I spent, like, half an hour setting the gaps on my Seydel Blues Soloist Pro today.  The harp plays a lot better.  But I couldn’t get it set up to both honk loudly in the middle register and overblow easily in the same place.  And…

One of the pleasures of SPAH is checking out the gear.  I bought 3 new harps at SPAH: a Seydel 1847 ($80), a Suzuki Harpmaster ($16), and a Seydel Blues Soloist Pro ($35).  A few impressions of each follow. The 1847 is expensive, but it…

Last night Buddy Wakefield, the president of the Newport News Harmonica Plus club, told me that he and some of his friends were going to teach 180 school kids how to play the harp this morning, after which they were all going to walk around…

I stopped by the Harp Depot store this morning and spent a little time at the Suzuki table.  I ended up checking out some of their new harp prototypes, which I really liked.  (They asked me not to discuss them in detail, and I won’t.) …

Thursday night was fun, but it could have been more fun, I think.  Or maybe not.  The folks who run SPAH are obviously well aware that they’re catering to at least two different audiences–the blues/rock (diatonic oriented) crowd, which tends to  be younger and like…

I started the day at SPAH by participating in a panel featuring players who play both chromatic and diatonic harps.  It was a good session, with lots of people in attendance.  One thing that became very clear is that one reason the panelists could play…

SPAH began to get interesting yesterday, for me anyway.  A critical mass of great players is now onsite, and it’s not hard to find really hot music. James Conway’s set of Irish music last night was really hot music.  Conway performed with his regular Chicago-based…

One of the things that’s really obvious at this SPAH is that the number of manufacturers making good-quality harmonicas has increased drastically.  In my youth, the only manufacturer of (barely) usable harmonicas was Hohner, and their idea of product development back then was putting a…

Went to breakfast and saw Michael Rubin, a harp player whose various posts to Harp-L (the Internet harmonica mailing list that most of the pros use) are always informative and interesting. Otherwise, I noticed again how old the general attendees to SPAH are.  I’m not…

Got in to the hotel at about 11:30 PM last night.  As I came into the lobby, I saw small clusters of mostly middle-aged men playing harmonicas.  SPAH is mostly men, and most of the membership seems to be in its mid-40s and up.  The…