Why are the notes arranged that way? There are two answers. When you add those notes to the chord, they add new colors, sometimes sounding pretty, sometimes giving a floating feeling, and sometimes sounding dissonant.
This chord also occurs at several places in the note layout, as shown in the white cells here:īut in both cases, the chords have other notes both above and below that are not part of the basic chord. The only difference is which note you use as the tonal center.Ī C major chord consists of the notes C, E, and G, and you can find that chord (or fragments of it) in several places on the harmonica, as shown in the white cells here:Īn A minor chord consists of the notes A, C, and E. Or it could be called the A minor pentatonic scale. The scale this harmonica plays is C D E G A – the C major pentatonic (five note) scale. ( Why draw notes on top? Because they’re the high notes in each hole.) The blow notes, the low notes in each hole, are below in yellow. Here’s the note layout for this Magic Harp, with the draw notes on top in blue. The harp was built to play the scale of C major pentatonic (a five-note scale), and I composed and recorded the tune Soulagement to mainly use that scale, though I added some non-scale notes with bends and overblows. 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.