source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:48:19 -0700 Subject: Re: tuning the harmonica From: Pat Missin It may be that I am attempting to make a square circle, but I was sure that if anyone could help me with the "perfect" tuning for the harmonica, they would probably be a subscriber to this list. Several suggestions have been made - all of them a compromise of some sort, but perhaps different compromises suit different circumstances. My thanks for all of those who have toaken th time to think about the subject. The 10-hole single reed diatonic harmonica (known as Richter, after its designer) has twenty reeds - a blow reed and a draw reed to each hole. The blow reeds form the series of notes: C E G C E G C E G C E G The draw reeds are arranged to give s full diatonic scale in the mid-range of the harp, but omit and/or duplicate certain notes to give a C and a G chord in the lower octave for accompaniment and to keep the C major triad as blow notes. D G B D F A B D F A Traditionally, the chord ws tuned as a just G dominant 9th (the F being a septimal seventh above the G. This sounds great in the G domintant chord, but very flat in melodies. To compromise, it was later tuned as a Pythagorean seventh above the G. This sounded nicer when the DFA triad was played, but the F-A interval was a rather rough sounding Pyth M3rd; so if you used these two notes to suggest a subdominant chord, some unpleasant combination tones were produced. More recently, because the issue of being in tune with other musicians was raised so often (harmonica players wondering why their instruments were "flat" intstead of wondering why the other instruments were in the compromise of 12TET!), there has been a tendency to tune the F even sharper, in some cases getting close to a just Dm chord, but this mkes the G7 almost unbearable. In many cases, the Es and Bs were also tuned a bit higher (midway between just and 12TET). There are other commonly used tunings (I have a collection of about 100, but most of these are far from "commonly used"), based on modal rearrangemnts of this set. For example, the harmonica minor. The blow notes are a repeaing Cm triad and the draw notes are tuned: D G B D F Ab B D F Ab Traditionally, this series was tuned as 8/10/12/14/17 - again some of the individual intervals sound a little rough, but as this harp is hardly ever played in anything other than Cm, that's not much of a problem. Blues and country-style players usually use a C harp to play in the key of G (cross harp), oso to get a major scale out of this position (as the modes are caled in harp-speak), the "country tuning" was developed, which is the same as the standard Richter, but raises the F to F#. This presents not problems with intonation (the F# is a perfect 5th above the B, a pure M3rd above the D, a pure m3rd below the A, etc.) Also, there is the natural minor (again based on the C harp, but the natural minor scale starts from the G). The blow notes are a Cm triad and the draw notes thus: D G Bb D F A Bb D F A. Again, this tunes justly with no real problems - it's one of my favorites because of the perfect 4ths and 5ths you can doublestop (and how well it lends itself to BbM as well as Gm). The chromatic beast I have described earlier - as I have pointed out, it's problem is the Dm6 chord produced by the draw notes. The usual way around this is 12TET. Phew! There you have it - the history of the harmonica's tuning. Various other approaches have been tried (including so-called "spiral" tunings, which spreads the scale out into a 13th chord, for example the blow notes could be: C E G B D F A C E G and the draw notes: D F A C E G B D F A This seems to lend itself rather well to various meantone ideas.) Other designs have used something like a slide chromatic to produce a "perfect" diatonic (as one of you suggested), but these have not met with much success. I hope this is of interest to someone out there! Pat Missin. "...my music's a lot better than it sounds!" (with apologies to Mark Twain) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 17 Jul 1996 00:14 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id PAA17352; Tue, 16 Jul 1996 15:14:28 -0700 Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 15:14:28 -0700 Message-Id: <95960716185259/0005695065PK2EM@MCIMAIL.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu