[Harp-L] re: Questions about Special 20's and Golden Melody's



Tim wrote:

"On the other hand, it is often very useful to modify the plates of a
Special 20 or Marine Band (I prefer to use the Marine Band) to fit
into a Golden Melody in order to get to some of the lower (and higher)
tunings that are not available in the Golden Melody.  I do this fairly
frequently to make low F#, low F, low E, low Eb, low D and high G
Golden Melodies.  It requires a lot of drilling and hand fitting, but
isn't all that hard to do.  "

Why in god's name do it at all? I can't imagine that it wouldn't be much simpler to remove the reeds from the stock GM and replace them with reeds taken from the S20 or MB in question. No alterations needed to the comb or reed-plate, just some time and patience with removing and then re-riveting the reeds. A minimal re-tune to finish it off and I can't see this taking more than two or three hours.

That seems massively less problematic than re-inventing the wheel, ie, restamping the MB reed-plates to fit the GM, when that is all GM reed-plates are in the first place.

"For a simpler thing like making a natural minor or adjusting
intonation, as Winslow says, it's far easier to retune the GM."

For just dropping down to lowF or even Low E it would be much easier to just retune a G as well. I've had success retuning reeds two hole tones and know that you can do much more quite successfully (from, amongst other things, talks on harp-l). So why bother replacing the reed-plates at all? Why not just retune? The same with high G. Maybe something like low D would be a bit of a stretch for just retuning, but again reed replacement mixed with retuning should be easier than reed-plate replacement in this case (where the reed-plate has to be reworked to fit the comb).




()() JR "Bulldogge" Ross () () & Snuffy, too:) `----'







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