Our first set of 35 original sounds for harmonica and the Zoom G3 is now available for purchase at this site! For your listening pleasure, we’ve recorded those sounds as we played them, using a Seydel Session Steel harp in the key of Bb and an Audix Fireball mic and a Zoom H4 digital recorder positioned about 6 inches in front of the speaker grill on our Peavey KB2 keyboard amp. No post-recording processing has been applied to these samples, except to normalize the volume levels; this is what the patches sound like, and nothing else.

As per our post on this subject, different mics sound WAY different with an amp modeler, just as they would with a “real” amp. (Check that post out if you want to hear the difference.) We like the Fireball V as an all-around great performer (with less feedback than any other mic we’ve tried, which counts a lot when you’re playing with a loud band), but if you want maximum grind in your tone, which many blues players do, use a mic that grinds! The usual suspects for that purpose include a Green Bullet, a Bottle o’ Blues, or a Shure SM57.

The samples below are laid out in the order in which you encounter them on the G3 with our patch set in it: basic blues and rock, followed by clean sounds, followed by heavily effected sounds that take harmonica to some new places. We think this layout will work well for most players: the bread and butter stuff first, and the crazy cool stuff in your back pocket for when you want to hit a note and see every head in the room turn your way. Of course, if you’d rather lay the patches out in a different order, Zoom’s Edit&Share software makes it easy.

Enjoy! And if you like what you hear, click here to buy!

Amped up Blues and Rock

These patches are designed for everyday blues and rock sounds. Effects, when used, are simple and straightforward.

Basic Bassman

Bassman Spring

Bassman Tape Echo

Bassman Vibrato

Bassman Tremolo

Bassman Phase Shifter

Vibrolux

Vibrolux Vibrato

Deluxe Reverb Vibrato

Bassman CE Chorus

Clean

These patches are built with little or no “amped” tone, and use reverb and delay, along with occasional effects like detune (which produces a tremolo-harp sound) and chorus (for that sweet shimmery sound) to create “acoustic” spaces that range from close-up to cathedral.

Clean Detune Reverb

Clean Reverb

Clean Modulated Delay Reverb

Clean Slapback

Clean Detune Reverb (variation)

CE Chorus HD Reverb

Digital Delay Detune HD Reverb

Slapback

Tenor Sax Harp

Clean Vibrato HD Reverb

Far From Ordinary

Okay, this is where we–and you–get our freak on. These patches are big, tough, and very, very different. We use pitch shifters, auto-wahs, and a variety of filters along with other modulation FX to create huge, otherworldly harp sounds.

Twin Filter Delay

Twin Big Low

Twin Bigger Low

BG Crunch Octave Down Phase Shifter

BG Crunch Octave Down Vibrato

BG Crunch Random Filter Vibrato


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