Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Greg Heumann interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 46

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Greg Heumann joins me on episode 46.
The focus of this episode is all about gear, as I talk to the founder of BlowsMeAway Productions.
Greg has released an album of his own and uses his knowledge of playing harmonica to understand what is needed to make great harmonica products.The first product in this line was the volume control which later on Jason Ricci asked Greg to develop into the actual mic, which led to the Ultimate Series of mics.
He also hand crafts beautiful custom wood microphones and grills which can include your own initials and designs.
On top of this Greg also makes his very own mic element, which is included in his successful smaller diameter ‘Bulletini’ microphone.

Links:

Gregs website:
http://www.blowsmeaway.com

All About microphones guide:
http://blowsmeaway.com/all%20about%20harmonica%20microphones.pdf

Videos:

Workshop video of creating wooden mic and metal grille:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbYGs58nW2g

Nic Clarke playing wood mic:
https://youtu.be/HBflXFYi1kE

Hermine Deurloo playing Ultimate SM58:
https://youtu.be/zBxEWyGrbmA

Mark Hummel playing the RackIt with Bulletini:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBg3D6xZmUQ

Harpin’ By The Sea festival 2021:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysr5Pep81QU

PT Gazell interview as part of Seydel Overtones:
https://youtu.be/2FdkEYT6ggs

Email:
greg@blowsmeaway.com


Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/

Support the show

SPEAKER_00:

Greg Heumann joins me on episode 46. The focus of this episode is all about gear, as I talk to the founder of Blows Me Away Productions. Greg has released an album of his own and uses his knowledge of playing harmonica to understand what is needed to make great harmonica products. The first product in this line was the volume control, which later on Jason Ritchie asked Greg to develop into the actual mic, which led to the ultimate series of mics. He also hand-crafts beautiful custom wood microphones and grills, which could include your own initials and designs. On top of this, Greg also makes his very own mic element, which is included in his successful small-diameter Bullettini microphone. So listen up to hear what Greg can share of his vast knowledge on amplified harmonica.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, Greg Heumann, and welcome to the podcast. Hello, Neil. We have a little bit of a different approach today as you are the owner of the company Blows Me Away Productions, which produces lots of great harmonica microphones and other equipment. That's me. Fantastic. Yeah. So we'll be getting deeply into talking about gear today. Before we do that, let's talk about your journey to your creation of your company. And you're based out of California.

SPEAKER_02:

That's right. I'm up in the wine country about 70 miles north of San Francisco.

SPEAKER_00:

And have you always been based around there?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I grew up and spent the first 50 years of my life a little further just south of San Francisco in the suburbs of San Francisco.

SPEAKER_00:

You are a harmonica player, yeah? How long have you been playing the harmonica?

SPEAKER_02:

I started in my 40s. I was actually an oboe player when I was young, from the time I was in second grade up through early college. So I was a classical musician. I learned to read music and I got an ear and I learned how to finger a woodwind instrument. But it wasn't really for me and I didn't know it at the time because I was just a kid. I just knew I was supposed to be an oboe player, except I had an awful lot of clues I realized much later in my musical career that what I really was drawn to was blues and jazz. So I don't know, 20, 25 years ago, I was working in an office, but I was always singing and whistling. And somebody gave me a C harmonica and the John Gindic book on how to play country and blues harmonica. I got hooked really, really fast. And that's what started me with harmonica.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. Yeah. So you had this John Gindic book, as you say there. And

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. That led me to, you know, I started playing in the car to the cassette tape that came with that Gindic instructional material. And then I would listen to the radio and try and play the C harmonica. I had no idea why it seemed to be okay with some songs and not others. And somehow or other, I don't recall how, I learned about these harmonica masterclass three-day sessions that Dave Barrett was putting on. So I signed up for one and I was just blown away at the whole experience and how much I learned and how generous with their knowledge. So many people were. So I started taking private lessons from Dave. He's about an hour and a half drive south of me when I was living there in San Mateo. And I went every other week for a couple hours for close to five years. Marvelous teacher and learned a lot.

SPEAKER_00:

Was this before Dave had his online teaching website?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. Bluesharmonica.com came after. But it was Dave who helped me figure out what my first product would be. I was kind of casting about for something to build and I had a need on my own microphone. Feedback was always a problem and I needed a volume control and I asked him if there was such a thing. And he showed me that old Switchcraft volume control that had been discontinued already for 20 years and they were unobtainium, super expensive collector's items that really didn't work that well. And I thought to myself, I could make something like that. And I prototyped it and Dave then became my first customer and he sold those vintage volume controls. I still sell that product today. I haven't raised the So

SPEAKER_00:

just going back a little bit more. So like you said, you had a day job in an office. I think you've got a degree in computer science. So you're working in computing side of things, were you? That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

supplemental income. But mostly it just was because I could, once I had produced something that I knew worked for me, I figured other people would be interested. And Dave concurred. So I just started to make this little volume control. I didn't think I was going to start a business. But in order to make that volume control, I had to buy a lathe. My father was a hobbyist machinist. I had no idea. He told me, you can get lathes relatively inexpensively these days. And so I would I was able to buy a lathe for my own shop and start making volume controls. That led me to making the low impedance volume control. And again, my dad, he's no longer with us, by the way, but he was wonderfully inspirational and creative and gave me the skills I needed to get started. He said, you know, you can turn wood with that thing. So I started to make the wood microphones and I started to become a

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. I

SPEAKER_02:

started to use this XLR volume control. If you ever saw his live performances, he was using an RE-10 microphone and my volume control and a Samson wireless transmitter plugged into the end of that. It was like swinging a baseball bat around. And with all of those XLR connections in line, it got wobbly and unreliable. So he had tape all over it and everything. And he contacted me and said, can't you build that volume control into the mic? And at first I told him no several times but ultimately i engineered the ultimate series mics which allow me to build a volume control in and replace the barrel of sm57 or sm58 or 545 from sure and he used those for several years

SPEAKER_00:

so you started doing the harmonic equipment as a sideline to your job i take it then at some point you were making enough money to be able to give up the day job and commit yourself full-time to this

SPEAKER_02:

well to be honest i was fortunate to be working at a company around the dot-com boom. They went public and I did have a little bit of stock options. And so I had a little bit of a nest egg. And so I was able to stop working for a while and kind of do my own thing. It took a couple of years before it was making any sort of reasonable money. It took two to three years to get to that point. But with the addition of more products and people responding and liking them and the advent of the internet that let me sell them and the continued expansion of the product line, the revenue kept going up. And so I was able to stay out of the tech industry and just do this wonderful job working out of my garage. So I'm a really, really lucky guy.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, definitely living the dream there, Greg. So you've started Blows Me Away Productions, I think, in 2004. That's

SPEAKER_02:

right. I actually look back on it. And to some extent, I see it as a series of happy accidents in developing new products. But they were all developed as ways to leverage my skill set and with my understanding of what the harmonica community wanted in support of playing amplified and so I you know I certainly made some reasonably good guesses about

SPEAKER_00:

that picking up on the comment you made there that you picked up a lot of these skills from your dad who you know had a lot of these practical skills like a lot of the older guys that I'm the same with my dad yeah he seems to know how to do all these things plumbing and things I have no idea how to do so I always turn to him so you do all these things yourself now don't you I I think, like you say, you bought a lathe, you know, you turn the wood yourself. And so these skills you didn't have before at all, you know, fixing, creating a volume pot and then cutting up a microphone and attaching it, you know, are these things you just learned yourself as you went along?

SPEAKER_02:

So from very young, my dad was always, he always had some sort of hobby in the shop, including electronics. If you're of a certain age, you'll remember a brand called Heath Kit. They marketed kits with components and circuit boards and cases and stuff, and you could build your own radio or some sort of test instrument. I think I was probably 10 years old when he started buying me a Heathkit here and there, and I built projects, and it taught me to solder, and it taught me a little bit about electronics. Certainly the technical skills, both operating the lathe and the milling machine, and some of the electronics I learned from him. And of course, as you come up with new challenges, you figure out how to do them. So a It was in my career, even though I had a degree in computer science, my jobs were always in sales and marketing liaison between technical people and sales and marketing people. And so I learned a lot of marketing skills, communication and web design and so forth. My website, if you look at it, looks like it was designed in the year 2004. And that's because it was and my skills haven't advanced from there. But it's easy to maintain. And it's all static HTML. So the skills have come from throughout my career the value of customer support and customer service

SPEAKER_00:

yeah and i've certainly heard good things about your customer service that's a real plus for you that you know people are always really happy that you you know you're good communication and you really help them out with what they want and obviously what you do which we'll get into is it can be heavily customized so just talking a bit more about your knowledge of the harmonica i think um you know as a harmonica players you know we like to think that the people we're buying stuff from know about the harmonica which you do yeah you've got an album out you know you're a good player you know Got this album out with your band called Blue State, called Duracool. What about that album? When did that come out? And I think you also play saxophone and sing as well, don't you? That's right.

SPEAKER_02:

I started to sing because when I first started performing out, my only outlet was jams. And if you weren't the guy who was calling the song, you didn't have a lot of control over what key it was in or what kind of groove it had or how long a solo you might get. So I started to sing at a self-defense so I could play more harmonica. And it was after I started the harmonica that I recalled one day in the high school band room, I had picked up a saxophone. And because I had really a strong lip from playing oboe, I was able to get a nice tone out of the sax. The fingering is very similar as well. And I had always been kind of curious about that. So I went and rented a saxophone and figured out I could play it well enough to play along with some blues, incorporated that into the band work. The album came out about 10 years ago now. It's been that long. I think my harmonica playing actually has improved since then and my understanding of tone and everything else. But I'm also very proud of that album. I think we did a good job.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and great to get it out there and get something down on the record, isn't it? So at this point, obviously, like you say, you started playing harmonica in your sort of 40s. So is amplification something you're always really interested in? Like you said, you wanted to solve some of the problems you had and that's what led you to looking at some of the products that you've released.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. I mean, I went through everything that everybody else goes to, we almost all start at jams. So the first thing I couldn't understand is why I couldn't hear myself. I had this amplifier, I had a couple of different amps, and they were loud as heck in my living room. And then I would go to the jam and I couldn't hear myself. I would turn the amp up and turn the amp up, and then I was fighting feedback all the time. I now understand much more what was going on then. And that is that that's a much, much louder environment than your living room. And you need a lot more power to hear yourself on stage. There are other ways to hear yourself on stage too, like having you in the monitors, but that's fraught with other problems. And at most jams, there's nobody running a soundboard. So it's really not a great solution. Anyway, it was again, sort of solving my own problems first that led me to my first products. One of the things I worked on then, what if I could hear how I sounded out front from the stage? I worked on any monitor. At that time, it wasn't wireless. Trying to see if I could develop a system where I put a microphone out where the audience was and fed it into a little amplifier and into headphones. I actually had all that working, but I came to the conclusion that it was just too complicated to set up to be a good product. And the other thing that anybody who's tried this will know, if you put anything in your ear when you're playing harmonica, all you're going to hear is the harmonica. At least it becomes significantly louder. And I'm very sensitive to how loud i am in the mix with the band i don't want to be overpowering i want to be heard and i want to be at the appropriate level for the song in the mix and once you put something in your ear unless you have a monitor mix engineer running the monitors at the side of the stage who can really really set up the mix in your in your monitors they are not a good solution to this problem either you just need enough amplification to hear yourself in the first place

SPEAKER_00:

so again you know he picks up on these things that practically you wanted to solve yourself. That led you, as we've touched on already, to you setting up the Blow Me Away Productions, a company which you've had since 2004. So we've talked a little bit about the vintage volume control, which is the first one you've done, which is basically the ability to add a volume control to a dynamic mic, wasn't it? Were they first for the Shure SM57?

SPEAKER_02:

No, the first ones had the vintage style screw-on connector that so many vintage microphones have. So they were for high impedance mics that had that screw on connector and of course it was pretty easily adaptable to quarter inch connectors then the the low impedance control came a year later that has the three pin snap in xlr connectors we see on all the modern vocal microphones

SPEAKER_00:

and a lot of people have an understanding that adding volume controls to microphones removes some of the output but that isn't the case is it if you do it right there's no free lunch but

SPEAKER_02:

the advantages outweigh the disadvantages disadvantages significantly. And if the volume control is properly matched to the microphone, the loss is minimal. So yes, it will steal a tiny bit of output. It turns out to be much more of an issue with crystal and ceramic mics than with mics that have dynamic elements or Shure CRCM elements. The higher impedance the element, the more sensitive the microphone will be to what it's connected to. And a volume control adds a bit of a load. So So I actually offered my control in two different impedances, one set up for dynamic mics and one set up for crystal mics. And in that way, the impact on tone and output is truly minimal. And of course, the advantages are huge. There are so many nice things about having a volume control, one of which is if feedback happens on stage, you turn your volume control down. Of course, everybody looks at you because you're the harmonica player, and they think that it's you, and you point to your volume control Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

absolutely. And like you say, a lot of advantages to having volume control. Obviously, you can turn yourself up in a solo. So, you know, you're coming through a bit stronger in the solo, different keys, got different levels of sound and the lower keys don't cut through the same. So be able to turn those up a little bit as well. So yeah, lots of advantages to having a volume controller.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And not to mention that the conditions change with the tune you're playing and with, you know, how big the audience is. Usually when a band is playing a hard rock and number, The volume gets a lot louder. Everybody's up and dancing. Their bodies are absorbing some of the sound and it can be louder. And then you play a slow ballad and more people sit down and the room gets quieter and everything is suddenly more audible. And you might want to be able to turn down a little bit for that. Another reason is simply that you're trying to get everything you can out of your amp. So you haven't turned up to the hairy edge of feedback. But, you know, mid tune, you want to go back to your amplifier and make an adjustment to one of the knobs. Well, if you get within a foot of it, it's going to feed back. But all you have to do if you have a volume control is turn it down first, go back, make your adjustment, walk back out to your performance position, turn your mic back up. No feedback. Works out really well.

SPEAKER_00:

And I imagine the volume controllers are, you know, not the most expensive things to buy as well. So quite an easy thing to add to your arsenal.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes,

SPEAKER_00:

absolutely.

SPEAKER_02:

I find throughout our hobby or profession. There's a little bit of expertise and a huge amount of mythology. And one of the pieces of mythology is that, oh, volume controls rob your tone. Well, volume controls used to rob your tone when the only volume control on the market was the Switchcraft control, which was 100 kilohm pot and people were using it with crystal mics. This is 40, 50 years ago. And so very early harmonica players would complain about that. And that complaint carries for to this day, people pass it down without having actually experienced and understood it themselves.

SPEAKER_00:

So yeah, so we'll move on now to talking about your custom wood microphone. If people haven't seen these, these things are a real thing of beauty, yeah? You basically take different types of wood, you treat it, we'll get into that now, and they come out with beautiful stripes on them, different colors, and they're light, and they just look so beautiful. Let's talk about those and how you came up with the idea of making wooden shells for microphones. You know, obviously they're usually We use the traditional metal shells. You know, what made you think about using wood initially?

SPEAKER_02:

Probably a few things. For one, there was a fellow named Fritz Hassenpush, Fritz the harp mic man, who was making wood microphones for harp before me. Wonderful, wonderful guy. Unfortunately, he died fairly young, but not before I got to know him. His mics were not kind of the same precision level that mine are. He used a wood lathe. I use a metal lathe, which allows me to be a lot more precise. But he did neat work. So that was part of the inspiration. And it was partly this notion of having bought a lathe and my dad reminding me that, you know, you can turn wood with that thing. And so I gave it a go. And at first I was, I just made the shell and I made it to fit a JT30 grill because I had no idea how to make a grill. And then I tried to make some wood grills. I did that for a while. They turned out to be a little bit fragile. And so I started making my own grills because the JT30 grill, if you remember, it's kind of lumpy and bumpy and it has those two ears on the side for the screws that hold it to the JT30 shell. Well, I didn't want those and I had picked this up from Fritz. He was doing the same thing. You have to grind those off. Once you do, you expose cast metal with bubbles and the plating is not there. And so they don't look very good. And then you have to paint them. And at that time, we didn't have these epoxy paints that you could buy. in a spray can so the paint didn't hold up very well to the rigors of banging a harmonica on the microphone grill. So I started making my own grills and it just kept evolving. I had a customer who said, can't you put a volume control in one? And I was intimidated by trying because it takes a lot of skill and I tried and tried and made that happen. But all of those aspects, I've made over 800 wood mic between then and now, starting in 2006. I just keep getting better at it. It's one of the things that I really enjoy about it. There's kind of this process in my brain that is constantly running, going, I wonder if I could make this faster. I wonder if I could make this more accurately. I wonder if I could make it more efficiently, more precise, whatever. And so I'll try little tiny changes, but they all add up. And so I get better and better at it all the time. And the result is these wood mics, they're wonderfully lightweight, which helps. The wood tends to be a They warm up people's tone a little, which almost everybody appreciates. And they're beautiful to look at. And so I call them playable art.

UNKNOWN:

¶¶

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and the wood that you use, because I think you use different sorts of wood and try and get this rare wood from around the world. Do you know what the wood's going to look like before you do it? Or, you know, obviously you use the same wood sometimes, so you do. Or, you know, how did you come to, you know, mating these really, you know, shells out of this wood? That just really came from trying it.

SPEAKER_02:

There's a retail chain in our area called Woodcraft. So I was actually able to get a wood from Woodcraft. able to go into that store and see different woods I'd never seen before. So I bought a lot of my first pieces of wood at the woodcraft store and I would try turning them. I knew I wanted to use hardwoods because the mic had to be durable and it was not long before I could really begin to predict that the straight grain, even if there's color contrast in it, on the side of the mic, which has this parabolic shape, it creates these beautiful concentric elliptic sections of grain and they're really pretty. That really came about from just doing it and seeing and I started keeping my eye out for exotic wood.

SPEAKER_00:

So you don't do anything else to the wood except turn it and it comes out naturally like you don't colour it yourself at all?

SPEAKER_02:

I really don't like staining. I have done it. But when you stain wood, the stain only penetrates a very, very short distance. So you can't stain before you turn. You have to stain afterwards. I just, I love the natural wood so much. You know, I had somebody who wanted a blue stripe. So I turned a piece of wood I had laminated out of dark wood on the sides and a very light, like ash, wood in the center. And now you go to try and stain that. And the problem is now that the stain wants to bleed from the light wood to the dark wood. It's hard to control the edge. So I don't do that too much. I have experimented with different materials and compositions of multiple materials and laminating multiple colors of wood together. And I also I also found a supplier of wood that in the industry is called diamond wood or spectra ply. There are several names for it. These are thin sheets. They're three sixteenths of an inch, usually sheets of wood like birch that are dyed under pressure. So the dye goes all the way through the three sixteenths sheet and then they're laminated together in big blocks and they sell that laminated wood with multiple color stripes in it. You can see these on my website on blowsmeaway.com those do that parabola thing just beautifully but unlike staining at home because of the process they use the color goes all the way through so even though you're starting with a rectangular block you can keep shaving more and more wood off of it until you've turned it into the shape of a microphone shell and it still has all of the color in every layer

SPEAKER_00:

so as you said people can look at your website and they can choose when they're ordering one of your mics what they want it to look like and it will look more or less like the pictures on your on your website Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

there's, you know, every species is different and every piece of wood is different. Very, very popular wood that I use is Cocobolo, which is a beautiful, darker rosewood, comes from Latin America, Central America, Mexico. So there are actually multiple species and they all look a little bit different, but they all have the nice characteristic of contrasting grain colors that range from dark brown to light brown to purple to orange to yellow. And they can be really really spectacular. I also, whenever, you know, every once in a while, I just see a really nice looking piece of wood that I've never even heard of before. But if I think it's going to make a nice microphone, I'll buy it. The one time every year that I make mics that somebody didn't actually order is when I'm going to the spa convention and I'm going to show some mics there so people can see what can be done and see what these mics look. So that's often when I'll try a wood I've never tried before. And a lot of times I discover, gee, this is a beautiful of wood and I'll try to get more of it and so it's happened that way too and over the years I've developed a lot of sources the woodcraft store near me doesn't exist anymore there is one that's 100 miles away I go to every once in a while but I have a lot more online sources for various woods and then sometimes I get wood that I just never get again.

SPEAKER_00:

It must be so satisfying working with wood like that when you work with something from the earth like that it's so satisfying isn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

It really is I'll tell you also one other source that speaking of satisfying that I just love is every once in a while, a customer will say, hey, I have some wood that's special to me. Can I have you make a microphone from it? I remember one got some of this wood from his grandmother's house that they were remodeling and he salvaged some wood from it and he wanted a microphone made from it. Another guy had a pecan tree fall down in his backyard. Huge thing. And he wanted to remember the tree and he found some nice section of wood in it and he cut it out with a chainsaw and he sent it to me so I'm happy to make microphones for people out of wood that's special to them too.

SPEAKER_00:

Superb and there's a great video which Dave Barrett made of you in your workshop and I'll put the link onto the podcast page and it shows you on your lathe and also making the metal grills which we'll get onto in a second but you've got a lot of kit now in that workshop of yours a big lathe and you've got this special cutting metal cutting machine for the grills.

SPEAKER_02:

Right a milling machine actually I have two lathes and two milling machines now.

SPEAKER_00:

So let's get into the grills now you touched on that a little bit earlier on another the really cool thing about your wood mics is that you can make custom shapes in the grill of the of the microphone so you can have say your initials put in there or some shape that's special to you i saw a cool one of a shark fin on your website so you've got this machine which does all this kind of intricate cutting which means you can pretty much put whatever shape or lettering or whatever onto the grills of the microphone yeah

SPEAKER_02:

yes uh within limits the the tool bit that does the cutting is an eighth inch and so it's very low resolution. But within the constraints of that, I'm able to personalize grills for people. The way I sell my mics, you know, there's a base price, which gets you a fully functional, great sounding wood microphone with an aluminum grill, but you can add features. And so I have some canned designs, various grill designs that you can choose from for one price, or I can develop a custom design with you for a little more money. That's done with the advent of a CNC milling machine. When I first started, all I did was straight slots, and then I added a device. This is for machinists out there. I had a rotary table, which allows you to spin work, and therefore you can make a curved cut in a surface. But I wanted to do people's initials. And you can't do like an S very easily on a rotary table. Fortunately, my dad had his old milling machine. He was still alive at that time and he was getting too short or it was getting too tall for him to reach up to the top of it, which you need to do when you change tools. And so he bought a smaller milling machine and he gave me that first one, which had been converted to be operable by CNC. So I began to teach myself how to use that. And that allowed me to do these personalized grills with people's initials.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, superb. And they look great. And you've got some stories of some of the interesting, you know, some of the more interesting grills you've had to make. I read one about having a sort of sergeant.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, yeah, yeah. He was a police sergeant in New York. He had retired after 40 some odd years, and he wanted a police themed microphone. It was his idea. He wanted the sergeant stripes on the grill plus his initials. And there was also this, you know, the blue and black color scheme of the police. There were blue and black inlays in the side of the shell which i did for him and it's always really rewarding to be able to deliver something that somebody dreamed up and really wanted that way so there have been some interesting grill designs

SPEAKER_00:

great that is so customizable you know with the wood and the grills and you know cool to have your name you know your initials on on the grill i know you had quite a long waiting list previously um i think you managed to catch up a little bit during the pandemic didn't you so um is a waiting list uh reduced a little bit

SPEAKER_02:

it hasn't changed much it's still running about five to six months from the time you put a deposit down on a mic to the time i build it and you get it that is just to be clear that's only for wood mics you know i have four different lines of microphones and it's only the wood mics that have that kind of delay everything else is pretty much off the shelf

SPEAKER_00:

okay so when you started making the wood mics i think you said in 2006 so we'll get into talking about elements now so were you putting in old elements at that point we'll get into the bulletini now so um were you putting in old elements initially in Yes, you're

SPEAKER_02:

exactly right. For the first many, many years, I designed these mics to accommodate kind of the standard Shure CR, CM elements. And I collected those and supplied them, you know, black label CR up to modern CM elements. And I found a few other elements that would fit. Turned out a brush crystal would fit in there, although the mics are a little bit too small to house an A-static or a Shure crystal. crystal and still have room for a reasonable thickness of gasket to give it good shock absorbing. And you want good shock absorbing on a crystal or it's going to break the first time you drop it. But yes, those wood mics to this day are still available with a choice available.

SPEAKER_00:

You came out with a Bulatini microphone, I think in 2015. So that is a smaller microphone, so it fits better into the hand. And as you said earlier on, it's something that is available straight away. So people don't have to wait for the beautiful customization you're No, I actually

SPEAKER_02:

developed it first and started offering it in my wood mics. It just happened to be a side effect of the nature of that element, which is quite a bit smaller in diameter, that it would fit in this shell that I use for the bulletini. None of the other elements we've been talking about would fit in a bulletini shell. Earlier, I referred to happy accidents. I think that was one of them is that this element lent itself to instance. in this considerably smaller diameter shell. And that's what became the Bellatini.

SPEAKER_00:

So, you know, the elements is this kind of holy grail, you know, how do you get these good elements? And, you know, you go back to the sort of the black label ones, which are the oldest, and then the white labels, and then it goes through the history of the different elements through the time. So the older ones are kind of the sought after ones. You know, how the heck did you come up with a new element? I mean, you know, talking about developing these skills you have for your business, you know, creating an element for a harmonica microphone, how did you dream that one up?

SPEAKER_02:

luck. And I just, I'm an experimenter. So I was always trying, lots of people would ask, can you fit an SN57 or a 545 element in one of your wood mics? And the answer was always no. Those are too long and you can actually disassemble them and take the element out of its cartridge in the case of an SN57 or 545. But at that point, it becomes much more susceptible to handling noise and much more susceptible to damage. They're actually pretty fragile things until they are protected and encased like they are in what they call the capsule for a 57. So I was experimenting and had a couple of different vocal mics sitting around that were in production. I haven't disclosed and won't where I get the element that I start with for the human element. But when I played it, I heard something I liked. Its output wasn't right. First of all, it was low impedance, so I had to add an impedance matching transformer then its output was actually too strong and I did a little more electronics work to get the output level right and I actually make some mechanical modifications to it too which affect its bass response and it turned out that the result was this element that had really nice bass boost and rolled off the highs naturally that makes it good for harmonica players for the same reason that vintage elements do so I want to back up and talk about vintage elements for a second. If you are an engineer, your goal is always to improve the specifications of a product or reduce its cost or both. And if we look at the way the first, you know, black label CR element was made compared to the last CMs, there were a lot of small improvements in the materials used and the production used that increased the frequency response of the element. That was considered a good thing from an engineering perspective. They increased even It's sound pressure level tolerance. That is, it could tolerate louder sounds without distorting. That was seen as a good thing from an engineering perspective. And those things actually work against us as harmonica players. We are all, especially when we're new, plagued by harshness. So beginners and intermediate players frequently are turning the treble all the way down and they're turning the bass all the way up so that they can get that bigger, fatter sound they've been hearing little by Walter or Kim Wilson or whoever is their favorite harp player get from a microphone and an amplifier. the old elements make that easier on us, but the old elements are getting rare and expensive. The modern elements make it much more difficult. They have extended high frequency response. They don't distort as much when you cup them. So they're not such good candidates. Well, the human element kind of gave back these vintage tendencies of better base response, less treble, and still would break up relatively nicely when cupped hard. That made it function much more like a vintage element and much less like a modern day element and yet it was something i could actually produce in volume i've sold many many thousands of those which makes collecting vintage ones to do the same thing impossible you can't offer a mic with an element that you can't depend upon the supply of right so it worked out really well

SPEAKER_00:

that's a question i think a lot of people will have you know you know people think these these old elements for you know the holy grail of the black label elements but obviously bulletin has done really well it's It's got great sound. And, you know, so, you know, how does your element compare to the older elements? You're happy that it stacks up against them.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I actually have a little flow chart. I can send people that, you know, how to choose an element. The human element has more bass than any of the others. That's just hands down. It has a nice bass. That means that it helps just about any small amplifier. And if you've had much experience with harmonica amplification, you know that small amps are generally pretty crunchy anyway. So they don't necessarily need a boost in crunchiness or distortion. They just need a boost in bass, and that boost in bass actually does help generate a little more distortion. So for almost any player, if you're playing through a small amp, the human element is as good as anything out there, I think. If you play through a large amp, then you need a little more help with crunch. Large amps are a little cleaner because they play in their clean range until you're using a The human element does not have quite as much crunch as a good black label CR. It has about as much crunch as a single impedance CM, which was a later generation Shure element. So if you're a really good player, I'm going to come back to why that matters. And you really like crunch, you might prefer something like the black CR. If you're an average player, you're probably going to find the human element will make you sound better. And the difference between those two players is cupping skill. We have all been told that to get good tone amplified you have to cup the microphone but that's kind of the end of the sentence and we don't explain what that really means and it turns out that really good cupping skill is elusive it takes years to develop but when you have it it has this wonderful effect of naturally rolling off the highs so you don't sound as harsh as the next guy using the same element would and actually increasing the bass a little bit so a pro with really good cupping skill can take even a modern microphone and make it sound somewhat warm and mellow through a big amplifier. And a beginner or an intermediate player absolutely can. It really depends on your own level as a player and your experience with how well you can cup a microphone that determines whether you're going to like a crystal or a black CR or the human element better through a big amp.

SPEAKER_00:

Like you say, one of the things of these elements that they're becoming harder to come by, you know, they're expensive and they're underlying Yeah, particularly if you're buying one off eBay, you don't know what you're getting. So to be able to come to you and get, you know, an element, you're very confident and the bulletini gets a lot of great reviews. People can just look on YouTube and find lots of people giving very positive reviews of the bulletini. So the bulletini is entirely the human element, is it? Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

Ella and I make gaskets to fit it to other shells. So if people want to retrofit a JT30 or a sure green bullet or a Turner microphone or a T3, there's a few other shells that the human element is available to install in those as well. But nothing is combined that element in such a wonderful, small, easy to hold lightweight shell than the bulletini. And that's why it has been so successful. I think it's really gratifying to me and kind of amazing every time it happens you see people ask about gear on facebook groups whether it's harmonica gear harp tone junkies or harp players or modern blues harmonica there's dozens and dozens of harmonica related groups on facebook and whenever somebody asks about a microphone there'll be six or eight people who will respond unless somebody asks about the bulletini at which point there's almost always 50 or more responses and almost all of them are very positive

UNKNOWN:

uh

SPEAKER_02:

Let me just add one thing, because since you mentioned the green bullet, people need to know. When I started playing, somebody said, well, you've got to get a green bullet. That's what harmonica players use. I didn't know that there had been five generations of elements in Shure green bullet microphones. If you buy a modern green bullet, you're getting a dynamic element. If you buy a 520D, you're getting a dual impedance CM, which of all of the generations of CM and CR elements is the harshest and thinnest tone. As you go back to the plain model 520, no letters after it, green bullet, now you get into the single impedance CM and even before that CR elements. And those are outstanding. But as you come forward in time, not all green bullets are created equal. People need to know that.

SPEAKER_00:

No, absolutely. And I think it's well established that the modern green bullets aren't that great. Okay, so we'll move on to some of your other products now. So let's talk a little bit about your ultimate series of mics. So we touched on these a little bit so these are basically Shure SM57 and Shure SM58 which you've chopped down to make them shorter and lighter and easier to handle and also put a volume control on yeah exactly

SPEAKER_02:

right if you take one of those mics stock it sticks out a long way from your grip and the weight of the cable then is weight on this long lever and it tends to cause hand fatigue they're just heavy if you add an inline volume control to that it gets even longer and they get even less comfortable to hold here's another little fact that one of my, I think it was Deke Harp pointed this out to me. What'll happen is you'll tend to point your head down so that the cable falls more vertically from the microphone. And when you do that, it helps close off your throat and your tone suffers. What we want is for our throat to be really open. So we want to be looking straight out at the crowd and we want to be holding that mic straight out in front of us. It becomes very uncomfortable to do that. So the ultimate mics shorten and lighten the shell and build the volume control So you're really comparing it to an SM57 plus an inline XLR volume control. They make it a lot lighter, a lot shorter, and more comfortable to play. The other thing they do is give you a choice of connector and impedance. As you know, an SM58 or an SM57 are from Shure. They have an XLR connector in their low impedance mics. And that means people get confused when it comes to hooking them up to their amplifier or effects pedal. Many people don't know that they're supposed to use an XLR to XLR cable and an impedance matching transformer and they go out and buy an XLR to quarter inch cable and they don't realize that they have now just cut their microphone's signal in half. But when you order an ultimate mic, you talk to me, I make sure you get what you want and need and the gear to go with it to hook it up. You can also order it in high impedance configuration so that if you want to be able to connect to an amp or a pedal and you don't want to have to put an impedance matching transformer in line with the cable, you can directly cable the mic to a high impedance device.

SPEAKER_00:

So the SM57 is a good mic that can be used into a tube amplifier. Paul Butterfield played the SM545, which is very similar to an SM57. So you get a nice hard driving tone from an SM57. And then for the SM58, that's a nice clean one, maybe more an acoustic sound or maybe using with chromatic. I know Hermione Derlo, who's been on the podcast, she plays one of those.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_00:

So yeah, you've got those two options with a sort of more clean 58 and the dirty 57, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. The 57, I like to say, has the widest tonal range in the right hands of any microphone. It has a beautiful, warm, clean sound in free air, and it dirties up quite nicely when you cup it. But I say in the right hands because cupping it at its diameter and its comfort is harder to do. And if you don't cup it well, you can get harsh tone from it. But properly controlled, you can get a really wide range from quite dirty to quite clean with it.

SPEAKER_00:

And hence the Bulletizer product from you, probably worth mentioning at

SPEAKER_02:

this point. Right. The Bulletizer changes the diameter you're holding the mic by and makes it a little easier to hold and cup. Also, the 58, because of the ball end, is actually harder to cup, almost impossible to cup into an airtight situation. And so you can't get it to go as dark or as distorted but also because of that it has a wider directional pattern which makes it easier to sing through uh so it's a wonderful mic when you want to kind of stay clean hook it up straight to the pa sing through it play acoustic harmonica through it and if you're like me and you close your eyes sometimes when you sing if you fall off axis a little bit it won't punish you as much as a 57 where you need to be dead center in front of it while you're singing or the output's going to fall really quick

SPEAKER_00:

so two great options there when the And then Toots Thielmans, no less, used one of your, well, your Ultimate 58s, didn't he, later in his career?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, he does. He did. And also Robert Bonfilio is using an Ultimate 58 sometimes as well, and he really likes it. So that microphone crosses a lot of genres of music.

SPEAKER_00:

And so another of your products, one which I'm really eyeing up at the moment, Greg, is your racket, which is its ability to put your harmonica onto a rack, and if you're playing another instrument like guitar, and it's got a bulletini microphone attached to it so that you getting a nice, hard-driven sound from playing on a rack, which, you know, usually on a rack, obviously, you're getting an acoustic sound. So it's got a cylinder cup, which encases the sound and mimics the sound of cupping the microphone, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

Right. It cups the microphone for you. So I call it a hands-free blues harp mic, and it can give you a really fat sound. That's a product that I saw the need for for a long time, and I had some really good rack players asking me to make something. The only solution available was this mic called the Stranad, which is now called the Tsunami. And it just wasn't delivering the kind of tone that people wanted. Unfortunately, what I knew needed to be built didn't match up with my skill set as a machinist. It would be a very difficult thing to machine the way I thought it should be built and shaped and out of the materials that needed to be made. But I was fortunate to hook up with a woman in Colorado. Her name is Michelle Lafrie. She started to do 3D printing work. She actually She started even before that with just thermosetting plastic and we started talking to each other and she consulted me about elements and so forth. So when I saw what she was doing, I started to give her feedback and we figured out how we could incorporate the Bulatini and really design the racket that is now 3D printed in the shape that we wanted and incorporate the Bulatini as a microphone for it. And the result was this thing that cups the harmonica much more effectively than anything else. except a few people's homebrew microphones. If you ever saw Paul Osher or Deke Harp, they had these homebrew contraptions strapped to their racks with PVC pipe and duct tape and bailing wire and God knows what else. And they were getting big fat tone because those contraptions were, in fact, cupping the harmonica really well. But those designs weren't really suitable to production. It was 3D printing that made the racket possible. And it has been very successful since. People are discovering it and getting great, great tone out of it. And the musicians I really love are the ones who come back and tell me, now I can play this whole class of music I've been wanting to play in a rack, but couldn't because I couldn't get that tone.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and the cool thing, you know, your website's got samples of a lot of your equipment being played by different players. And there's a nice video of Mark Hummel playing with a rack.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

so

SPEAKER_00:

people can go and check that out as well the racket looks a very interesting product as you say and it's got some um it's got some scope to get different sounds you know it's got a sort of three levels of sound isn't it a huge a fat and a bright sound so you can vary the tone a little bit on that which is interesting that's right yeah Something else that you sell, I don't think you manufacture yourself, is wireless systems for harmonicas that people can wander around without having to be plugged into the amplifier directly with a wire. So that's something you source, you know, your experience setting it up basically so people can come to you for that.

SPEAKER_02:

You're exactly right. I'm a Samson dealer. I chose that system several years ago because I liked the way it performed. And I did do it as a service to my customers. I had so many customers asking me about wireless. I wanted a system that I knew and understood. understood so that i could set it up properly for them so that i could make various adapters to work with it to connect to various kinds of harmonica microphones but yeah you can't really make much money on something that's sold also online at amazon or guitar center i offer it as a convenience but they're very good systems

SPEAKER_00:

yeah well again it's good to be able to come to somebody who's done that done that background work isn't it and another thing which i think you were doing maybe not so easy to come by now is the kalamazoo amps i think it's one of the earliest things you did and these are great amps made by Gibson wasn't it which we're very sought after are you still selling those

SPEAKER_02:

right those are those were I started doing that in about 2006 they were made by the parent company of Gibson called Chicago Musical Instrument Company it was a sister company to Gibson they are wonderful little harmonica amps for many years I was buying them used and beat up off of eBay and reconditioning them and restoring the electricals to factory spec and reselling them And I had a long waiting list of people who wanted them. But I don't know if you've looked in the last year, year and a half, maybe two, the prices have just skyrocketed and it no longer makes sense for me to do that. So I don't sort of sell them proactively to my waiting list, but I do still rebuild them for customers. If a customer finds their own Kalamazoo Model 1 or Model 2, they can send it to me and I will rebuild it. And they know they have the experience of somebody who knows what they're supposed to sound like and what goes wrong with them and how to make them just right.

SPEAKER_00:

You know the list of players who you know sort of endorse your products is as long as your arm yeah you know a lot of people have had on the podcast I'm proud to say you know Charlie Musselwhite and Kim Wilson we've mentioned too and Paul Lamb here in the UK so Rick Estrin the list goes on and on you know the endorsers and people who really love your product so fantastically well done Greg in what you've managed to do and get out there and you know you've made a real splash so another thing you've done which is really useful and you've touched on it a lot through the conversation we've had is all the different sort of techniques and all the sort of technicalities behind you know the microphones and amps and how you get a good tone and it's a guide that you've written called all about microphones which is available on your website again i'll put a link on the front of the podcast page so people can dig that out but i read i read through it the other day and it's got tons of great information on there you know you're talking about all the you know the harmonics and the different tones of the cupping they're different all about the different mic elements and you know how to control feedback all sorts of all sorts of things in there it's a really good read and all that detail that you know the harmonica players really crave is in there isn't it i hope so it's you know i just wanted to

SPEAKER_02:

try and encapsulate a lot of what i have learned over all of these years being so focused on where does tone come from and then answering a lot of the questions that people who confront amplification for the first time haven't gotten the answers to yet i always find customers are almost apologetic like i'm really sorry i feel really dumb to ask this question and i want people to understand you shouldn't feel that way nobody they didn't teach amplified harmonica in high school they didn't teach high impedance versus low impedance or dynamic versus crystal these are all things that you don't learn until you have an interest in learning them but i have learned them and i'm happy to share that and i've shared a lot of it in that document

SPEAKER_00:

it's a great guide you know i feel i'm pretty knowledgeable but it was a great read for me you know it refreshed a lot but it also definitely gave me insight into some things i didn't know as well so i definitely recommend people ever read through it it's

SPEAKER_02:

uh

SPEAKER_00:

you know, it's kind of like 28 pages long or something. It's not so long, you know, it's kind of readable in one sitting and it's very good. Yeah. Thank you. On this topic, Greg, a question I ask each time is my 10 minute question. So for you, I'm going to ask you the 10 minute question from a microphone amplification angle. So if you were to practice for 10 minutes on your amplification skills, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_02:

I would spend those 10 minutes learning how to cup more airtight. When we hear about cupping a microphone, we think about creating a seal between the back of the harmonica and the front of the microphone with our hands. And it turns out that it's really, that's part of it. But whether we're playing amplified or acoustic, what we have to come to learn is that a great deal of sound pressure escapes out the front of the harmonica too. If you're not blocking those escape paths for sound pressure until you can get kind of a full or near full mute, you're not getting a full cup. And the problem here is that if you're not getting a full one, you don't know how far away from a full one you are. And a lot of the golden beauty in amplified playing is somewhere between like 97% and 99% airtight. You can always open up more. I have a harmonica in my hand. I don't know how well you'll hear this, but I just want to say, here's how most people sound when they open and close their hands. But when you get a really good airtight cup and you seal off both the rear and the front of the harp, I hope that difference comes through. It

SPEAKER_00:

does, yeah, it

SPEAKER_02:

does. Playing acoustically even, learning to really cup the harmonica well will give you a much deeper wah. And the trick is sealing off all of the escape paths for sound pressure. It means putting a lot of harmonica in your mouth, using tongue blocking if you can, and then sealing off the right side using a combination of your cheek and your thumb, and then being really observant, looking in a mirror, finding out where the leaks are and learning how to plug them.

SPEAKER_00:

We'll move on to the last section now, which is just talking a bit about gear. So talking about the harmonicas that you play, first of all, I think you play sidles, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, my main gig harps are sidles. I started with Lee Oscars very early. Well, I started with a little bit of everything and I kind of got driven to Lee Oscars, but then I realized I didn't like the way they were tuned. They're more kind of a country sound and I settled on Special 20s. Dave Barrett helped me, I think, find those. And I like Special 20s and I still do. I think the Seidls hold up longer, have very similar tonal qualities, but are louder. And so all my main key harps are Seidls, but admittedly, they're more pricey than a Special 20. One thing I like about both of them is that the sides of the cover plates are closed, whereas on some marine bands and other harps, there's these little gaps in the sides of the cover plates. And when you're going for this airtight cup, Those fight you. You know, I still use Special 20s like for my D-flat harmonica and my B harmonica that I don't play as much. But Seidls are my main ones and I love them.

SPEAKER_00:

So what microphone do you play then, Greg?

SPEAKER_02:

When I play my big amp, which is a Sonny Junior Avenger, I'm using one of my custom wood mics with a 1949 Black Label CR. When I'm playing through my small amp, which is a Kalamazoo, like for coffee shop gigs and pub gigs and lower volume gigs, I use a Bellatini through the 5-watt Kalamazoo. And then I have an Ultimate 58 set up in a mic stand connected directly to the PA. And I use that for my voice and my acoustic harmonica work. do you use any effects pedals very little i usually use a delay or a reverb these days lately i've been using a reverb i find i'll use a pedal for a couple of years and then i'll take it out and put something else in and go oh that sounds good and then i'll take that out and put the other one back in and go oh that sounds good and then i'll go next door and sit in with a band after we did a gig and i don't want to set everything up so i just plug straight into my amp and i say oh that sounds good i think people always think change is good but i'm not a big effects pedal guy on the other hand I'm not doing a three-hour harmonica show. There are people who do that, and I think mixing up tones using pedals when they're used sparingly. Jason Ricci is a master at this. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not my thing.

SPEAKER_00:

so final question then we've been just through a pandemic of course and so what have you been up to over the pandemic and what about now for your plans or you know you're looking at some future products you know you've just been catching up with back orders over the pandemic and what's happening with your you know any future plans for new new product lines

SPEAKER_02:

well business is still is is picking back up i did drop off during the pandemic when people couldn't perform but now that they can uh business is coming back and it's keeping me busy and uh i'll be very honest i'm old enough and ready to kind of retire and slow down that there's a lot of things I'm not doing. And that's including introducing new products. I may have one trick up my sleeve left, but for the most part, I'm actually happy to let the business slow down a little bit. So I have a little spare time. My wife and I want to travel while we're still young enough to do it. So that's the honest answer. I'm not planning a whole bunch of new products.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, great. But I mean, the products you have are great. Certainly the wood mics are something on my shopping list. this. I'll have to get ordering one of those while you still can, eh?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much, Greg Heumann, for joining us today and giving us a great insight into the wonderful products you offer.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Neil. It's been nice talking to you. I appreciate your questions. And of course, anybody's able to contact me through my website or Facebook, and I'm

SPEAKER_00:

happy to answer questions. That's it for episode 46. Thanks again so much for listening. I highly recommend you go and check out Greg's products on his website, blowsmeaway.com. Just over to Greg now to play is out.

SPEAKER_01:

uh