Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

The Harmonicaster interview with Ronnie Schreiber

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 134

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Ronnie Schreiber joins me on episode 134. 

Ronnie runs The Electric Harmonica Company, producing the Harmonicaster, which is an alternative to the traditional harmonica microphone, using guitar style pick-ups to create “the first practical true electric harmonica”. Ronnie first came up with the concept some thirty years ago and has been developing it in earnest over the last ten years.

Ronnie tells us the story of how he developed the idea, from the need to use steel reeds, the custom harps needed and the availability of pick-ups to use with the harmonica, and some of the harmonica players who have supported him through his journey.

We discuss the advantages of using a pick-up with the harmonica, such as having a different sound to the traditional harmonica microphone, and the  feedback resistance it brings, as well as some of the challenges of using the Harmonicaster.

Links:

Harmonicaster website: https://rokemneedlearts.com/harmonicaster/wp/

The Frank Harmonica mic developed by Ronnie: https://rokemneedlearts.com/frankmic/

Harp-l post introducing the Harmonicaster: https://groups.google.com/g/harp-l/c/_ETwuJvbRRA

Brendan Power playing some Irish music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rx8kVBjAL4

The Turbo Harp: https://turboharp.com/

Dyna-mic: https://www.dyna-mic.com/

Videos:

Harmonicaster YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@harmonicaster8106

Ronnie overview of the Harmonicaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzbYxwKLPR4

Jonah Fox YouTube review of the Harmonicaster: https://rokemneedlearts.com/harmonicaster/wp/


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


Support the show

SPEAKER_00:

Ronnie Schreiber joins me on episode 134. Ronnie runs the Electric Harmonica Company, producing the Harmonicaster, which is an alternative to the traditional harmonica microphone, using guitar-style pickups to create the first practical true electric harmonica. Ronnie first came up with the concept some 30 years ago and has been developing it in earnest over the last 10 years. Ronnie tells us the story of how he developed the idea from the need to use steel reeds, the custom hearts needed, and the availability of pickups to use with the harmonica, and some of the harmonica players who have supported him through his journey. We discuss the advantages of using a pickup with the harmonica, such as having a different sound to the traditional harmonica microphone, and the feedback resistance it brings, as well as some of the challenges of using the Harmonicaster. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello, Ronnie Schreiber, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

You are the owner of the Electric Harmonica Company, which is what you're here to talk to me about today, yep? Yes, that's

SPEAKER_02:

correct.

SPEAKER_00:

So, I think you've been running this company, what, for the last 10 years or so?

SPEAKER_02:

The germ of the idea started about 30 years ago, but I've been working seriously on it for about 10 years now. Since 2014, actually.

SPEAKER_00:

So you created the Harmonicaster, which is the first practical true electric harmonica, and that's what the electric harmonica company does, yeah?

SPEAKER_02:

There's a couple other things that I'm planning on sort of getting into right now, but yeah, that's the flagship product. I wanted to make the company name obvious.

SPEAKER_00:

So yeah, so we'll talk about the other things that you're looking at getting into. But yeah, we'll focus on the harmonica stuff for now.

SPEAKER_02:

About 30 years ago, I started playing harmonica. I took some lessons. Got adequate enough that I could play with actual musicians without embarrassing myself. There's a mailing list called Harp L, which still exists. And it had everybody from rank amateurs to some world-class players. And it was an interesting combination of younger blues and rock orchestras I was just wondering, has anybody ever tried to make an electric harmonica? And I said, has anybody ever? And they didn't quite say KID, but basically they said, this is how we do it, KID, with a microphone. And I said, well, I don't know. And so I thought about it. There was a guy named Vern Smith who was a technician, and he agreed to make me six steel reeds because the idea was I was going to make an electromagnetic instrument like an electric guitar only with reeds. I live in the Detroit area, so I've been around the auto industry most of my life. And so I got him some shim steel from a source and sent it to him, and he fabricated six reeds so I could test low, middle, and high frequencies, because you've got to stuff both reeds in each channel in order for it to work. And out of the blue, I contacted Lace Music that make lace pickups, lace sensors, just because they're It was an interesting technology, and I spoke to Jeff Lace, and he sort of liked the idea. I said, what do you have that's wide enough to span 75 millimeters, which is the span on most harmonicas, most diatonics? And he said, well, one of our jazz bass pickups will work. So he sent me a free pickup just to play around with it because he liked the idea. And I sort of fabricated a crude proof of concept out of some wood where I could slide the comb into it. And it was obvious that it could work, and it was loud. And I couldn't get it to feed back, so I said, well, gee, that's a feature harmonica players might like. And then I couldn't do anything for a long time because nobody made steel reeds for harmonicas, and I did just not have the resources to do it myself. And about 10, 11 years ago, I decided to pick up the harmonica again, started playing a little and reading the emails that I wasn't reading, and I found out that there was a company named Seidel in Germany that was now making stainless steel reeds.

UNKNOWN:

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02:

And most people think that stainless steel is not magnetic. It's just that most common grades of stainless aren't magnetic, but some are. So I contacted their American distributor, Rupert Oisler, in Asheville, North Carolina. And I said, can you find out what kind of steel we're using, you're using? And he said, it's proprietary. But he said it is magnetic, so I ordered one. And a month later, I had a more or less fully functioning, you know, proof of concept 20-note diatonic. And Peter Ruth, Mad Cat Ruth, lives in Ann Arbor, which is less than an hour away. I used to live in Ann Arbor, so I contacted him, asked him if he'd be interested in just giving my opinion about it, because I'm just not a good enough player myself to test it out. And he was encouraging. He said there were things about the tone he didn't like. He said it sounds like harmonic in a box, which it was. It had some sustain and echo. But he encouraged me. And then I think later that same year, I went to a gig where Jason Ritchie was playing. And Jason also encouraged me. You know, he had some critical things to say about it, but he said it's a cool idea. He might want to try it in the studio. And so I started working on it. And I got some components from Seidel and some pickups from Lace. And the first version, many people said, looked like a Viewmaster, one of those 3D slide viewers. You had to take the cover out. It wasn't perfectly practical. One of the people that has been advising me over the years on this is Brendan Power. Brendan's a genius. Not just a great musician. pretty cool inventor. And he's given me a couple ideas. He said, you're going to run into some pitch problems because of Helmholtz resonances, because I was using a mouthpiece, because there was a real estate conflict between your mouth and the pickups. The pickups have to be centered over the reeds, the reed tips to get the most energy. And just working with different harmonica players, Will Wild contacted me about it because he plays hard rock, high gain stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

Very much electric guitar style riffs, so yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

At his encouragement, I made a Mark II version, which actually exposed part of the harmonica, and he liked it, but then he said there were playability issues, which led to the final version, well, There's never going to be a final version because you do continuous improvement. I was trying to figure out a way to be able to get the whole harmonica in your mouth, basically. You have to be able to accommodate different... playing styles and some people just pucker and some people put practically swallow the thing. And I realized in order to do that I needed to have a pickup that could fit in the harmonica. I've gotten lucky a couple times and just so happened that Lace makes a series of pickups, a line of pickups called the Lumitones. They work a little differently than normal pickups do. And they made a version for cigar box guitars that was essentially just a piece of eighth inch aluminum plate that was water jet cut and had some bending on it. And I said to Jeff Lace, I said, well, can it be a sixteenth of an inch? He said, yeah, it's surface area. It's not the thickness. And so we went back and forth for about a year or two developing different profiles in aluminum until we came up with what is probably the thinnest, lightest guitar type pickup, electromagnetic pickup that's probably made in the world. The Illumitons are really cool. Most of the explanations of how guitar pickups work are actually wrong. And that's according to guys like Jeff Lace and Seymour Duncan and Lindy Frayland and Dr. Z and a bunch of other people that I've spoken to that are in the business of making pickups. You'll often see a picture with these magnetic field lines emanating from the pickup, and they'll say that the steel string disturbs the magnetic field, creating a current in the coil. That's not how it works. An electric guitar is a classic generator, a magnet moving past the coil, and what happens is the magnet magnetizes is the string. and then the string becomes a magnet moving past the coil. And I actually have a video up on YouTube where I pulled the rod magnets out of a fender pickup and just mounted a bar magnet down at the, stuck a bar magnet down on the bridge so there was magnetic continuity to the strings. And it's not as loud as a conventional pickup does, but it actually does work. So the idea is you need to magnetize the string enough so that it can create a signal in the coil or the reed, but in have such a strong magnet that it dampens the reed, affects the pitch, or even worse, it tracks it and it sticks to the magnet. There's sort of a sweet spot. There's a range of magnetic force that I needed to use. Like I said, I've gotten lucky a couple times. I can't use conventional magnets because I need a long, because harmonicas are small, the area that I need to have it located is very small, so everything is very small scale, or let's say long and skinny. So conventional magnets, ceramic or Alnico, they're too brittle to be fabricated in the size I need. Fortunately, there's what people call refrigerator magnets, flexible magnets, that I've been using until now, laser cutting, that are in that sweet spot. And so basically the trick is to magnetize the reed enough, but not too much.

SPEAKER_00:

So you mentioned there, obviously, that you've got some, you needed to use steel reeds, which Zydle created for you. So they provide the re-plates, Ryan.

SPEAKER_02:

A lot of people in the industry have been very gracious to me in terms of helping me with the project because I'm very small scale. Zottel supplies the actual harmonica components, meaning the reeds, reed plates, and combs. They're basically session steel components for their session steel harmonicas, but this was an idea that Brendan Power came up with. What they do is I have them, both plates use blow plates. If people take a part of harmonica, they'll know that the two reed plates are manufactured differently. The blow plates have the rivet right up against your mouth, and the tips point away from you, and the draw plates have the rivet on the distal side of the plate, and the tips point towards the player. I think the reason why they do that is that they visibly differentiate between the two reeds, otherwise they're visibly identical, and it would create manufacturing problems. So they sound identical, so basically I have them do a little bit of custom work for me, so that I can basically have the pickups where I want to have the pickups. And then the rest of the components I either make myself, I'm 3D printing a lot of stuff, the tone and control, volume and tone control I source from Asia.

SPEAKER_00:

So just to make it clear to everybody then, is that you need to use custom harmonicas with the Harmonicaster?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, it's a system.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so you can't use this with your own harmonicas. You need to use custom harmonicas. So you mentioned steel reeds and you've been explaining about how magnets work with pickups. So going further into that point then, the need for steel reeds is due to that, yeah? You need the magnetism from the reeds to be able to work with a picker.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. I mean, nickel, anything magnetic would work, but they do make now reeds out of steel.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, because electric guitar strings are typically nickel,

SPEAKER_02:

aren't they, I think? No, they're steel. They're sometimes pure nickel. Sometimes they're nickel with a steel winding. I'm a little agnostic about tone woods and tone. I think 90% of the tone of an electric instrument, like a guitar or my harmonic caster, comes from the vibrating elements, meaning the reeds or the strings and the pickup. And then the speaker on your amplifier has a major function Anything else that can contribute to the way the reed resonates or the string resonates, yeah, that'll affect the tone, but I think it's a relatively minor thing. It's mostly the sound of an electric guitar is the sound of the pickups mostly and the speaker.

SPEAKER_00:

One thing that most harmonica players who play live will know is that electric guitars are very loud, right? They get instant sort of response, so pickups work great on electric guitars, right? And you talked about the challenges of getting that to work on the smaller form factor of a of a harmonica so what are some of the challenges around you know transferring that power of the electric guitar pickups to the harmonica

SPEAKER_02:

well there was initially a physical constraint of actually getting a magnet that was the size that I needed that was capable of being manufactured that wouldn't break into pieces like conventional magnets so there was that and I use a laser to cut the cut because it's very difficult to cut something three millimeters wide accurately unless you have a die or you know use a laser so And I've been laser cutting them. And like I said, it's a tricky thing. The more powerful the magnet is, the more output you get out of the pickup. But if you get too far, you'll start affecting, as a matter of fact, you'll start affecting the vibration of the reed. As a matter of fact, Jim Ontake, the guy that made the Turbo Harp, I think Seidel, I think, was selling it for a while, a tunable harmonica that used little neodymium magnets to affect the way the reed was vibrating. So I don't want to do that, obviously. So You do get immediate response, and that led to addressing an issue. 80% of the people that have heard it have liked the tone. That's what Mad Cat said to me the first time he heard it. He says, yeah, other people have tried it, but yeah, they just made sine wave generators and they need to do DSP to get it to sound like a harmonica again. He said, you made an electric harmonica. It still sounds like a harmonica, just like an electric guitar still sounds like a guitar. But it's got that, it sounds cliché, an electric vibrancy to

SPEAKER_01:

it.

UNKNOWN:

...

SPEAKER_00:

just to be clear on that point so we're calling it electric harmonica which is fine but it is an acoustic harmonica that attaches to the pickups yeah so

SPEAKER_02:

they can be used as a conventional acoustic harmonica they're not quite as loud as a comparable session still for a couple reasons um i'm using avs plastic cover plates that are color-coded to the keys because it's a system so they mate with the with with the pickup and control housing but also i was gonna say the vast majority of people like the tone it's just that the most advanced players could hear The reeds sustain for a while, which they do in any harmonica. You just can't hear it. Even on a microphone, there's a little brief burst of sustain afterwards. And pickups, when I was doing some initial testing with the bass pickups... a pickup will actually sense sense that vibration from inches away i mean it may not be an audible signal but there is a signal there so i'm of the opinion that experienced professional musicians or people making musical instruments or amplifiers have trained ears and may be able to hear things that the general public cannot hear and one of the things they were complaining about was the sustain because they thought it was was smearing the articulation of the notes because there was still a little bit of droning going on in the background if particularly on the bigger, lower reeds. And so what I initially, I spent about two years working on an active version of it that used active noise suppression and things like that. But in the end, I'm just putting little foam dampers on the base of the reeds by the rivets, which is sufficient to dampen the tail under the vibration without affecting the pitch. So that's one of the sort of mechanical engineering challenges that there were, but so far people are happy with it, and they're been any complaints about the pitch. It's funny, because about the pitch, I mentioned Brendan Powers had warned me that on the earlier versions we're going to have pitch issues, and I said, well, nobody's complained about it yet, and then a couple people complained about it, and I asked the guy who I'd paid money, I'd hired to demo for me at a NAMM show, I said, Will says there's pitch issues, you've never mentioned it. Well, yeah, I guess there are some pitch issues, and it's, oh, okay, you wanted to work for me next year. And that's one of the challenges, because you had mentioned in our correspondence what the reaction of the harmonica community has been to it, and harmonica players are very traditional and resistant to change. They're married to their microphones, many of them refuse to use pedals. And I'm not diminishing them at all. If you've spent 20 to 30 years working on a technique with a microphone, and I love the sound of a microphone harmonica. I got microphones myself. I play it. There was Snooki Pryor or Little Walter, whoever was at first plugged in. That's a cool sound.

UNKNOWN:

¶¶

SPEAKER_02:

I have nothing against it, and this is just another tool for the toolbox. It's like I like to tell people, in 1948, somebody said, Leo, it doesn't look like my Martin, it doesn't sound like my Martin, it doesn't play like my Martin. You call that thing a guitar? So I've had to sort of listen to a lot of criticism from a lot of people and try to winnow out the... actual constructive criticism from resistance to change. So, like, I'll have people say, well, can I use my, I like Hohner's, or I like Lee Oscar's, or I like this brand of harmonica, can I use one? And I'll say, well, no, to begin with, it's a system, and secondarily, those are brass, and brass won't, brass are bronze, and those won't work with magnets. And they look at me sort of confused.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, so let's talk about some of the, you know, advantages of, you know, why people would want to use this harmonic caster the first of all you know first of all talking about the sound you've talked a little bit about that already but you know it's a bit different isn't it than the sound of using a microphone

SPEAKER_02:

It's a little bit different, but it's still a harmonica. I mean, it's a different tone. And you can manipulate a signal from a microphone, too. But there's a lot more devices out there that are meant for modulating or manipulating the signal out of a pickup. And so if the tone doesn't particularly suit you, I'm not saying most, like I said, the vast majority of people here at the ears pick up and they say, oh, wow, that's cool. There's equal, you can EQ stuff. I mean, there's things beyond the harmonica that you can do. Most, like I said, the vast majority of people hear it, their eyebrows go up, and they go, wow, that's surprising, because it does sound kind of cool. The best analogy I can give is between an electric and acoustic guitar. It's still there, it's still the same instrument, but there's an immediacy, a vibrancy, there's some sustain, and it's loud. And that gets into one of the advantages of the harmonic caster, is that because it's based I'm not saying you can't get it to feedback, but you have to be putting it in a gain situation that you would never be playing at and stick the harmonica literally inches from the speaker in order to get it to feedback. I test things. I use a Boss Katana 100-watt amp as my main test rig. It's very convenient, it's pedal-friendly, and it's light. I can dime the amp volume gain and master all the way up on the clean and lead channels without any feedback. If I turn it all the way up to what I think is the brown sound setting, which is like really high gain... can kind of force it to feedback but under normal playing circumstances you're not going to get lost in the mix you can play as loudly as you want and it's not going to feedback

SPEAKER_00:

yeah so that would be one of the you know the sort of number one advantage right is you don't really get feedback and like you say unless you really push it and right you can get electric guitars to feedback of course

SPEAKER_02:

and to be honest i would love to be able to have controlled feedback on it okay it'd be it'd be a cool thing to do i've seen some guys play with a microphone deliberately feeding back you know literally sticking the mic in the amp and the audience goes crazy and every harp player in the room covers their ears because you don't do that. And the audience loves it, so what are you going to say? But I would like to believe that the major advantage is that it's got this cool tone. But in terms of practical advantages is it can't feed back. It's got other practical advantages in that you can manipulate the sound with effects.

UNKNOWN:

...

SPEAKER_01:

so

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, another thing it does is that there's no breath noise that you get off microphones, which is quite often very prominent.

SPEAKER_02:

I hadn't even thought about that. And Jonah Fox, who did a review of it, brought that up. He also said you can sort of use it as a silent microphone. It's not truly silent, but it's like those silent guitars. And the fact that you can play amplified and your wife won't hear the noise on the amplifier.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, you can wear headphones with your amp.

SPEAKER_02:

The pickups are a bit microphonic. You can hear when I'm jostling the unit or mounting a harmonica on there, the volume's up, you're going to hear it. Actually, that's how I basically test them, is I tap them. But that's okay, that's cool too, because it keeps that natural microphone tone as part of the overall tone. So it's different, but it's not that different. So you can play Chicago-style blues with it. It's not just a noisemaker, it's not just a device to use with pedals. You can play to blues, as they say.

SPEAKER_00:

So let's talk about the form factor of it now. And so it's kind of rectangular shape.

SPEAKER_02:

I like to say, if people remember how big a Sony Walkman, with the harmonica mounted on the housing, it's about the size of a Walkman. The control housing, which has the pickups and the controls and the jacks and switch, is a little bit wider. The harmonica is, I think, 104 millimeters wide, a little more than four inches, but it's about four inches wide. So the how is a little bit wider. It's, I think, 120 millimeters wide. And it's just as compact as I can possibly get it and still fit all the electronics of an electric guitar inside something that you can hold in your hand. People sometimes say, well, it looks big and bulky. It's actually easier to hold than cupping a microphone and a harmonica in the same hand.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and you've got... It's also lighter, isn't it? You've got some weights on your website around saying it's...

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it weighs... With a harmonica, it weighs depending... I mean, you know, there are tolerances in the plastics and things like that, but it's in the neighborhood of 200 grams, about six ounces. That's compared to just a microphone. A green bullet weighs almost a pound by itself.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so you've got the green bullet and a marine band weighing 424 grams and a marine band with a JT30 weighing 348 grams. So it's kind of half the weight of one with a green bullet. So it's definitely light. I mean, one thing about the shape of it is, again, it isn't kind of cup-shaped like a... like a traditional microphone is.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's not round, and so some people might think it's not ergonomic. It's just 33 millimeters tall where you hold it, because you're holding it by the housing, not by the harp. The harp is held in with very strong neodymium magnets that are either embedded in the cover plates or glued into the housing. So it's half the height of a microphone. So if you look, at least my hand, if I sort of make that sort of cup feeling where i'd be holding a harmonica it's actually sort of a rectangular shape so it does it fits nicely in the hand the all the corners all the edges are rounded i like what they call squircles um all the corners are rounded it fits in the hand very nicely ergonomically the the volume and bass and treble controls are right there by your your right fingers the uh one of the things that i i changed uh in response to to jonah fox's review is i relocated the jack from the left i I'm right-handed, so the jack on the left side didn't bother me, but Jonas holds with the left-handed grip, so now the jack comes out of the bottom of the unit. So it's a little more friendly to lefties.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And holding it is, because it's not rounded, you can't use hand effects like a traditional microphone. But, I mean, again, because it's an electric microphone, that sort of, you know, the air sort of doesn't work in the same way, right, anyway.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. Well, that's, that was one of the first things, you know, Mad Cat is one of the world's best at hand effects. It's part of his technique. And that's what he said. He said, I can't use my hand wise and the smart-ass that I am, I said, well, that's what the wah pedal's for. That's one thing. You cannot use a wah pedal on a microphone. It's sweeping frequencies that are just going to drive the feedback crazy. You are giving up the hand-wise, but at the same time, you can do volume swells, like the Roy Buchanan Telecaster thing with his pinky. You can do volume swells, because the volume control is right there by your index finger, right at your fingertips, and you can also do tremolo with that and you can do true vibrato because the the just stick your finger over both the bass and one or the other or both and you can fiddle with the with the pitch

SPEAKER_00:

yeah so like you say there there's this so there's three controls on the top which you can reach for your fingers when you're playing and that's volume bass and treble yeah

SPEAKER_02:

there's also a toggle switch on top uh initially the toggle switch was to was for coil splitting i wasn't hearing that much of a tonal difference And I decided to change it. I recently made a production change where it's now bypassing the volume and tone controls. It's hot wiring the pickups directly to the amp, which gives a little bit more output and a little bit brighter thing. Because even when everything, even when the controls are fully dimed, they're still loading the pickup a little. So I actually, I got that idea from Jack White's signature Telecaster, actually. He's got a switch on there that bypasses the volume and tone controls. And that's just sort of giving it an onboard little boost. It's passive, but it's audibly louder if you're soloing or something like that. And that's also on the top, and that's right near your left hand.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and so on that switch, it also gives you... So you've got two pickup types. You've got the single coil and the humbucker pickups.

SPEAKER_02:

That's what it was originally. Oh, that's what you've changed it for? Yeah, I've changed it. It really wasn't single coil because it's quasi-single coil, but it's more split coil and the full split coil switch. I just frankly wasn't... I may be too old to hear it, but I frankly wasn't hearing that much of a tonal difference, whereas the bypass is audible and I think is a more practical... more use for the player.

SPEAKER_03:

Hey, what's happening, y'all? Jason Ritchie from Blue Moon Harmonicas, and I'm here to tell you that Blue Moon Harmonicas are the way. You can customize them yourself, or you can get Tom to do them. The website is a rabbit hole. We're talking about custom combs, custom cover plates, throwbacks, refurbished pre-wars, double reed plates, anything you can imagine, aluminum, ABS, plastic, phenolic resin, wood, any kind of comb you want, any kind of covered Tom Halcheck's your man he's got you

SPEAKER_02:

And also in terms of appearance, I'm a Detroiter and I've got a side gig writing about cars. There's a grill on the front of it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, a nice car grill on there, yeah. You talk about, obviously, you know, the big advantage, one thing you might lose is hand effects, but it opens up a whole new world of pedals, right? Because pedals used with a harmonica microphone generally have to be sort of custom-made pedals. You can use a few of those reverbs and delays which aren't custom-made for harmonicas, but generally you can't use the whole plethora of guitar pedals but this is pretty much open to well a vast majority of those

SPEAKER_02:

I would say the I can't say all because there are modulation pedals that are designed around the shape of a picked guitar note I'm a deadhead, so of course I have envelope filters here. And some envelope filters, it doesn't trigger. Others, they sound cool, really cool. I mean, yeah, you can sound like Jerry on your harmonica if you want to. So with some of the modulation pedals that are tracking the signal and are really meant around guitars, I would say no. But the vast majority of pedals, certainly any kind of gain, distortion...

SPEAKER_01:

Most,

SPEAKER_02:

the vast majority of pedals will, you know, it's compatible with it, because basically, electronically, it's an electric guitar.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so, I mean, just to explain that further then, so, you know, what is it about using the harmonica cast of microphone that, you know, that means you can use the pedals over a conventional harmonica?

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, well, it's, number one, it's not a microphone, it's pickups.

SPEAKER_00:

No. I know. It's a pickup,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah. To begin with, microphones can have impedance matching issues, and same thing with whether pedals are amplifiers. You know, that can be solved with just a matching transformer, but not every pedal will work with every microphone. And in some cases, when they're doing some of the modulation, in the case of a wah pedal or some of the, you know, like the Freak Out or some of the Pitch Shifters or things like that, you might run into a situation when using that with a microphone that it's just going to create feedback and stuff like that. One pedal that I don't like using it with is fuzz. You have to be really... It's like pepper and food, you know? It's just a... Because the harmonica is very raspy to begin with. That's, I think, one of the reasons why people, no pun intended, resonate with the harmonica is it's very human voice-like. The way the reed creates the sound is very much similar to the way our vocal cords create that sound. And there's a little bit of a rasp to the harmonica sound, and it's already got that fuzz there. I've already been into it. But other than that, I have literally a closet full of different pedals that I like trying with it. One of my favorites is Robert Keeley makes a what's it called, the MS-30 or something. It's based on the Beatles' Abbey Road vocal doubling. If the player's ears are open enough to be willing to explore pedals, that opens up just a whole world of tone possibilities and sound possibilities that aren't there.

UNKNOWN:

...

SPEAKER_00:

But an overdrive pedal is a good example, right, where you're getting, obviously, an overdriven sound out of an electric guitar that you couldn't get through a harmonica microphone because you'd just be getting feedback straight away.

SPEAKER_02:

And one of the problems I personally have is I'm just, like I mentioned, Leo Fender maybe could play some cowboy chords. Lawrence Hammond was so profoundly tone-deaf he was described as a musical. All of his early employees were musicians because he needed their airs. And I've had to rely on a lot of players, both here in the area and internationally, who have been great. with their time and advice. And I want to make it clear that any of the Harmonica players I have mentioned, here's the official disclaimer, are not endorses or endorsers. They've just been gracious with their time and been cool about helping to move the technology forward.

SPEAKER_00:

I think there's a line on your website where it says that the harmonic cast is there for people to explore and make new sounds, right? Sort of like Hendrix on the guitar, no one knew that he was going to make the sounds he did out of the electric guitar,

SPEAKER_02:

so... Rickenbacker and Leo and Bixby and all those early guys that worked in Les Paul, they couldn't anticipate stuff. It says in the Ethics of the Fathers, who is wise? He who sees the end of a thing from its birth. You know, who Who can tell? I can't tell what people can do with it. It's just I want to put it out there. While I was working on the active version, the noise circuit that I was using was from ISP Technologies, the decimator pedal. They're local here in the Detroit area, and Buck Wilder's one of the world's experts at noise suppression. And so I asked him once, I said, it's kind of cool when a great musician uses your stuff, isn't it? And he told me a really cool story how they were putting on a showcasing at one of the NAMs or something, where Steve Lukather and Alan Holdsworth were playing for them. And it was a private event, and some guy carrying a guitar comes to the door, and the woman with the list isn't having any of it, and she's just not letting him in, you know. And he says, no, no, no, Alan's a mate of mine. No, these are friends of mine. And Don Lace walked up to explain to the woman, yes, you could let Jeff back into our event.

SPEAKER_00:

So going back to what the sounds you can make out of it, is obviously you talked about effects pedals and there's a whole world of effects pedals which we can we can try but the other interesting thing is that you can use guitar amplifiers you know non-modified guitar amplifiers so

SPEAKER_02:

right if you want to try play through a marshall stack or a dual rectifier or something like that turn it up

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so what typically happens with harmonica amplifiers is that when you use an amplifier with a harmonica, you can use guitar amplifiers, but generally if you do, you have to change the tube so you're turning down the gain so you're not getting the feedback. And then often you have the amplifiers modified so they're a bit more friendly with the harmonica as well on the feedback. So you really have the opportunity to use the kind of screaming high gain sort of amplifiers that are available for guitars.

SPEAKER_02:

You don't have to worry if you're showing up at a gig, whatever the back line is, too. I mean, you know, you can use a DI box if you want to just go right to the board. Anything that'll work with a guitar in terms of DI stuff will work with this, so I'm not looking to get rich off of this. To begin with, I'm 70 years old. And it is slowly becoming accepted. I've sold a few of them. I haven't gotten any negative feedback from any of the customers yet. What feedback I've gotten from them has been glowing, and we want to buy more harps. Which, considering that the additional harmonicas are not inexpensive, is a bit of an endorsement from at least the customers. You know, I've sold a few full sets. You want to buy 12? I'll sell you 12. The additional, just address The basic system is$325 and it comes with one A-harp. I figure that's the most common one that Yeah, I know if you buy a set, it comes with a C, but no, we play an A harp. And each additional harmonica is$85. I would like to charge less than that. It's okay, it's fair for a premium harmonica, and there are specialty harmonicas that are up into the$140,$150 range for some of the diatonics. But Ziddle charges me what they charge me, and I really don't have much of a margin on the additional ones. But that's the cost of being a small... small businesses.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think, you know, talking about the price,$325 for the Harmonicaster and an A-harp is not bad. I mean, you know, a premium microphone, you could easily pay more than that.

SPEAKER_02:

And if it's a custom mic that's turned out of some burled wood or something, you're going to pay$300,$400,$500 for a custom

SPEAKER_00:

mic. Yeah, so that price, and like you say, you know, another harp,$85, so, you know, maybe buy a two or three, so you've got four or five maybe at

SPEAKER_02:

the most. It annoys me that I can buy, my brother lives in Jerusalem and and he needed a local radiologist that he knew here in detroit to look over some cat scans of his and the radiologist was nervous about viruses so he wouldn't take it on a thumb drive and the easiest fastest most convenient i didn't want to pull the one off my laptop off of my my laser and stuff so i went to micro center and for eighty dollars i bought a laptop with windows 10 on it doesn't have a whole lot of memory on it but it's fine for a tiny little laptop and i'm looking at this thing and i'm thinking they're selling all that technology for and I got to charge$325 for them. And if I was a larger company and I could buy... Now, there's a limit. You know, the harmonica components are going to come from Germany. They're not going to be cheap. The pickups are made, completely made in the United States other than maybe the magnets. The supply chain on the pickup starts in Reno, Nevada where they're laser cut out of aluminum. Then they send them to me. I do some metal shaping and then I glue in the magnets and then I send them out to California where lace adds their... the Illumitone coils and leads, and then they come back here to Detroit. Speaking of the magnets, and I have to decide whether I'm going to be doing this as an option or I'm just going to do a production change. To quote Josh Scott from JHS Pedals, loud is more good. Everybody wants louder. And so I've been trying to develop higher output pickups. And I was sort of running into a constraint that I was already using the highest output flexible magnets that are made. And I kind of stumbled into, I don't want to take full credit because I'm not responsible for the fact that they actually had things that were the size that I need, but to get into that range that I spoke about before of the field strength of the magnets, that it's got to be that sort of Goldilocks, just right area. And I've been using neodymiums as latches for a while. So I'm, you know, and I just thought to myself, well, gee, what if I use a really small version of a really powerful magnet? And so it just so happens, and because there's AI available, I was able to not have to do all the math myself. And actually, before I even tried the prototype, I was pretty sure that it would work in terms of field strength. So what I've done is I've replaced the And like I said, I'm not sure if this is going to be an option or a production run. But instead of a strip of flexible magnet, there's now just a strip of rigid magnet that has some tiny holes in it that each has an individual neodymium that's 2 millimeters wide. It's 2 millimeters in diameter by 1.5 millimeters thick. I can control it based on the size of them. But the first one I tried was giving me 9 dBs more gain at the speaker, and then using the largest ones that I can actually process. If I make them too big, the carrier is going to be too fragile. There won't be anything to hold them. I was measuring, two feet from the speaker, I was measuring a 20 dB increase, and that's a huge increase in loudness.

SPEAKER_00:

So is this magnet in the current version, or is this one you're looking at?

SPEAKER_02:

It probably will be a production change. When I get the next, I'm filling a couple orders, those probably will have the newer magnets. Right,

SPEAKER_00:

yeah, so they're already now, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

But I would like to have the, one of the things that I've wanted from the beginning is, this opens up a lot of options to me, because I can offer for differently voiced pickups now. I can go down and have sort of an intermediate output pickup, and I can go up and have it sort of full bore, or I can go back to the... And there are some slight tonal differences, you know, but between the flex magnets and the neodyms. And

SPEAKER_00:

is it possible for people to change the pickups on the harmonicas themselves, or are they sort of too hardwired

SPEAKER_02:

into the... Well, you're talking to an inventor that has... a laser in his kitchen and 3D printers in his dining room. So I don't know what skills people have. If you can assemble a kit, If you can follow...

SPEAKER_00:

But it's not a simple switch in and out.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, because you have to complete... In order to get at the pickups, you have to take out some of the other parts. But it's not something... If they have some small tools, it's not something... It's nothing that do-it-yourselfer couldn't do. Yes, if you know enough to change the pickups in a guitar and solder them... Now, in this case, the change is not... I can modify the pickups one to the other. They're all interchangeable. It's just the... that I put in the slot. So to change from, if somebody wanted to upgrade to a higher output pickup, I would just upgrade, I would just modify the pickups themselves rather than have them replace it. It's not that hard. They'd have to, four screws, two nuts. They basically have to remove the jack and volume control so that they can get at the hardware that mounts the thing. And then it might be helpful to have a nut driver for the three millimeter nuts that hold things in. But yeah, it's something people could do. That's one of the things that I get tickled the most isn't, oh, wow, I made this and it works. It's like, oh, it all goes together.

SPEAKER_00:

So you talked about other things that you're looking at with the Electrical Harmonica Company. What are some of those two other things you mentioned that you have in mind?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, okay. Well, I have a small collection of vintage solid-state amplifiers because most of those hits on classic rock stations were done on solid-state amps. And I have a couple of those tuck-and-roll custom amps, and they're PA amps, and they have an anti-feedback circuit on it. It's a cool little circuit that, in addition of the filters it's got a side circuit that still lets some of the the mid highs go through so it sounds pretty natural because it was made for vocals originally but if it's going to work for vocals so that's going to be called the backless and the backless plus that with the the simple version is just a single a single band filter the backless plus would be as a three band filter a noise suppressor an isp noise suppressor for when you're not playing and you know, in between notes. And it also is going to have a low-Z, both a quarter-inch and an XLR low-Z input on it, so it's a little friendly to most microphones. So basically a simple version and a more deluxe version. It's an anti-feedback pedal, is what it is. There are a lot of anti-feedback pedals out there. Some of them actually work. The Kinder works. but some people don't like the way it sounds, but that works. There are anti-feedback devices that work, and this is just something I figure. There are people that will not try my harmonica. I should be able to sell something to somebody that doesn't want a harmonica player that won't play my harmonica.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so the anti-feedback pedal. Is there another thing you're working on?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, the other thing that I'm working on is I've sold a handful of them, so I'm calling it the Frank Harmonica Microphone in honor of Frank Sternad. I don't know if you're familiar with the Sternad Harmonica Microphone. but there was a guy in Flint, Michigan that was in a harmonica trio with his brothers and he developed a handless harmonica microphone where it was basically designed around honers where there was a groove in the front you slid the harmonica into the groove and that holds the harmonica into it and Frank died about 15 years ago and a couple people have tried putting it back into production but it's not currently in production and I looked at it and it was within my rudimentary CAD skills to design it and And so I'm making both a dynamic and electric version of that. I changed the design a little from grooves to closed-cell foam so that it can accommodate a broader range of brands. Actually, I made one guy a chromatic version, too. So the guy that's selling a harmonica that won't feed back because microphones feed back is also selling microphones. Because I've got nothing against microphones. I mean, they're... And so far, the people that have gotten them like it. So it's relatively inexpensive to make.

SPEAKER_00:

And so what about your plans? As you said, you're 70. Have you got any long-term plans for the company? Are you working with somebody who's going to carry it on into the future? Have you thought about that?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, well, my son plays guitar. My younger daughter's taking lessons. It's funny, I was at the automotive engineers convention, and a woman engineer says, well, did you encourage your daughters to go into the sciences? I says... I have a 3D printer in my dining room. What do you think? They weren't interested. I tried. No, but I'll see. Sometimes I wish some Chinese company would knock me off and popularize the idea. I'm not looking to sell thousands of them. I'm kind of sort of looking at this as sort of more like a boutique luthier kind of setup where they're all made to order, which is nice because I'm 3D printing. I have a lot of options available to me. If you want a purple control housing, I'll make you of purple control housing. I'm color-coding the cover plates to the keys. There's a system called BoomWacker to teach kids how to play music, and it keys the notes to colors. And you've got a case full of identical-looking harmonicas, and I can print them in different colors, so I'm going to make them in different colors to make it a little easier for you to identify the key. Fortunately, also, ZYDAL makes combs in matching colors, so it works out. And also, because there's the rapid prototyping aspect of it, if I had a when I switch, for example, when I switch the switch, the new switch is slightly larger, so I had to go into my CAD program and spend a couple hours fiddling with it and give me enough room in there, because things are very tight inside there. I would like to make it smaller, but I really can't make it any smaller than it is. A jack is so big, potentiometers are so big, just parts take up space, and it's really down to the fraction of the millimeter in there. As a matter of fact, when I rotated the jack so that the output was on the bottom of the thing, I had to shave away some plastic on the inside of the parts so that the tip of the... Everything is shielded. There's a company near Toronto that makes really high-quality shielding paint, and plastic doesn't shield, so all the interior of the plastic parts are painted with shielding paint, and there's continuity, there's electrical continuity throughout the unit, so I can't have anything active touching the surfaces, so I had to make sure there was clearance there, so it and ground out the tip but

SPEAKER_00:

so it's a great run I think you've created a definitely a very interesting thing and a huge gap in the market if we can have a an electric harmonica as we say we're using using pickups definitely worth having in your arsenal and as you said there you don't necessarily want it to replace your microphone it might be something that people are interested in purchasing you know trying it out getting one or two harps or even just one to try and then and then you know experimenting with different pedals different amplifiers I think that's where the real beauty of this is right and you can you can really experiment with the sounds and and see what you can do with it which is different than what you can do with the microphone you know and potentially use both and uh you know it's not it's not exclusive the one to the other is it

SPEAKER_02:

the cliche i like to use it's a new tool for your tonal toolbox you know it's not it's not how many times have you nowadays in current year how many when you go to a concert that's more than just a club and even a club how many guitar players only play a single guitar for the whole show They'll pick out the specific instrument that serves. And in some cases, I feel that this may serve, number one, besides new opportunities and making new music. There's existing music that this might, you know, it's like... If you're going to do a cover of Voodoo Child, you might want to have a wah pedal while you're doing a cover of Voodoo Child, okay? It's part of the sound of Voodoo Child, okay? Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

absolutely. And then the big thing with the guitars is, you know, they've got a whole palette of sounds from different guitars, different pickups, but also the different pedals they have. We just don't have that same palette of sounds with harmonica, right? So to open that up is a great avenue, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

It's funny, I respect what the guys at Lone Wolf are doing. As a matter of fact, when I was showing at the Spa Convention a couple years ago in St. Louis, I asked them, I said, do you mind, we're sort of competitors, but do you mind if I plug into one of your overdrive pedals? And he said, yeah, but it's not going to sound good because it's made from microphones. And that's also a cool thing. I think there's so much opportunity for people to do new things with it. Not just with my thing. I mean, there's Mitch Granger's Dynamike. There's the Lecombe, the MIDI device. You know, it's not 1948 anymore. You know, it's time to move the instrument into the 21st century. And I can work off some of my creative juices doing this. You know, it's... And one thing I have to say that's very cool about harmonica is it's maybe quite possibly the world's most popular instrument in terms of the number of people who actually play it or try to play it. But if you go to the Arlington Guitar Show in Texas, you might run into Billy Gibbons. Like I ran into Tommy Emanuel at a NAMM show and I got a private little five-minute concert from one of the world's best musicians, right? But you're not going to be able to sit in a workshop with them, you know, unless you pay real money to go to some guitar camp or something like that. If you go to the SPA convention, at least five of the ten best harmonica players in any time in the world are going to be at that convention. And you're going to be able to interact with them, and they're really cool to beginners. There's very little ego there. Everybody's part of this small community, and it's a really cool thing. And what I think is really funny about harmonica is the world's most famous harmonica players are disrespected by harmonica players. somebody's you know my sister's a huge bruce springsteen fan and i mean like front row of the broadway show kind of fan right and she said oh give me one i'll throw it up on stage and i said that will do me no good at all with the community of harmonica players and by the way dylan can play

SPEAKER_00:

no that's good yeah we agree with that

SPEAKER_02:

no no dylan no i've seen i've seen dylan play second position blues live yeah he's been playing harmonica for 70 years he should know how to play 60 70 years he shouldn't know that's just how he plays and it's I think

SPEAKER_00:

you've definitely created a very interesting thing there, Ronnie, which is definitely to be applauded, and I hope the harmonica players listening can experiment with it and take it further.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, thanks so much for joining me today, Ronnie Schreiber.

SPEAKER_02:

And have a good time in Marriott.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. And be sure to check out the great range of harmonicas and products at www.zidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidel Harmonicas. Thanks to Ronnie for joining me today. He's certainly created an interesting alternative to the harmonica microphone that we all know and love. And it will be interesting to see how it develops and what new sounds it might bring to the harmonica. Check out Ronnie's website for more information, and there are also some YouTube videos where you can see demos of the Harmonicaster. Links for both are on the podcast show notes page. The audio clips of the Harmonicaster in this episode were recorded by me, using a Positive Grid Spark Mini Amp with various guitar amp emulators and effects used to provide a range of sounds. and another reminder that the harmonica happy hour.com website now allows you to view the podcast episodes in categories so you can find episodes according to different harmonica types genres of music and more this feature is only available when listening to the podcast via the website and not through a podcast player on your smartphone however you could still find a podcast episode of interest on the website and then listen to that on your phone's podcast player so thanks for listening again and please send me any comments or suggestions you might have for the show they're always welcome and it's great to hear from you. You can contact me via the contact form on the harmonicahappyhour.com website. I'll sign out now with me playing a version of Walter Horton's Easy, Almost Lost My Mind, using the Harmonicaster through the Positive Grid smart amp.

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.