Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Pat Missin interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 115

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Pat Missin joins me on episode 115.

Pat’s knowledge about the harmonica is unsurpassed, with his website at patmissin.com, a definitive source of information for over twenty years. He gives us an insight into some of this knowledge, starting with how free reed instruments were the predecessor of the harmonica and the questionable history of who actually invented the harmonica as we know it today. We also discuss various harmonica recording firsts, such as the first blues harmonica song recorded, the first second and third position and chromatic recording. Pat was also one of the earlier leading exponents on exploring harmonica tuning schemes and has released some song books for harmonica as well as some on other free reed instruments.

Links:
Website:
https://patmissin.com/

Free reed instrument history:
https://patmissin.com/history/history.html

Harmonica collection:
https://patmissin.com/gallery/gallery.html

Tunings:
https://patmissin.com/tunings/tunings.html

Vintage harmonica recordings:
https://www.patmissin.com/78rpm/78rpm.html

Harmonica reviews:
https://patmissin.com/index1.html

Magazine articles:
https://www.patmissin.com/articles/articles.html

Roger Trobridge’s Harmonica Archivist site:
http://www.the-archivist.co.uk/

Videos:
Pat playing at the NHL festival in 1999:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKOBtWLuV7E


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
--------------------------------
Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com

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SPEAKER_03:

Pat Missin joins me on episode 115. Pat's knowledge about the harmonica is unsurpassed, with his website at patmissin.com, a definitive source of information for over 20 years. He gives us an insight in some of this knowledge, starting with how free-read instruments were the predecessor of the harmonica, and the questionable history of who actually invented the harmonica as we know it today. We also discuss various harmonica recording firsts, such as the first blues harmonica song recorded, the first, second and third position and chromatic recording. Pat was also one of the earlier exponents on exploring harmonica tuning schemes and has released some songbooks for harmonica, as well as some on other three-reed instruments. This podcast is sponsored by Zeidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.zidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidel Harmonicas. Hello, Pat Missin, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, it's good to be here. Pat, you are originally from England, but now living in the US,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah? That's true. I grew up in sunny Kingston-upon-Hull, and I'm now living in even more sunny rural Ohio. Long story short, I've been in America just coming up 24 years, so not quite half my life. Not enough to lose the accent. So what prompted the move to the US? He got married to an American woman.

SPEAKER_03:

Not for harmonica reasons then?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, she was one of my customers, which was how I met her. I worked on some harmonicas for her and we hit it off.

SPEAKER_03:

That old trick, eh? Working on harmonicas. Works every time.

SPEAKER_02:

They work for me.

SPEAKER_03:

So you are a renowned person with great knowledge of the harmonica and certainly your website is one of the greatest resources on harmonica. Moving to the US, did you find a good harmonica scene there? How did it compare to Sunny Hill? Well,

SPEAKER_02:

one of the things that was big in the early 2000s, I married in 2000 and initially lived in Baltimore and then spent some time in Chicago and finally wound up kind of in the middle of nowhere in Southeast Ohio, but not too long a drive from where we are is Columbus. And in the early 2000s, well, I actually started long before then, but in the early 2000s, the big harmonica congregation was for the Buckeye Harmonica Festival at Columbus, Ohio. That wasn't the reason we moved here, but certainly for the first few years we were living here, there was a lot happening up in Columbus. I was at several of the VHF festivals there, and they attracted the same kind of crowd that you would get at spa or something like that, so a wide variety of players and a lot of people who know each other and whatever. So from a harmonica standpoint, that was going on not too far away. But in the immediate vicinity, it's like fields, deer, some cattle here and there, and not a great deal else. I don't wish to portray the area in any way negative. That's why I'm still living here 20 years later. But not a lot happening in the way of the music scene.

SPEAKER_03:

Sure, yeah. So is that Buckeye Festival still go on?

SPEAKER_02:

I think there's something going on. Certainly there's a guy called Danny G who runs an online harmonica business and has quite a few get-togethers and things at his place. And I think he's kind of taking over the Buckeye thing. I know he took up the Ohio State Harmonica Championships. That's one of the things he now does.

SPEAKER_03:

So what about you going back to the early days? What got you

SPEAKER_02:

into the harmonica? Kind of indirectly, I wanted to be a pop star or a cool musician or, you know, do something. And not being blessed with the world's greatest singing voice or ability to write catchy songs, I figured what I would do would be I'd be the guy who played all the cool stuff in the band. I'd be able to play any instrument. One of the things was trying to play as many instruments as I could. And being a teenager and finances being limited, that meant cheaper instruments kind of came first. My first serious instrument was guitar, because obviously... You want to be a pop star, you've got to at least be able to pose with a guitar. And then, not sure if keyboards came next or harmonica. Harmonica, possibly. And again, because it was another instrument to play and cheap. Oh, I managed to get a bass of disputed provenance at a suspiciously low price as well, so I was playing bass around that. And the harmonica was just like one of the other things I was going to play while I was in this chart-topping supergroup that never actually happened. I get I guess as I got more into my late teens and into my twenties, the thing was, you know, everybody played guitar, so bands weren't looking for guitarists. gradually the harmonica was not the instrument that everyone played and especially as I learned how to use the harmonica as you know substitute for keyboards or a horn section or you know something to add those touches around a band and then in my mid-20s I was quite ill for an extended period saxophone was the first thing to go because I played alto and that just requires you to be in marathon runner like condition to be able to play whereas the harmonica i could actually lie down on on the floor on a bed or on the sofa or whatever and play with you know zero expenditure of energy so that just became the most convenient instrument for me to play and then it all kind of grew from there actually before I was ill and that physically became the easiest instrument for me to play. One night, I was still at high school, so I'd be maybe 16, already played guitar, but already got some kind of interest in blues and early R&B and rock and roll and stuff. And I learned to play the guitar, one of the obvious starting points, at least seemed obvious to me was Chuck Berry as being like the backbone of a lot of modern music guitar styles. And Bo Deadly, you don't have to worry about chords too much. You know, you just found that one or two, maybe two chords using a tune and the rest of it was getting the rhythm together, getting the synchronization between left and right hands and really getting the feel for the groove. So there would have been harmonica on there and I was a huge, I woke up Johnson fan, the original Dr. Phil Good guitarist. So they had records with Harmonica on it. So I was kind of aware of it from then, and there were a whole bunch of pop tunes with Harmonica on it. So it was a very familiar sound. Well, one night I was listening to the John Peel show on late night radio on and at 1145 he stops talking and this distant crackly sound comes in and voice says,

SPEAKER_00:

baby don't go yet. It's only a quarter to 12.

SPEAKER_02:

I was immediately wow. That's a really cool sound. That wasn't a sound I'd associated that much with the harmonica. I mean, I must have heard, you know, Billy Boy Arnold. I'd certainly heard guys like Lee Brello and Lou Lewis. But this was just something. The pacing of it, the fact that it wasn't like frantic British pub rock speed, and the reverb, like the whole sound of the studio back then, really... got my attention just as I was dozing off in bed. And I obviously must have played some harmonica already at this point because I definitely recall the thought of, wow, that sounds incredible. And, you know, this instrument has like 10 holes and it's either blow or draw. That's only 20 notes and the rest are bends. I couldn't figure out how to do this. This wasn't like a guitar with like six strings and 20... two frets or whatever, a keyboard with like, you know, octave after octave of black and white keys. And this was like something that's a few inches long and it's got like 10 holes in it.

SPEAKER_03:

and you did go ahead to figure it out in great detail and again I mentioned your website is a great resource and it shows the sort of level of detail and depth you went in to look into it so we touched on in the last podcast episode with Seth Schumacher talking about the early history of the harmonica and some of the plays so you've looked into this a lot with the history of mouth blown free reed instruments so let's talk about that first and you've provided information on the various free reed instruments that came before or free reed So tell us about them and when did you get interested in those? Was it earlier on or was it later on when you started getting your knowledge of harmonica grown?

SPEAKER_02:

That was later. I mean, I'd been interested in all sorts of instruments. just like instruments in general, and especially the more obscure they were, the more they kind of intrigued me. But no, that really didn't come along until later when I was looking at more historical stuff to do with the harmonica, and there was the simplification that the harmonica is inspired by this East Asian instrument which uses free reeds and bamboo tubes and things. And I thought around that point, I should at least get one and see how it works.

SPEAKER_03:

So initially The understanding of that is that it was the xian, which is kind of popularly thought to be the predecessor to the harmonica.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, the information on your site certainly talks about other free-read instruments which came before the Sheng, did they, and developed into that, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I mean, it's actually a modernised version of an instrument that could have been made in the Stone Age. It didn't actually require necessarily metalworking abilities to make them. And, of course, there's nothing in the way of historical evidence of instruments that could have been made from bamboo and dried gourds and things that generally do not stand the test of time quite as well as metal. There's tended to be a bias towards the Chinese instruments, mainly because China was like a big, powerful country, and credit was given to them for ideas that might not actually have happened in mainland China, more likely to have come out of Southeast Asia, places that don't have quite the documented history that China has. I did find, and this has been a recurrent theme in a lot of my research into this, that most of the stuff you you think you know really is an oversimplification or in some cases a fabrication for various reasons but you know the standard history of the harmonica is it's derived from this Chinese instrument it was invented by Bushman and then Hohner took over production I was going to say whilst it's not inaccurate bits of it actually are rather inaccurate or at least unprovable and it it's more than anything else a gross oversimplification of something very complex that for the most part was not being documented at the time so there's very little history for us to to work with

SPEAKER_03:

yeah so i'll try and decipher what i understand for your website which is probably hugely simplified you can help fill in the details and of course people can go and read the great info on your website to get more information but so from what i understand it there's these early sort of free pipe reed instruments which developed and then we had the western version and the first version of that was by uh probably pronounce his name wrong so please correct me uh christian gotlieb kratzenstein who made a sort of speaking machine which which replicated the sound of the voice using what was that free reed instruments again

SPEAKER_02:

that was a free reed connected to um a series of resonators to give the different vowel sounds It is not certain, and I'm not sure it's provable, that he was directly inspired by ancient instruments to do that. It could have been he just had the idea independently, or he stumbled across it, or someone stumbled across it and showed it to him, and he developed it from there. Because one of the big differences, and again, simplification, but most of the ancient free-grade instruments, the traditional ones, and the western free reed instruments such as the harmonica and the accordion the reed organ harmonium things like that is how the reed is actually made in most of the the traditional asian instruments the reed is cut from surrounding plates so the reed and the reed plates are actually one unit and there's two or three cuts to to make a reed that is capable of vibrating through the whole left by cutting it that's a terrible explanation. Better to look at the pictures on my website. I'm sure there's something that illustrates it better. And they usually, because of how they're set, they usually require an additional resonator of some sort to get the reed to speak clearly. Whereas the Western version, you have a reed and a reed plate, there are slots cut in the reed plate, and the reeds are fixed in some fashion so that they are to one side of the plate, which means they usually only respond to changes in air pressure at one side of the plate rather than the other so you have blow reeds or draw reeds on harmonica which normally only respond to one direction of breath and the same with an accordion with the push the bellows and pull the bellows the way that is set up they don't actually require their own resonators, so the instrument suddenly becomes way more portable. You don't have to have all these specially tuned pipes. You can have lots and lots of reeds that all just vibrate in their own airstream quite happily as long as the players are playing out to them. They don't actually need anything else to make them speak properly. That is the big difference between most of the traditional Asian reeds and the ones we're familiar with over here, the more modern ones, which really only go back to a couple of hundred years, a bit more than that.

SPEAKER_03:

Here's a word from my sponsor. Looking for a new harmonica? Or maybe you just want to replace the replates on an existing harp? Theharmonicacompany.com is a place to go for all your harmonica needs. They stock a wide range of harmonicas and accessories from all of the major manufacturers and always ensure that they ship quickly, offer excellent customer service and are super competitive on price. Go to theharmonicacompany.com and enter the code HAPPYHOUR7 at the checkout to get an additional 7% off the already low prices. have a question or need advice just drop Jonathan a line on sales at theharmonicacompany.com and he'll be happy to help the discount code and email address are also listed on the podcast page So another thing that you talk about on your website is who invented the harmonica as we know it today, so the sort of Western version that we all, that became what the harmonicas we play today. So a contender is a 16-year-old Christian Buschmann in 1821 who made the aura or a mandolin. So is that, do you think, the first harmonica? You talk about there's other sort of contenders that may have been who actually invented it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

There are other contenders, and this is where we get into one of the things that Well, who actually did invent the harmonic? Let's look at this. The more I sort of picked to that thread, the more things unraveled. One of the key things about the Bushman story is they say he was granted a patent when a patent back then was essentially you got some local nobleman or a member of royalty to go, yeah, we're granting you a patent. I'll just sign this piece of paper. Basically, a patent back then was an IOU from someone important. So we don't actually have any documentation of the patent. he is supposed to have. We don't have any surviving instruments. We don't have any surviving illustrations of the instruments. We just have a few things from letters within the family. And the more I looked into this, most of the documentation of that came from one book that was published in 1938 in Germany, in the middle of very strong political opinions, compiled by members of the portray the harmonica as this very German invention by the wonderfully amazing German people. And so a lot of things were downplayed in the story, like the fact that a lot of the early history of the harmonica in Europe is actually from Austria rather than Germany itself. Certainly most of the production was not in places like Berlin, it was in what was for a time East Germany, Bavaria, Saxony. It's a tangled story where there are so many other vested interests in spinning one version of it rather than the others. And at the end of it, you're left with a mess where there's a lot of possibilities and not very much in the way of documented fact.

SPEAKER_03:

So we're lost in the midst of time to some extent. But we do have, of course, you know, the Hohner and Seidel both started factories, what, in the 1840s, 1850s. So, you know, that is linked to these beginnings in Germany or Austria, I take it.

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and and again the whole thing about the story being uh told with certain other um goals in mind rather than historical documentation as hona became one of the dominant producers and eventually the dominant producer for a very long time they had a massive advertising campaign particularly in america they just spun especially for the american market this story of that really portrayed the harmonica as the all-american instrument despite the fact that you know they were a bit in Germany and producing these things. So you have all these ads with Abraham Lincoln played the harmonica, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earpole played, and it's like, well, you know, it's possible, but it's most people's idea of, you know, the history of the harmonica is essentially from the advertising material of one dominant company. Not that I'm accusing them of anything terrible. They had product to sell and they did an incredible job of selling it. Well, they then happens is people put together history of the harmonica which is essentially summarized from a whole bunch of publicity material for the owner company yeah so that really distorted and then people would get commissioned to write the book about the harmonica and of course you've got to put like the first page has got to be the history of the harmonica well it's i've got three weeks to finish this book i can't spend like the next five years researching what actually happened i'll just run with what's available so it becomes um you out of the same story gets more or less repeated and people are used to seeing exactly the same story with very minor variations from lots of different sources and that becomes the accepted version of events.

SPEAKER_03:

We'll move on because we don't have time to cover it all here but people can check out your website and you know read the history but it's interesting to see that you know other contenders you talk about one was British one was German one was American so there's various claims so yeah people can go and check that out but you know it's fascinating stuff but you're moving on in a related thing obviously we've talked about your interest in free reed instruments and the history of the harmonica and this also led you to make a very interesting harmonica collection so on your website again there's pictures of early octave harmonicas a miniature bass harmonica the bomb harmonica and the cheng gong harmonica which is a sort of sliding mouthpiece the hole in a comet which I talked about with Swang recently which is a double reed octave tuned harmonica and various different chord harmonicas all sorts of interesting manifestations and quite interesting because you also talk about MIDI harmonica as well but some of the ideas that we see coming back now you know have been done before haven't they there's been all sorts of crazy you know sort of attempts and experiments isn't there with different sorts of harmonicas through the years

SPEAKER_02:

the vast majority of harmonica patents from both Europe and America look like they never actually got produced and I gather that's probably the same with most areas of intellectual property but some of the things that I've seen the diagrams of them in patent documents. It's like, oh, I really, really, really wish they'd made this one. It's also possible one in particular was done by a guy from literally just a few miles of the road from where I live now that had multiple sets of reed plates and things. I don't think it would be great if that had been made, but then I'm also thinking that would probably have required lungs like Superman to blow that many reeds and the amount of leakage here and there. It was probably unplayable. I'm guessing that was the reason it was never made.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, because it's interesting, you know, talking to some of the customisers on here and Andre a few episodes ago, talking about, you know, obviously they have to sell, right, and they have to become mass popular for them to mass manufacture them, so I guess they make a small number. But there's an interesting one, there was a whole new Rhythm and Blues one, and then Tommy Riley was used to, you know, sort of showcase playing it and, you know, to advertise it.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEAKER_03:

another interesting section again I covered that in the last podcast with Seth is talking about the early harmonica players and you know going back to that history and we talked about you know Henry Witter and you know the first harmonica recordings and so you've got some really interesting first one here so you've got a collection of 78s and you've got you know recordings that you gathered I understand Roger Trowbridge here in England helped you out with that and you went to the British Library and you did a lot of research and you manage to dig out lots of information. You've got all these really early recordings. So I'll just pick out some of those. But the interesting ones is the first blues harmonic recording we've got is My Dog Gone Lazy Man with Herbert Leonard playing with Clara Smith in 1924. Yeah. Whereas Pete Hampton did the first recorded harmonica, as I understand, and talked about in the last episode. So this is the first blues recording, as you understand it, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

Blues to a certain definition. I went with the standard discography definition, so like Dixon and Godrich and stuff like that. Because you could argue, you know, Henry Witter had played stuff in Obviously, African-American influence, second position, blues style. So you could argue that was an earlier blues recording, but I've gone with the standard discography type thing of an African-American musician playing on something that they kind of deem a blues rather than, you know, any other style of music. And we've just passed the 100th anniversary of that.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, of course, yeah. Yeah, of course, 1924, yeah. So you mentioned Henry Witter again that I talked about with the Fox show. last time. So he recorded the first, as you've got it, the first second position playing on Rain Crow Bill Blues in 1923. So, like you said, ahead of 1924, which is the song we've just mentioned. Was that quite a well-known song at the time?

SPEAKER_02:

possibly that kind of piece was popular. Henry went to himself where he didn't get popular until he did less of the harmonica stuff and more of the early country music stuff and especially when he partnered with fiddle player Grayson then they became quite big and he did the original version of the record the old 97 which was a massive hit so yeah he was kind of big I'm not sure necessarily he made the harmonica that big or that he was big because he played harmonica I think it was his songs that were really the thing. But obviously his harmonica playing was good enough to get people to record him when they'd never recorded anything like that kind of harmonica before.

SPEAKER_03:

So a couple more firsts you've pointed out on here. So third position, this surprised me. So it's partly Little Walter in 1951 playing Lonesome Day with Muddy Waters.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEAKER_03:

So yeah, confident that was the first third position recorded. A

SPEAKER_02:

lot of these things, you know, get tested over the years. This one, I'm pretty sure me and, you know, the late Bob Jack indefinitely, and probably Joe Falesco, I think I can count him on there, would agree that they don't know of one that's earlier than this.

SPEAKER_03:

So it's interesting, you know, if Little Walter came up with that by himself, you know, how did he discover third position? I guess, did he just play it and thought, have you any idea about that? I wondered

SPEAKER_02:

if it came about after he took up the chromatic.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I don't know for sure. It kind of makes sense from the mechanics of playing the instrument that if you learn first position that the relative minor position, fourth position, actually is an extension of that. And you hear that in a couple of the older recordings that they'll go to a minor section of a major tune, so you go fourth position relatively early on. Yeah. And the same way between second position a fifth position that, you know, you can find yourself in a minor key just by playing in a major key and doing something different with it. Maybe third didn't come about because people really didn't use 12th. But it's still kind of surprising that given that, you know, that chord right in the middle of the harp, that somebody didn't go, oh, look, I've got a D minor chord here. Yeah. Possibly because, you know, and actually to get, like, any of the correct, you know, the... music theory minor scales, the stuff that you'd get taught at a music school. they're not built in because you've just got this Dorian mode thing where if you want a natural minor, a melodic minor, a harmonic minor, you've got to have bends and overflows. Yeah. So maybe it's that, but I'm still surprised that people didn't discover you can do all this bluesy stuff in third position. Or rather, and I should correct myself, it's entirely possible someone did. What happened is they didn't make it to a record. I know that Little Walter recorded something that is indisputably third position. I haven't been able to find anything else before then, so that's what our definite fact is. I'm guessing he was playing third position before then, because he seems confident with it. And that came right after he played the chromatic, so that would typically be my guess, or that somebody else did it years ago and we just didn't hear him.

SPEAKER_03:

So talking about the chromatic, you've also got the first chromatic harmonica recording, which is by Borominovic, which is Hayseed Rag with a dizzy trio. What sort of year is this one?

SPEAKER_02:

That was just after the 260 chromatic came out again and was billed as being like brand new and it's kind of been around for more than a decade already. That was billed by Hohner as being the first record featuring their new chromatic harmonica. So again, that's probably a fairly solid one. Plus, the chromatic harmonica was relatively new, and the phrase relatively new gets an asterisk after it because things have changed in the last five years on the whole history of that as well.

SPEAKER_03:

So another really interesting section, I think something you're really well known for, I don't know how innovative you were, is about tunings. You've got lots of information about tunings, different harmonica tunings on your website. So were you one of the first who sort of really seriously got into it? I think you were definitely one of the major resources about it the time?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, that was essentially how the website came about. I never planned on it being whatever it is today. But 1997 or 98, I got the internet. And at that point, I was pretty much working full time on harmonica repair. And I hesitate to say a custom work, but, you know, modifications to people's requirements, I guess. So I was making contact details available to people from all over the world who weren't necessarily, you know, in the loop on who was fixing things. And there really weren't very many of us working on harmonicas in the 90s. Obviously, I needed people to be able to find me. So I put something up that back in the days of a relatively small internet, you could go to, it wasn't Google, but whatever people use, they'd go harmonica repair and you might be able to find me and email me. And then there were all the different tuning options I could offer that you know at that point there wasn't a lot of discussion readily available online about it there were some things if you were if you got Harmonica World magazine you know you might see an article on it if you saw the spa magazine you might have had stuff on it or you might have vaguely heard people talking about the difference between how they used to be tuned and how they're tuned now but it was all very esoteric so I thought when I'm dealing with customers especially by email not even by phone for a lot of cases how would you want to set up? Well, how can you set it up? Well, I can set it up like this, that or this. What's the difference? Well, you know, and usually if people told me they played in a certain style, I could recommend how they would want their instrument. And again, not just the tuning, but like the reel adjustment and things like that. And I could recommend something for them. And after that, you know, I'd usually recommend they got one harp done first and see what they thought of it and kind of work from there. But I decided it would it would be really helpful to put just some audio samples of here is a diatonic in equal temperament, here is a diatonic in just intonation, here are the differences, and whatever. Listen to it for yourself.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, no, exactly that. It's really useful, the fact that you can hear the difference with the tuners. You read about them a lot, but yeah, so on your website, that's still available, like I said, just intonation. Equal temperament.

SPEAKER_02:

And then what happened from there was people would type into AltaVista or whatever, harmonica tuning, and they'd find my site. And probably just typing harmonica after a while, you've got a chance of finding me somehow. And then I would start to get the questions by email. hey, you seem like a guy who knows something about the harmonica. Who invented it? And I'd politely reply. And then like a week later, hey, can I ask you a question? Who invented the harmonica? And if I was lucky, I might have saved the email from the week before. And after a bunch of these came in, I just thought, you know what? How about I write this once really well and I put it in a webpage and I just stick that on my site so I don't have to keep typing the same answer. And that was it. It just snowballed from there.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so then you were on all these sort of harmonica forums and you became known for it that way, yeah? And this was in the late 90s, early 2000s, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. And when they started becoming popular, all the horpels and those things, yeah. Great, so there's loads of other great stuff on your website too. You used to do at least lots of harmonica reviews, didn't you? And there's an example of you playing a turbo slide on House of Rises. Yeah. And you also have written various articles. In the past, you used to write for UK's Harmonica World, and you wrote for Blues Review magazine. You were playing some gospel. They talk about some gospel harmonica and some early players that we talked about. So, yeah, you were writing and very much involved in the harmonica community then,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah? Well, most of that writing was pre-internet. I had it on a hard drive, and again, same thing. Well, I might as well put this on the website. I never really set out to build whatever the website is. Really, a lot of my participation was trying to find customers so I could pay my rent. That was actually the motivation for a lot of it. Actually appearing knowledgeable is good for business. Being friendly and polite when people ask you questions is good for business. So I would do all of those things. The website really Really, initially it was just that.

SPEAKER_03:

But the more you do it, the more acknowledged you will become, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, an awful lot of this stuff has just been stuff that gradually happened without me really doing that much to set the ball rolling.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. And so when you were in the UK before you moved to the US, you were involved with the NHL here, the National Harmonica League Club.

SPEAKER_02:

I was actually after I moved as well. I think... I could be wrong, and I apologise if I'm stealing anybody else's ballot. I think I was the longest-serving committee member of the NHL. Very much could be wrong, but I can't think of anybody who did longer. I did 20-some years. And the last part of that was as the American coordinator, the US coordinator, which became increasingly irrelevant as everyone got the internet and cell phones and stuff. So I stepped down at that point that I actually hadn't done anything as a committee member for like two or three years at one point.

SPEAKER_03:

There's a video of you playing in 1999 at the harmonica convention here in the UK so they've got a recording of you playing with two other harmonica players on a song I think is called She Moved Through the Third You've got some recordings of yours that you've done through the years. You like harmonic minor tuning. You do a recording on a song called Heads Up back in 1993 with the Honkies. You were favoring the harmonic minor tuning certainly for a while though, weren't you? Actually not that much.

SPEAKER_02:

That was probably the only song that I played regularly that used it. The lineup of the band with me and it didn't last for that much longer anyway, maybe a year, 18 months. And I think that was the only time I used harmonic minor. And that was mostly because I wanted it for the solo and then for the arrangement of the rest of the song, I could play it on I didn't need the harmonic minor to do it, but I could play it on there.

SPEAKER_03:

Not meaning to challenge what you just said, but didn't you write two song books for harmonic and minor tune

SPEAKER_02:

parameters? Yeah, about that. I'm trying to think actually how that originally came. That was... I think that would have been my second book, the first harmonic minor book. And yeah, I mean, I love the tuning. I played it a lot at home. But one of the questions, again, that I would get by email was like, what songs can you play in this thing? You know, it sounds really cool, but like, you know, I don't know any songs that actually... It's an odd scale in itself by the fact that it's the harmonic minor It actually quite works quite well for an instrument called the harmonica, but not many melodies use the harmonic scale there are some and Apparently there are more than 200 at the last count. I don't know if I'm gonna do a third book or not Probably not. But yeah that I came with people were asking what can I play in this thing? So, okay And again, I needed to make money, so I wrote a book that obviously made me fortune.

SPEAKER_03:

You also wrote a book on the Ultimate Miniature Harmonica Tune Book. So this is for the one-octave kind of little lady type. So yeah, what made you write that one?

SPEAKER_02:

I'm not sure there was a specific thing. I wanted to do another book. I got fairly well set up for putting these kinds of things together. So I thought that might actually be more popular than the harmonic minor was, which actually was not, you know, it surprised me just how well all of these books have sold. But there is something about, apparently I have a unique skill set, and one of them is I can flip very, very fast through stacks of sheet music and immediately discount songs is not going to work for or a particular tuning or a particular position or a particular instrument. And I can do that really effectively. And I realized I could probably fill a 365-tune buck with things that used a one-octave diatonic scale, and I did. And the nice thing about that is it's also accessible. There are a lot of ocarina players. Now, the ocarina became a surprisingly big instrument after Legend of Zelda. I'm told, I don't know anything about these things, but the ocarina had its own boom, and all 365 tunes in that book can be played on an ocarina in C, so I picked up a lot of additional stuff, and most of them can be played on penny whistles and limited scale instruments, crumhorn, if you know a good crumhorn player, they can probably play them all. And as much for the challenge of, can I put together a collection of 365 tunes that all just use the Yeah, the one octave, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey, everybody. You're listening to Neil Warren's Harmonica Happy Hour podcast, proudly sponsored by Tom Halcheck and Blue Moon Harmonicas. This is Jason Ritchie here telling you I love Blue Moon Harmonicas. I love the combs, the covers, the custom harps, the refurbished pre-war marine bands, and nobody's easier to work with than Tom Halcheck. www.bluemoonharmonicas.com.

SPEAKER_03:

You've also written some books on how to play these two Chinese wind instruments, the Bawu and the Halusi, is it? Of course. Yeah, is that linked to the free read knowledge that you have, yeah? Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

that was... Surprisingly successful, actually, for something that was dipping my toe into the water of self-publishing. Now, backtracking a little, shortly after my wife and I got married, we were living in Baltimore, well, she lived in Baltimore when we got married, and we were there for a couple of years together. And on the day of the September 11th attacks, We were going to a seminar about the future of publishing that was being sponsored in part by Adobe. There was, unfortunately, basically on the same block as the Baltimore World Trade Center. But we were there, this whole concept of a print-on-demand that they were talking about back then, and just-in-time production methods. And then... The news came in that New York and Washington had been attacked and the entire city was evacuated because we didn't know if this was World War III started and they'd attacked one World Trade Center. We didn't know if they were going to do the one in Baltimore. Fast forward about a decade and those things, we never actually got to see the rest of the seminar. We just got the exciting, you know, see the publishing world of tomorrow. A decade later, the exciting publishing world of tomorrow was like today. And there were all these things. You just upload your book to them. They will publish them. They will list them somewhere. They will put them on Amazon.com and they will send you the money when they sell, hopefully when they sell. I thought, well, I already had a list of I don't know how many books. I remember working on some of them in the 90s for things that I thought would be a really good harmonica book for just enough people to make it worthwhile to write and to publish it. And all of a sudden, the publishing part of it became much easier. I thought, well, I have all these harmonica books. You know what? I could write a book. I've written enough articles. I've taught plenty of students in groups and private lessons and stuff. I think I can do this. I decided I would dip my toe into the water by doing something that wasn't harmonica related. I remember literally on the back of an envelope, I went to eBay. I saw how many, this would be 2011. I went to eBay and I looked how many Bowen Hollis had sold. And I thought, well, I'll try this, you know, because I already had kind of a page that demonstrated them. I'd been playing them a few years and I'd been answering questions about them. There is a, not to get too involved because it's not very... pertinent to the harmonica. Well, it kind of is pertinent to the harmonica. Both of those instruments have a triangular reed cut from a plate that is offset to one side of the plate, which is different from how that would be set up in a mouth organ type instrument. What you do then is you open and close finger holes on the body of the instrument to change the resonant pitch of it, and essentially you are overblowing a single reed to produce a full scale. So it is. kind of related to the way that a harmonica overblows if it's mounted slightly offset to the reed plate and if it's adjusted properly and you use the right technique. What most people were finding with these instruments when they got them, they nervously blow them very softly and then they don't make much kind of sound. The sound doesn't change when you move your fingers and it sounds buzzy instead of the lovely kind of flutey sort of tone they have. So people would email me, I think there's a problem with my bow. I've seen your webpage about it, so I'd explain. And again I wrote this so many times I saved copies of it and that was essentially the key bit of the book. That first step from being completely unable to play to being not a very good player yet is like this enormous step and on some instruments it's a difficult one to do without someone helping. So I built a book around this thing which had become my standard copy and paste email reply to people. I did the calculation of how many people bought this, what my royalties and I came back with the magic number, I think it was$10,000. And then I had to ask myself, well, if somebody offered you$10,000 to write a book, would you do it? Well, yeah, of course I'd do it. So the$10,000 actually, I didn't get it all in one payment, but I believe I've made more than that with it already. And then it was like, well, I'll do a harmonica book now. So what's the most obscure thing I can do? How about 101 tunes for the harmonic minor? There's bound to be at least three people want to buy that.

SPEAKER_03:

Those niche ones are the answer, are they, to sell?

SPEAKER_02:

They are when the hardest part of the job is taken care of by a system that you don't have to touch. Yeah. You know, I don't really have to deal with customers. I don't have to deal with deteriorating postal systems. Yeah, all of these things.

SPEAKER_03:

So just a bit more on your playing. We've got a recording of you doing a blues piece called Driving North.

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SPEAKER_03:

So you do a bit of blues. You also like to play some sort of drones. It's something that you like to put in drones when you're playing, yeah, and you sort of long, slow bends and using drones. That

SPEAKER_02:

came very much out of an interest in, you know, one of the instruments I played briefly in my career as a wannabe pop star was a sitar, so I became very much interested in Indian music. And the difference between the bow and the holocene is the holocene is essentially a bow with its own drones built in. You essentially have just when you play the instrument before you play any melody notes something like sounding in the background and that's just always been one of my favorite sounds

SPEAKER_03:

nice yeah and then more recently you've been recording with a guy called Andy Welsh you recorded on a couple of his releases a song called All About Me and last year a song called Feel Good So are you still playing and recording?

SPEAKER_02:

Not really, but I guess I'm kind of retired. Not entirely deliberately, but then a couple of years ago, I was in a band with Andy 44 years ago. Just sounds insane. I mean, we were like teenagers, but... we went kind of separate ways and not for any real reason other than you know like people drift apart and i hadn't seen him for years but then um A couple of years ago, I would just get this email going, I'm doing my first solo single, do you want to play on it? I was like, yeah, that sounds like fun. So we did that, and then it's like, well, do you want to do another? And I'm like, oh, okay. So that's the one that's just been released, All About You. And this is me back to playing pop music again. Playing stuff I'm sure we're far too old to be playing.

SPEAKER_03:

Not at all, not at all. So a question I ask each time is the 10-minute question. If you had 10 minutes of practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_02:

Depends what I'm working on. I really don't have a set practice regime. I have had at certain points, but it really depends what I'm working on. If I'm doing a page for the website about something or other, I work on that. A lot of the time, most of my practice time is 5, 10 minutes at of time. I think my practice time would probably better be used figuring out why my practice time is so fractured, you know, but spend five minutes trying to figure out how to make my life flow a bit better than it does at the moment. I always have like a harmonica somewhere handy. You mentioned the bomb bass harp. is right in front of me. That's not what I would practice with my 10 minutes. It is just an incredibly limited instrument, though, that I just... it's just satisfying to play so with my 10 minutes I would probably I mean what oh backtracking the question what would I do with my 10 minutes of practice or what what would I tell someone else they should do I guess it's kind of advice for others yeah okay well for again depending on what they want to play and what level of playing they're at you know I learned an awful lot of you know basically getting started on blues harp I would carry one in my pocket as I I worked on a market garden in Northern England, and I just make sure that if I had to walk from one place to the other, I could be there. And that would get me from A to B, and that would be less than five minutes practice, you know, two minutes practice at a time. That was great for ingraining chords. I mean, I already knew what a 12-bar was from playing guitar, but getting the feel of the kind of stuff worked well with walking around. So a lot of my early practice time was that or sitting at a red light late at night in the car, I'd practice something.

SPEAKER_03:

short regular practice sounds like the overriding tip here yeah

SPEAKER_02:

yeah i mean if you have an hour then definitely the uh the whole work on your scales work on your phrasing work on long tones actually listen very clear clearly to the tones you produce don't take any of them for granted actually be actively listening as you play but five or ten minutes you're not going to play through 12 scales. Maybe you're going to play through all 12 scales badly. Whatever. So I think at that point it's worth embracing the fact that you've only got a few minutes and do something that takes a few minutes. Pick a tune off the radio or YouTube and imagine you got hired to come play in that session. What would you play on it? One of my favorite pieces of harmonica from John Popper from Blues Traveler I stumbled across years ago. He was on someone's radio show or pod or something and it was on YouTube. They were talking about Janet Jackson or someone and they're all kind of kidding around. No, Paula Abdul. Someone like this is a few years ago. And they just put the track on and John Popper played with it. And it just took a little while for him to find out what key was in, find out what the groove is, find out how to work with it. And after just a minute or two, he was playing some of the sweetest stuff I've ever heard him play. You know, and so, you know, Try that. Pick a tune off the radio. Don't go with something really familiar. Don't go with anything with a harmonica on it. And imagine you've been brought in on this session and, okay, what are you going to do with this song? I mean, it could be something really simple. Just play a few notes here and there. You could actually find a real solid rhythm groove and play along with the drummer rather than the melodic instruments. Ten minutes of that doesn't necessarily do a lot for your technical chops, but does a lot for your musicianship.

SPEAKER_03:

So obviously we talked about your interest in all these wonderful harmonica creations that have come up in past. So what harmonicas do you like to play these days? I have sitting next to

SPEAKER_02:

me a crate full of Lee Oscars and I'm not even sure how many tunings. More tuning than Lee makes them in. And that is 95 or more percent of my harmonica kit. And there's some other stuff in front of me that is getting played at the moment because I'm working on something to do with it. There's a harmonetta and a harmonica CX 12

SPEAKER_03:

jazz great the harmonettas you ever talked about those recently as well yeah i want to get one of those things yeah great uh so you can play the harmonetta can you very badly yeah and so what about different tunings we've talked about harmonic minor do you use different tunings other different

SPEAKER_02:

tunings yeah I mean again most of my stuff on diatonic is in just standard major tuning but I have done an awful lot of stuff on the natural minor you mentioned driving north earlier that's all natural minor and I have a variation on the melody maker which is part melody maker and part one of Brendan Powers tunings and that's probably my third used thing. That's what I would use for major key stuff where I'd be playing out of the draw position, second position, rather than first position. And then some harmonic minors, some combination tuning, which I don't play as much lately, but I used to use it a lot for blues. And some, the Oscars in SBS tuning, and then a few more esoteric things.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so plenty of different tunes, yeah. And what about overblows, do you use those? Yeah, I invented them.

SPEAKER_02:

As in, I found them for myself one day. Actually, I didn't really even find it for myself. I remember trying to bend, again, very strong visual memory of this, trying to bend six blow on a marine band in A in the early 80s and figuring, why is this not, none of the books said at the time, well, here are the notes you can bend and why, here are the other notes you can not bend and why not. And so I was trying to bend this six blow and instead I got, let's do it in the the key of A for posterity. The screeching sound. And I was like, I don't quite know what that is, but that's a really wild noise I'm gonna start annoying people with in the middle of solos. And then it wasn't until a while later. I realized what the wild sound was like, the regular note and the overblow, both of them out of tune at the same time. And then shortly afterwards, I found out there was this thing called overblow, and I realized, oh, that's what I was doing. So that's 40-some years ago. I don't even try to play all 12 keys on a harmonica, or I don't play that chromatically on the diatonic. What about your embouchure would you like to use? Whatever. I started out just like the whistle position oh and not quite whatever I don't do that rolled tongue thing the u-block thing don't do that I started out not tongue blocking and then I found out about tongue blocking and then I started using that and then I really just I don't even think about which one I'm using most of the time if I had to pick one it would have to be tongue block because there's so many things you can do you can only do with a tongue block but you know I don't have to pick one

SPEAKER_03:

And what about amplifiers and microphones?

SPEAKER_02:

These days, not so much. I've got my Pignose here and an old Japanese tube amp that I had rebuilt for 240 volt main supply just before moving to America, which is not one of my best investments. But 60s and 70s Gaia tone. It just makes it almost like a Fender Champ sound but rattier than a few microphones. but I don't really have like I'm not gear obsessed

SPEAKER_03:

great and so just then final question about your future plans obviously we talked about your website a lot and you know you still got plans to update it and keep it going and you know and you're still planning you're going to add these other harmonicas and things so that's that's in your plans yeah

SPEAKER_02:

yeah I mean I'm just horribly behind with everything I've had some health issues I've moved house more times in the last decade than I really wanted to but hopefully I'm going to start catching up a lots of things are behind schedule, but I've also got a lot of half finished things that one day I will completely finish. You know, they'll probably get done ahead of the things that I haven't even started. So, you know, basically more of the same. Certainly bits on my website need to be revised, both from a technical point. I mean, the website was initially built when like no one had cell phones and certainly no one could foresee that cell phones were going to be how most people would use the internet in the next decade so there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff there that I'm still trying to make up to speed and still be usable for everything else and some bits actually need to be amended as more information comes in the page about the Richter harmonica and who might have been behind it or whatever I have a few more pieces in that story that I'm hoping to get done in the not too distant future And there is one not horrible mistake on the page, something based on outdated information. I don't like having that hanging around for too long to get that fixed. So, you know, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_03:

So thanks so much for joining me today, Pat Misson. It's

SPEAKER_02:

been

SPEAKER_03:

my pleasure. Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. Be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Thanks to Pat for joining me today. Be sure to check out the wealth of information available at his website, patmissing.com. And thanks to Roger Trowbridge for supporting me with some invaluable information on Pat. Be sure to check out Roger's Harmonica Archivist site. The link is in the podcast notes. And also thanks to Ben Hewlett for his donation to the podcast. I'll leave you now with Pat playing live at the UK NHL Festival in 1999, making use of drones on the song Apple's Theme.