Re: [Harp-L] Original Marine Band Deluxe, now Seydel pre-1946

[David Payne <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Baker wrote:

Maybe I should get mine fixed up and actually play it. I'd be very  
curious to play a pre-war Seydel, because I've seen quite a lot of  
their communist era production as well as later instruments prior to  
the takeover by the new management in 2004 and most weren't very good  
(in fact the DDR harps were terrible). As this factory made the first  
ever Richter harps to be commercially manufactured, it would be nice  
to know they were doing a good job prior to the cold war era. Does  
anyone have any info on this?"

That was a great post Steve, it's going right into my "Reference" folder. I just called Jason and left him a voice msg, I just HAD to be the first to tell him about that gold on his prewar MB DeLuxe. He'll be tickled, I'm sure.

Hopefully during this very long post, I'll say something of use....

I've got a few prewar Seydels. They similiar in quality with Hohners of the period, with some different directions taken here and there. From playing them both, the prewar MB DeLuxe and the prewar Seydel were par with each other, One interesting note was that my ear says the MB DeLuxe was tuned pretty close to A=440, while the Seydel was tuned A=442 or 443. 

I'll say it, the DDR harps sucked and it was a crime to discontinue that bandmaster design like the DDR did. If you watch Star Trek, a good comparison would be that during the DDR years, Seydel had been assimilated by the Borg, then unassimilated after reunification. While there's this little light in the corner with Karl Pucholt working on really cool stuff privately during the DDR years, as far as official vision, the company was cryogenicly frozen and then slowly thawed out after reunification.
The three Seydel prewars I've got in working order are the Super Cool Prewar Bandmaster C, a Prewar Bandmaster High G and a tremolo called the "Military Music," which I assume is a rip off of the Marine Band name, not a harp geared for the military.
As far as prewars compared to Hohner prewars, the reedplates are of about the same quality. A couple of things Seydel had going for them was that cool Bandmaster coverplate and their coverplates of the time were all attached by screws and nuts, not nails.   
During the 1930s, Seydel had two reed profiles. One was a wider profile where most of the reeds are the same width. The other was a narrower profile with reeds slightly more narrow than the Marine Band. They were using, from what I've seen, the wide profile in the tremolos and the narrow profile in the diatonics, including the Bandmaster flagship. Today, the narrow profile is used on the Solist, the wider one on about everything else, although I believe there is a slightly altered profile on the 1847. 
One major difference between the Hohners and Seydels of that era is the combs. The Hohner combs were peach or pearwood, the Seydel combs were beech (as the Solist comb still is). On the Hohner combs, you notice at the bottom of the hole, there is an indent that has been pressed into the wood. On the Seydels, there is no such indent. On the Hohners, the bottom of the hole has two perfect 90 degree angles, I assume some evidence that a fancy machine was used to cut it. Seydel combs of the time appear to have been cut by hand, it appears to me that the Seydel comb teeth were cut out using a bandsaw jig. The teeth are perfect, but you can see evidence of perpendicular saw marks in the bottom of the hole.
On the Seydel brass reeds, I can tell no difference between new and prewar. While the reedplates and profile of the prewar bandmaster and modern sollists are the same, the old Bandmaster plates were better, but there is a key difference, the Solist is the cheapest harp they've got, the Bandmaster was their flagship. 
Another interesting little feature the Seydels had at the time were rounded corners. Some harps had the corners rounded so the sides of the harps caressed the hands in a gentle arc, top part of the reedplate of the Flagship Bandmaster went off the corner at a 45 degree angle, and the side started at another 45 degree angle. 
The megaphones on the Bandmaster served another purpose besides a side vent on steriods, it is made so that your finger and thumb lay alongside them for a very good and comfortable hold.
Seydel had plenty of novelty items, my favorite is shaped like a pistol, it was sold as the "Glee Club" (circa 1923) at one time and the "American Marksman" at another. There was one that had a coin holder and some kind of dice game inside.
What they didn't have so much of as Hohner were the same harps with different coverplates. Hohner was thinking about marketing constantly, while Seydel and the other K-Thal makers were going through middlemen to get to export markets. So Hohner would make a Marine Band and name it after some politician or river or waterfall or something to sell to people who liked that politician or lived near that river or wanted to go to vacation at that waterfall... that never occurred to Seydel. So, while you have a similar number of harp models, you don't have as many models geared for specific markets. When the U.S. economy faultered in the late 1800s, Hohner went to Mexico and all these other places, nobody could market like Hohner back then, but I should mention the huge coup Seydel had with the Boomerang in Australia in the 1930s, it actually saved the company from going under. I get orders from Australia all the time, even after all that has happened and the
 years that have transpired since, Australia seems to have remained fertile Seydel ground.


They made some really interesting developments... one that comes to mind they had in the 1920s is an individual sound channel for each reed... like the Suzuki Overdrive of today.
They were experimenting with various tunings, one that comes to mind is this octave/tremolo hybrid (which they reissued recently in the Hochlandklange), 
THe one thing they didn't make was chromatics, although I suspect they may have offered one during the brief period they were merged with Rauner in the early 1930s, but that would have been made at the Rauner factory. 
Until the end of World War II, Seydel was full of vision and dreams, it just went into a coma during the DDR period, 1946 to the early 1990s. It did not operate under the name Seydel during those years... it had a few names, the best known is probably Vermona... the Vermona trademark is pretty interesting because it has the C.A. Seydel sun logo, but instead of C.A.S.S. on the inside, it says Vermona.
I've not seen many DDR harps from other companies and there were other DDR companies. The key different is the company that had been C.A. Seydel was completely state owned. There were companies that were entirely privately owned until at least the 1970s. A.A. Schlott is one that comes to mind. He resisted any attempts at nationlization and got away with it. Schlott, I'd call him one of my heroes (like Hans Eisen), used to, anytime he could, would go down in the factory, pull up a chair on the line and start hammering reedplates to combs. Schlott was no communist and besides not playing communist ball with the DDR, he would never say anything good about socialism, which, as far as the government was concerned, was very bad. After Schlott died, his sons took over, and it wasn't long after that the East German Communist Party, which controlled everything, required Schlott to fill a bunch of orders, but refused to give it any brass or any
 workers. So, Schlott is like "What the hell are we supposed to do?" and the communists are like "You will fill the orders." As the Schlott family should have been gearing up to celebrate their 75th anniversary, they were looking at impossible orders to fill and if they didn't fill them, they were going to some Gulag to rot for the rest of their lives. They left the company behind and defected to West Germany. 
In that surreal environment, it is impossible to make anything of quality, so anything Seydel made during the DDR years is no indication of anything except the company was in a verk dark reality, incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived through it. 

Dave
___________________
Dave Payne Sr. 
Elk River Harmonicas
www.elkriverharmonicas.com