Sonny/Brownie
What's the story behind the Sonny/Brownie breakup? It's hard to find very much 'negative' history online but I've been curious about this for a while.
-Taylor
cool. Thanks!
I posted this question on Dave Barretts forum also but perhaps I should have asked you. I was wondering if valved harps are more difficult to bend than regular diatonics? I have recently been playing Suzuki Promaster vavled harps.
Half-valved harps have all the bends that are available on standard harmonicas, and those bends are not affected by the presence of valves. (The additional bends made available by the valves are another story, which I'll detail later in this message.)
However, Suzuki harmonicas - valves or no valves - may bend a little differently from other harps, such as Hohners. Bending on a Suzuki is no harder, and may even be a little easier, but it is a little different.
Reed design and adjustment on Suzukis are different from German harps. While achieving a bend is no harder on a Suzuki, a Suzuki harp will be more sensitive to how you shape your mouth, and will sometimes ring or squeal, even when you're not trying to bend (this is true of Lee Oskar, as well). Hohners and Seydels tend to be a bit more forgiving and don't always require the same precision of mouth placement.
Half-valved harps do differ from standard harps in other ways, though. For instance:
==In Holes 1 through 6, the blow notes will be louder than on a standard harp because no exhaled air is leaking through the blow reeds. (The same is true for the draw reeds in Holes 7-10, though it's less noticeable.)
==The blow bends in Holes 1-6 an draw bends in Draw 7-10, while unattainable on a standard harp, don't sound or react the same as the standard bends. It takes more finesse and determination to achieve them and make them sound good.
==Overblows and overdraws are not possible on half-valved harps.
Thank you for your detailed response. I found it very interesting and useful. One more question. A lot of my freinds seem to like golden melody harps. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on them as far as bending. Thanks
Golden Melody (GM) harps have the same reeds as Marine Bands and Special 20s. They're a bit more airtight than the traditional wood-bodied Marine Band but have a different tone. They're also tuned so that the individual notes in the scale are more in tune with a piano but as a result the smoothness of the chords suffers (this is always a trade-off and not unique to the harmonica).
Bending on the GM isn't much different from other standard diatonics, aside from what I've already mentioned.
One important thing to understand about bending:
When you first learn to bend draw notes, or high blow notes, or play overblows:
At first every individual bend on each hole and each key of harp - and each model of harp - seems vastly different and you wonder how you can possibly master them all.
But as your bending technique gets stronger, the differences seem to fade into the background and instead you start to develop and strong sense of the things that all bends have in common. The stronger your technique gets, the more the differences all start to melt away - between different kinds of bends, different models and different keys.
I don't have any more info than anyone else. I never met either of them, though I saw them together plenty of times in the early 1970s. (Now I wonder why I didn't chat them up like I did with Walter Horton and Wolf and Muddy and Johnny Shines and Charlie - heaven knows at this distance in time.) You could always tell that they had a rivalry and while it was jovial onstage, I later heard that it got serious offstage.
The gist of the stories I heard were that Brownie wanted to get more contemporary while Sonny was wedded to the older styles - which he played with great virtuosity and flair.
That's really the sum of my received stories and observations.