[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING ON THE HOHNER MARINE BAND HARMONICA]

BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and I am playing on a Marine Band Special 20 from Hohner, my personal favorite type of diatonic harp. The diatonic harp is a type of harp that has a key stamped on it. They're all in different keys, but they only play within the key that is specified. Now, this is a C harp. Now, on a standard orchestra or piano scale, what that equates to is a G when you're playing cross harp. There are different positions. I'm playing second position which would be cross harp.

Now, if you grab a different harp, say a G harp for example, got to hear my Marine Band, standard Marine Band. That's a G harp but it's actually in the key of D, so you are transposing down, I believe, four whole steps. Check me if I'm wrong, but I know that the G harp is a D and a C harp is actually a G, so keep that in mind when buying these.

Now, as a blues harp player, you want to have a variety of keys available to you. G, A, C, D, B-flat, F are very popular keys to have if you're playing with a band. And if you're going to jam, especially if you're going to just sit in a session, you want to have different harps with you.

Now there's also< what's called a chromatic harp. The chromatic harp actually can operate within the different semitones and different keys, and this is more for playing in a traditional song style not so much in the way that I'm playing. What I'm playing is much more raw and it's very traditional of both Americana and blues in the way that it's played. There's also a split-reed harp that's used a lot in eastern music. Now, this scale -- this version of it is not actually used in eastern music because it's not the right type of harp but they do make them with all the semitones available.

This is what's called a tremolo harp. Now, a tremolo harp as two reeds, one slightly flat and one slightly sharp, and it creates kind of a bizarre effect. Check this out.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING ON THE HOHNER MARINE BAND HARMONICA, TREMOLO HARP]

Now, there's also what's called an orchestral harp, which is a really big harmonica. It's used more when you have a harmonica in an orchestral situation. Around the turn of the century, a lot of composers were using orchestral harmonicas in their compositions, and you can hear that in a lot of those works, although it's not a very common thing to find and it is a very special order item and you really have to invest in order to become an orchestral harmonicist.

Moving on, I want to talk about some of the comb types. Now, one thing a lot of people don't know is traditionally, harmonicas came with wood combs. The problem with the wood comb is that over time it warps. Now, a lot of players, in order to prevent warping and cracking, would actually I guess take the combs out or soak the harmonica in water. I guessing they would take the comb out and soak it to prevent that from happening, but now what can also happen with wood is as you play [PLAYS A NOTE], your spit can get in here and it absorbs it because it's a porous material, it's wood, and it will expand. You'll see a lot of times these will expand past this point. I actually had to get rid of the C harp recently that had that problem. Now, a lot of the new woods, like this harp from Hohner, actually don't do that. They're designed to not swell up as much although over time they still will, and this is really the difference between buying a cheap, tourist trap harp and buying a $20 harmonica.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING ON THE HOHNER MARINE BAND HARMONICA]