reed work can increase the available range while making the harp much more responsive. It should be more fun to play an overbend harp, not less.
