вторник, 24 августа 2010 г.

Notes on history...

Hello, friends!

This post is about history of diminished tuning. I asked Pat Missin, famous expert on altered tunings about the invention of the  diminished tuning and here's what he replied:


The diminished tuning (actually that should be diminished tunings, as
there are a few possible variations) has been invented a few times.

Some time around 1990, I had a dream that I'd retuned a 12-hole Marine
Band 364 to this layout. I'd never thought of it before, but as soon
as I woke up I made one and played it for the rest of the day.

However, I wasn't the only person to have had this idea.

In 1996, Christian Neumann was awarded German patent 29512316 for two
tunings, one of them being the diminished layout. This is odd, as the
German patent office had previously refused to grant patents for
harmonica tunings, plus this tuning had already been patented
elsewhere.

In 1993, Dr John Yeadon was awarded UK patent 2259802 for several
chromatic harmonica tunings based on modes of limited transposition,
including a couple of variations of the diminished layout.

In 1992 Magic Dick and Pierre Beauregard were granted US patent
5166461 for various diatonic tunings, including the diminished layout.

Alfred Hirsch from Germany apparently came up with the diminished
tuning himself, about the same time that I did and if I recall
correctly, so did Steve Jennings in the UK.

I would not be at all surprised if lots of other people had the same
idea.

Hope this helps,

-- Pat.

Next post will be more on practice!

воскресенье, 22 августа 2010 г.

Diminished tuning overview

Hello, my harmonica friends!

I'm Doctor Mager. I decided to start a blog about harmonica and my personal experience with diminished tuning for 10-hole harp. I switched to this tuning some moths ago and see that there's still lack of info about dimi- tuned harmonicas and approaches to play on them. Of course, Richter tuning remains the main tuning for diatonic harmonica and i do not want to discuss advantages ( or disadvantages) of diminished(dimi) compared with richter. May be it's better to see what opportunities dimi-tuning can give us and how to gain more from exploring this new field.

For the start let's assume that you have at least a bit music theory knowlege:). I will explain things as they appear

So what is dimi tuning? First let's see what is a diminished chord. Diminished chord is a four-note chord(i.e. seventh chord) wich is built with STAKED( remember this) minor third( 1.5 tone) intervals. Let's build a diminished chord from C.

Our chord will consist of these notes (due to simplicity i'm using F# instead Gb and A instead Bbb )

C Eb F# A

Now let's see what happens if we contunue with adding minor third to the last note:

C Eb F# A ...wait.....C!

We ended with C and that means that all the notes repeat again and again. That also mean that no matter note (C Eb F# A) we start we will have inversions of the SAME diminished chord. It's easy to figure that there are two more diminished chords in 12 note chromatic scale:

C# E G Bb ....continue this row yourself

and

D F Ab B

all above information is fundamental to understand diminished tuning concept and features.

Now you can ask me how it is connected to harmonica?

It's not all bloated music theory article.

HERE WE GO!

If we put notes of C diminished chord on the blow reeds and notes of D diminished chord on the draw reeds we will have a diminished tuning layout for harmonica!!!

That's how 10 hole dimi diatonic harp looks like:

C Eb F# A C Eb F# A C Eb blow reeds

D F Ab B D F Ab B D F draw reeds

but what about C# diminished chord ,you may ask.

It's somewhere inside I'd say:)

I hope you heard about bends on diatonic harmonica:). Since we have a whole tone between blow and draw note in EACH hole, it's possible to bend a draw note a semitone down. And only one type of bend is possible here, a half-tone bend

So let's look again on the layout, now with bends:

C Eb F# A C Eb F# A C Eb blow reeds

C# E G Bb C# E G Bb C# E half-tone draw bend

D F Ab B D F Ab B D F draw reeds

Here you see that we have filled our harp with ALL notes of chromatic scale using ONLY half-tone( half step ) bends

I think it's all for the first time.

In the next posts i will talk about bends, positions, 4-hole boxes and road maps wich are very usefull for playing dimi harp

See You next time!