Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
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Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
John Cook interview
John is a harmonica repairer and customiser. Following years of experience as a toolmaker John moved into repairing musical instruments, initially for woodwind instruments, before tapping into a rich vein of work repairing harmonicas. As well as many private clients, he now does repair work for the big three manufacturers.
This has led to John now making quite possibly the only hand-made harmonica in the world today, under the name The Great British Harmonica company.
Select the Chapter Markers tab above to select different sections of the podcast (website version only).
John's website:
http://www.johncookharmonicas.com/
Julius Berthold book:
http://www.johncookharmonicas.com/book-julius-berthold
John's saxophone stands:
http://www.saxrax.com
John's engraving website:
https://www.johncookengraving.co.uk/
YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBdedNWMD0l6o3Y1Nyv1sLw
Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com
Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB
Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ
Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/
Hi, Neil Warren here again and welcome to another episode of the Happy Hour Harmonica podcast, with more interviews with some of the finest harmonica players around today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and also check out the Spotify playlist, where some of the tracks discussed during the interviews can be heard. A quick word from my sponsor now, the Long Wolf Blues Company, makers of effects pedals, microphones and more, designed for harmonica. Remember, when you want control over your tone, you want Lone Wolf. Something a little bit different today as John Cook joins me. John is a harmonica repairer and customiser. Following years of experience as a toolmaker, John moved into repairing musical instruments, initially woodwind instruments, before tapping into a rich vein of work repairing harmonicas. He now does repair work for the three big manufacturers. This has all culminated in John now building his very own harmonica, making quite possibly the only handmade harmonica in the world today, under the name the Great British Harmonica Company.
SPEAKER_03:So hello
SPEAKER_00:John Cook and welcome to the podcast. Hello, good to be here. Great. Thanks. Great to have you. So, John, you're a harmonica repairer slash customizer. So it's a little bit different today. So, yeah, we're going to talk about your story to become a harmonica customizer. So
SPEAKER_02:you
SPEAKER_00:were born in London initially and moved out to Essex. And your dad, I think, was a big influence, wasn't he? He worked for Ford and he had a hardware store. So, yeah, maybe tell us about how you got interested in fixing stuff.
SPEAKER_01:I was actually born in Essex. I was born in Billericay. 1965 my parents were from the east end my dad was from East Ham and my mother was from Dagenham and back in the early 50s people were moving out of London they were going east and they were going to what they believed to be the countryside and the countryside in the early 60s was Basildon can't believe it now but back in the day it was a Basildon new town so we ended up in Basildon That's where I lived in
SPEAKER_00:my early
SPEAKER_01:days.
SPEAKER_00:Your dad worked for Ford, and he had an interest in tools. So I think you were inspired early on, and were your granddad as well. They liked to fix things. Is that what got you interested in tinkering with things and fixing things yourself at an early age?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. When we moved to Basildon, my father was working at Ford's. I didn't know it at the time. He was a jigs and fixtures engineer. And he used to make tools to put the cars together. So when Henry Ford was making a car, put the engine in and there was a difficult nut to screw together, they would call on him, make these special tools. So that's really where I suppose the first influence come from because when we lived in Basel, he sort of had a garage. Now when you're two or three years old, just a six by four garage, it was like a castle. So when you walked into this garage and it's full of tools, sort of mind blowing really. So that was really my first sort of indication of the tool business was just seeing how many tools my father owned. My grandfather before that worked for British Telecom and he was an engineer as well. Again, he had a shed and it was full of tools. He used to go to a market in the East End called Club Row on a Sunday and he used to just pick up old tools and broken televisions and radios. He'd take them home and he'd plug them all into one socket. You shouldn't be doing this really, but you wind all the wires around a screwdriver, stick it into the plug socket and run about 10 televisions off of one plug. It was fantastic to see how he would be fixing equipment. And then my father and mother up and moved and my father bought a hardware shop in Hornchurch, Roy's Hardware. He still works at Ford's, but for some reason, unbeknown to me, he decided to open a shop selling nuts and bolts and screws. And we used to live in the flat above and as a five-year-old it was absolutely fascinating I'd go down my job was to fill these big pitchers of paraffin for the old guys to put their heaters on in their greenhouses again it was like a sweet shop for me all these nuts and bolts and spanners we would have now one of the things that he did do and it sort of installed in me that he worked full-time at Ford's he owned a shop that my mother ran six days a week He would also take on some market stores. And at the weekend, we would also have a market store where we would go and set up. So he really worked seven days a week for years and years. He still comes in now. He's 87, a couple of weeks ago. He still comes in and he tells me that we should be opening more hours and that I should be doing a lot more work than I am. So he's
SPEAKER_00:still hammering me down. So great. So some great inspiration there to get you interested in fixing and tools. So you went to You were good at technical subjects and you went on to become an apprentice toolmaker yourself at Ford.
SPEAKER_01:When I was at school, I wasn't very good at the maths and English, but I was very, very good at technical drawing and woodwork and metalwork. Back in, again, this was now probably the 80s, if you had someone that worked at Ford, you had a good chance of getting into Ford. And I went in as a toolmaker at 16. It was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed it. I got paid for making things. So yeah, I was a toolmaker for about nine years. And then I got moved from there. For some reason, someone took a shine to me and I got promoted into the offices and I became a machine tool buyer. And that was a job where you wore a suit. I didn't have a suit at the time. So I went and bought a suit and I landed the job as a machine tool buyer. And that was buying lathes and mills for the factories. Again, I traveled all around the world buying lathes and milling machines and seeing how they were made. So back as I was a toolmaker, I was using the machines. And now I'm actually buying the machines that I used to use.
SPEAKER_00:Going to your interest in music then. So what drew you to the harmonica? So you play You played in a band as a youngster, as many youngsters do, and played some guitar and harmonica in that band,
SPEAKER_01:yeah? We was a band that played sort of rhythm and blues, and I played the harmonica. We were mostly a support act, although we did get signed up with Stiff Records, and we was on a compilation album. We'd done a lot of warm-up gigs. One of the ones we'd done, Steve Marriott came over from L.A., and he wanted a warm-up band to do the 100 Club and Dingwalls, and we were that band. We'd done okay. I played harmonica. We used to just play... Mainly sort of nine below zero type stuff. That was our main influence. But I knew nothing really of harps other than, I used to drop them in a pint of beer. Someone told me once that you should soak a diatonic and it played better. So I used to drop it in a pint of beer and then play it and then wonder why it all fell apart and split. But I never really paid much attention. I just bought another one.
SPEAKER_00:So you're going to debunk that. As a harmonica repairer, you're going to debunk that myth now.
SPEAKER_01:That was a bad choice. It actually played really well for the first couple of tunes, and that's all I really worried about at the time.
SPEAKER_00:So talking about your influences, you say you're a big fan of Nine Below Zero.
SPEAKER_01:We used to do a load of gigs at Shepherd's Bush. Two albums we used to play together. Well, maybe three albums. We used to play on the way down there. I think one of them was Live at the Marquee at Nine Below Zero. That got a real cane in. Must have played that one to death. And we played that because we was learning the tunes. And then after we would, when we'd get out the van, we would play the tunes that we'd listened to. So things like Homework.
UNKNOWN:Homework! Homework!
SPEAKER_01:I used to listen to it in the car and then go out and play it that night. The other album was the Q-Tips. That was another big influence, the Q-tips. And the third one was Fabulous Thunderbirds. That was one of our bands that
SPEAKER_00:we all tried to copy. So yeah, you played the harmonica. You had the interest in harmonica. And at this time, were you interested in tinkering around with the harmonica? I probably
SPEAKER_01:did. Not that it was a conscious thing that I was tinkering with. You know, if something just got jammed, I would probably rip the back off it and try and unjam it. At that time, no one was really, or I certainly wasn't, aware of what Gapin was and anything like that. And I don't think there were too many harps around at that time. I think I remember buying just the blues harp, the standard marine band. And then I think I heard that Mark Feltman was playing special 20s. So I think I ran out and bought a load of special 20s.
SPEAKER_00:You were still working for Ford now as a tool buyer. And then what got you interested then in starting your own business around a music repair business?
SPEAKER_01:As a machine tool buyer, again, I was doing really, really well at Ford's. And then for some reason they wanted to promote me to be a superintendent of one of the manufacturing plants. I sort of went from being on the shop floor to sort of running one of their factories. I was one of the youngest managers in Ford's at the time. And it came with all the trappings. But I never really enjoyed sort of being responsible for the factory itself. I was working with a lot of people. I had to work with unions. And it really didn't fit with what I enjoyed. Funny enough, I really enjoyed working with my hands as a toolmaker. But if you're any good at it, I suppose like anything in life, they sort of single you out and move you on as though, you know, your reward is that they take you out of what you like to do. And that's what sort of happened to me with Forge is that they kept sort of rewarding me by taking me out of what I like to do. So I ended up as a superintendent in Enfield, in the Enfield plant, making Speedos. and instrument clusters for the full cars. And I wasn't too happy really. And so an American company came along from Detroit and they offered me a job. and said, why don't you come along and sell machine tools? And I took it, and I went to work in Detroit, working for them, selling machine tools with a base in the UK. And then the recession hit, and I was made redundant. And that was really the turning point of the whole thing. I sort of found myself with a house and kids and no job. And then I thought to myself, what I need to do is maybe take a step back and think what I really enjoy. And then that led me onto this path, the path of music.
SPEAKER_00:I think the first thing you had success in was the saxophone stand. Is that what really got you into making music?
SPEAKER_01:My start into the business of music, I should say, the music business that I was in, was that my son was playing a saxophone. And every time I went into his bedroom, the saxophone was laying on the floor. And I thought to myself, I can make a better saxophone stand than this. So I went down to B&Q and I bought some metal and I fabricated this stand. And I thought, yes, it's a good saxophone stand. It's different to what's out there. And I'm going to patent it. And then... I was made redundant. And so what I thought to myself was, I'm going to try and sell this product. I've made one product. I think I'm going to try and sell it. So I looked online. And I thought to myself, what is the biggest music fair of how you can sell a musical product? And they said that the biggest music fair in the world was coming up. It was about three weeks' time, and it was in LA. It's called the NAMM Show. It was in California, in Anaheim. And I phoned them up, and I said, I would like to take a booth there. And they said, why, sure, you can take a booth. And it was expensive, and I put all my redundancy money into hiring the booth. I took some pictures on a camera of my saxophone stand. I flew over there and I said to my wife at the time, keep cutting out the job applications in the newspaper because if I don't make it when I come back, I've got to find a job. And so I packed my bags. I made 10 stands. I put them in a suitcase and I flew to LA and I was next to, I had a booth there, nine foot by nine foot. And I was next to the biggest music saxophone stand, saxophone makers, drum makers. I was next to Gibson guitars. And there was little old John Cook from Horn Church with 10 saxophone stands that he had made. two weeks before, right in the middle. And for the first day, no one spoke to me. I'd handmade these leaflets And I stood there with my suit on thinking, this is how you sell musical instruments. The second day, no one spoke to me. And then the third day, a guy came up to me and he said, look, I'm doing a gig across the road and I've forgot my saxophone stand. Can I borrow one of yours? And I said, look, you can take one of mine because I've got 10 here and I don't want to put them in my suitcase and take them back. And so he took one, he thanked me and he took it. The next day he came back to me and he said, look, thanks for lending me your stand. Here's some tickets to the show tonight. I didn't think nothing of it. I put it in my pocket. My I phoned up she said how you doing I said I haven't sold anything so make sure that you're keeping the job applications coming in because I've got to find a job when I come back so when I got back to the hotel that night I pulled out the tickets that the guy had given me the guy that gave me the tickets was a guy called Leroy Harper and he was the saxophone player for James Brown it turned out that James Brown was playing across the road and I just supplied some saxophone stands to him well the next day I turned up to the music fair I had about five guys there wanting to talk to me and they said you know who that is and I said no they said that's Whitney Houston's saxophone player. And then the guy next to him was Prince's saxophone player. And they were all there on my booth, all loving my stands. And really, that week changed things for me in the music business. I came back to the UK, and I had orders for making stands for some very famous players. And I used the money from selling the stands, individual stands, into buying more products, you saxophone products at the time i moved into a little workshop going i was earning it was only me i mean it sounds like it's a massive deal but it was only me in a little shed i didn't have a toilet in this shed i hired a farm building and i started making saxophone stands and that really got me on the um on the road to the onto the you know to the music business side of things superb yeah and you still sell these saxophone sounds yeah so sax racks is the company if anyone wants to find me the company's been going 20 years now and now i make stands I make stands for the Jules Holland Hootenanny so if ever you see Jules Holland Hootenanny you look at the saxophone section they're all my stands I've supplied stands now to the BB King band Whitney Houston the Alicia Keys tour I've done the Eagles I've done Live 8 when Live 8 was on they phoned me up they are expensive I hand make them here me and my dad make them he comes in on a Monday and a Wednesday he's 87 and we still hand make each stand but the money that we generate from the stand business allowed us to buy some small parts, saxophone reeds, saxophone mouthpieces. And that grew and grew and grew. So I used to sort of repair saxophones. Then we got enough money to open a little small music shop. I suppose it was like a workshop really with a trade entrance, little trade booth. And I would start repairing instruments. And just over time, sort of 20 years, I would get more and more instruments coming in. come in for repair and start repairing them and then the reputation grew. The rest is history. So this music shop of yours, East Coast Music, is a... It's a little bit like when I was at Ford's and they moved me out of Ford's and I wasn't happy. I'm always happy in the repair shop. The thing with repairs is that when a repair comes in, you have to think, how the hell are you going to fix that? And then you would think, okay, I've got to make a tool for it because you can't get that dent out of that trumpet because the trumpet's dent is right around the corner of the bend. And I used to then start buying tools to make my own tools. So I'd start by buying lathes and I was buying milling machines. My workshop grew and grew and grew to the extent that I had, I've got CNC machines, I had surface grinding machines, I had lathes, I had mills, just for servicing, making repairs of instruments. And harmonicas was a big thing there. I used to be getting quite a lot of harmonicas come in.
SPEAKER_00:What did then get you into repairing harmonicas, obviously moving across many different brass and woodwind instruments?
SPEAKER_01:I was always getting harmonicas coming in. They were drips and drabs, really, because I was never a techno geek advertising online. All the repairs were sort of just done from people coming into the shop and then the area knowing that I did repairs. So I was always doing repairs of harmonicas, but never on the scale of what I envisaged like it is now. Now it's gone so crazy now that I can't believe how big the repair industry of harmonicas has got. And it's all down to the internet. It's all down to the internet. I've never done anything on the internet. And it was all very, very small. I used to do ones and twos here and there. And then suddenly I started putting some posts online. Someone said to me, you need to do a YouTube video of this. And they used to come in and wait for me. And I used to repair it in front of them. And they would say, one guy would say, you need to do a YouTube clip of this because this is fantastic. And I said, oh, I never even thought about it. And then I'd set up my telephone and I'd video it. And within about three months, I had a thousand followers. It just flew. Really, that's how the business grew. I've always viewed repairs as a business. When I say that, I mean that one of the questions is, do you do customizing? Do you do repairs? Do you build harmonicas? Well, I do all of that. I do all of that because it's a full-time business. You have to view repairs, if you're doing it as a full-time business, a lot different from if you're tinkering with it and you can spend eight hours capping a read plate. And I've always viewed it as a commercial enterprise. And I do it as a commercial enterprise. I do all the Hohner repairs, all the Seidel repairs, all the Suzuki repairs, all the warranty repairs for all the shops. Because I've got the tools here to get them out, you know, to do the work and get them out. So I do do all of that rather than, you know, any one part because I have to do it as a living.
SPEAKER_00:So is Imonica's now your main part of your business?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Imonica's now is my main business. I'm probably close to 1,000 a year
SPEAKER_00:repairs. What is it you think about why there are so many, you know, there's such a demand for harmonica repairs? Obviously, there are a lot of harmonicas. I think it's the biggest selling instrument in the world, isn't it? Because they're small and cheaper than a lot of other instruments. So is that what you think it is about why there's such a demand for harmonica repairs?
SPEAKER_01:One is to make it accessible. What I try and do is to make repairs accessible. I'm very sort of hands on. You phone me and I talk to you. You send it in and I send it back. The other thing I think the growth is in eBay and the secondary I think you can pick up some harps very, very cheaply now. They're finding out it's not any good. They go online and they find someone who can do it relatively cheaply. And that's, I think, what's happening.
SPEAKER_00:Do you think an old harmonica can always be brought up to a good standard?
SPEAKER_01:No, I tend to put everybody off who phones me and says, I've seen a harmonica on eBay, shall I buy it? I always say, if you buy a£100 harmonica, if the reeds are vibrating at 440 times a second and it's 100 years old, then that reed has vibrated a billion times. and you're never going to turn the clock back on that reed. You can send it to me, and I can change the windsavers. I can gap it. I can fix the comb. You can tune it absolutely perfect, but the reed is 100 years old. So what you can do, what I say to people with an old heart, it's like an old car. You would never drive to the shops in a 1930s Morgan, but it's nice to have in your garage on a Sunday, and you pull it out, and you play it. And they've got a certain sound to them, but they're never going to be as responsive and as bright as a brand new harm. You're going to get some that might, but the majority aren't. And you're never going to know whether it's fatigued or not until you've spent all the money trying to do it.
SPEAKER_00:Carrying on about your sort of journey, and then we'll get into some more details about harmonica repairs and things. You were doing this quite a long time, and then you came out at Horner Harmonica Accredited Training in 2016.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Funny enough, Steve Proctor of Sutherland came to my shop and done a workshop with Steve Westweston. I had quite a big shop at the time, so I managed to put Steve and his band in my shop, and we'd done a harmonica workshop. We talked about how he played and what he played, and Steve came down to support it. So Hona sort of sponsored the event. And Steve came in, and he looked at the workshop, and he said, my God, I've never seen a workshop like this. And I said, well, the majority of my business is in doing repairs. Then he put me forward, And then I flew over to Hohner and I worked over there. And I became a Hohner, a credited Hohner repairer. Yeah, did that lead on for you getting direct work from Hohner and the other manufacturers you
SPEAKER_00:saw?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so the Seidel one, I was researching for a book, a guy called Julius Berthold. Julius Berthold made and invented harmonica harmonicas. machines that made harmonicas and I was researching that and he lived in Klingenthal and so to research the book I flew over to Klingenthal just to document this guy I mean this guy lived in 1870 so I sort of flew over there hoping to find something out and Seidel was there so I made contact with Lars and I went up to see his factory and our relationship sort of grew from there really and I started doing Seidel when I came back I started doing Seidel repairs and then I met Howard Johnson from Suzuki who I met him at the National Harmonica League Bristol Festival when I was doing a talk on repairs and Howard suggested that I could do some of his repairs I could do his repairs for the UK market that's where I met the big
SPEAKER_00:three there's quite a tradition of great harmonica repairers and customisers in this country you know Willie Danica and his son Tony Danica who's still active now you've got Douglas Tate who made the Renaissance Harmonica Steve Jennings we've got brendan power of course that has done a lot and still active in that space so are you aware of this legacy and these other people and you know the things that they're
SPEAKER_01:yeah they're all great repairs i never met doug tate though i've seen some of his harps some people that have come in to my workshops i've seen some of his hearts they're amazing i do some work for brendan yeah so i respect all of them they're all um you know great repairs one of the things i'm just actually leaning my tea on at the moment is that i managed about uh or maybe five years ago to to buy Willie Danica's tuning tables. The story goes is that Hohner, just after the war, Hohner put some tuning, some of their Hohner tuning tables into the Hohner UK facility for Willie Danica to tune and repair instruments in the Farringdon office. And that all shut down and they moved this equipment into a storage unit in Wales. And Steve Proctor said, I spoke to Steve and he said, yeah, I've still got those old tools and I managed to get them off him. So right next to me here, you can hear it, is one of Willie Danica's tuning tapes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, is that one of your videos? I've seen you using that where you slide out for the bellows, yeah. Fantastic piece of kit. And that allows you, of course, then to play the harmonicas without having to blow them yourself as well, which would be quite important in your job, particularly now. So, yeah, as I said, there are lots of great, you know, sort of tradition of repairing harmonicas in this country. So great to see you carrying that on. And you write articles for the Harmonica UK magazine as well. So you're very active in all your videos. So if we just talk a little bit now, but just for some people, what would you say the real basics are? make your harmonica you know work better and just do some basic improvements that they can do what are the areas you know tuning re-gapping embossing these sorts of things The main
SPEAKER_01:repair, it's not even a repair, it's a setup. I think that gapping is the thing that everybody should do on their harp. The diatonics, really, if we're talking diatonics, is you need to gap the reeds for your type of playing. It's a very simple job to do. Probably some YouTube clips on it, on gapping, but it really will transform a harp that's not playing very well. The thing with harmonicas now, most of them, if not all of them, are really well put together now if you stick to the major brands they're pretty well made whether they were always well made is a mute point but today I've visited the factories of these guys and the tools are sharp and they follow standards and the The people are well trained and they're well motivated. So you are going to get a good harp, but you may not get a harp that's set up exactly how you play it. And so your breath and the way you blow and you suck and you draw may not be the same or definitely won't be the same as the guy next to you. So you need to adjust the gaps of your harp accordingly. to suit your sort of playing. And that's very, very important to do. So if you want a tip really to improve your harp will be to go online and look for gapping and understand how that works, which leads me nicely onto some of the courses that I run. One of the reasons why we've developed the workshop is that I run some courses for people to learn how to gap and to emboss and to do it while I watch them and to use some of the tools here. People are interested in repairing harps and that's good to see you know people one of them i get a lot of people emailing me that want to do it for themselves and that's great one of the successful things on my business is that i sell a lot of tools to repair harmonicas and i sell a lot of tools which suggests to me that people want to take their harmonicas apart so if you're unsure you can book on one of my courses they're all stopped at the moment because of this virus thing but i do run courses on repairing harmonicas
SPEAKER_00:Are you thinking about doing some online given the fact that you can't do face-to-face ones at the moment?
SPEAKER_01:No, I haven't thought about doing that. I've stopped the courses. It might be worth something thinking about. Yeah, I mean, people really are interested in the maintenance and repair of stuff. I've been fortunate enough to be asked to attend a lot of the festivals, and there's a good turnout, and I love it. I love the people asking questions. There's that enthusiasm for understanding how a harp
SPEAKER_00:works. Yeah, and I think you're right what you said. I think at the moment, I go to forward to say we're in a sort of golden age of harmonica manufacturing because the quality's gone up so much over the last 10, 20 years, and the vendors are really pushing each other. They're coming out with a lot of innovations really big improvements. So harmonica is now a great, but like you say, you're just learning a few of those basics really helps just to, you know, improve it that little bit more because they can't do everything in the faction and maybe if you're on style of playing. So maybe just a few more quick things that people maybe can look at just to do a few improvements and repairs.
SPEAKER_01:One of the things for chromatics is that a lot of people are frightened to take the mouthpiece off. They're absolutely paranoid about taking the two side screws off. It's all going to come apart, which is not the case. You really need to take the mouthpiece off, one, hygienically just to clean it, but the other is to oil it. Certainly Suzuki do an oil, a slide oil, to keep that slider oiled. The reason for that is that one is it obviously acts as a lubricant for the slide, but secondly, it fills the gaps up. It makes it more airtight. People lose a lot of air through the mouthpiece. And so if you can keep it nicely oiled, not too much oil, but keep it nicely oiled, it will play better. There's too much to go into, really, on the chromatics. I mean, anyone who's got a chromatic is going to know all about windsavers and things. But just keep them clean. The thing is with a harmonica now is that they're so well-made, and the tolerances are so tight because people are demanding such a great response out of the box that there is no room for error. So if you get a tiny little hair or a little tiny... spec between the reed it's going to lock up you know back in the day when there was a great big gap between the reed and the reed plate you could drop a sixpence in there and it wouldn't matter but nowadays if you get a tiny bit of fluff going there it will lock the reed up so that's the downside of it getting things getting better
SPEAKER_00:so yeah so john you've got lots of youtube videos showing out different repairs so i'll put a link up to your youtube channel where there's a there's lots of repairs um demonstrations yeah yeah so as well as doing repairs you do do some customizations of harmonicas don't you do a double reed harmonica for example i didn't i never really went out to
SPEAKER_01:to do customization my thirst for knowledge of how things work in the harmonica world the more i got into harmonicas the more i sort of wanted to know how they're made and what makes a good one and what doesn't make a good one i remember seeing i think ben hewley put a question up why aren't the makers making double reed plate harmonicas and why why do we need to emboss why don't they make you know, make a reed that fits into the slot. Well, they're doing those now. So the makers stepped up and they're making the diatonic now as good as they've ever been. But to go one step further was always something that intrigued me. So whenever I got some spare time, I'd try and look at making things a little bit different. So, you know, because I've got the machines here, I started making combs and I would machine draw up combs and machine combs and try them out and make them. Why is a harmonica a certain thickness let's see if I can make it bigger and see what happens and it was nothing but just for my own understanding you know what can change and if I change something what would happen And because I had the facility here, I could do that. Now, Hohner have been doing that for 100 years. Idle's been doing that for 100 years. The reason why your harp, you know, your 10-hole harp is the size and shape it is, is because they've messed around like I have for the last 100 years, making it a little bit bigger, a little bit wider, optimizing their design to exactly what it is now. I was always intrigued with following that journey. For me, I needed to know why the reed, why the slot was 2mm. Every harmonica from Suzuki to Zydle, why are their reeds the same width or roughly the same width? They're all two mil. So I thought to myself, I'm going to make a reed five mil, like an accordion. It's a little bit like what Brendan does. So Brendan sits in his shed and he comes up with these ideas. Why don't we try this? And why don't we try that? And so just over years, really, I started just working on stuff just to see what I could do. Now, I always knew that double reed plates were out there. And the double reed plates, basically, you get two harmonicas and you get a reed plate and you take all the reeds off. And then you put that blank reed plate with just the slots on top of a reed plate that's got the reeds. And the idea is that the reed then has to swing through two thicknesses of reed and it gives you a lot more volume and a lot more response. A few people are making them. Joel Anderson's making one. I make one. In fact, I ran a course this year for people to come in to actually make one for themselves because they're not easy to make and they're quite expensive to buy.
SPEAKER_00:So you get sent lots of things, as you say, up to 1,000 harmonicas a year. So what are some of the most interesting harmonicas you've been sent to repair, some of the most challenging?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I've had everything come in. The worst one was a harmonetta. I think there's about four people in the world that would admit to working on harmonettas full time. I'm one of the four. maybe five or six, but there's not many. Anyway, a guy took the harmonetta apart and he put it in a box. Now, a harmonetta's probably got a thousand parts and he put it in a box. He couldn't put it back together again. And so he just put all the parts in a box and sent it to me. That's probably the worst one I've ever had. It took me weeks to pull all the parts out to fix. So Google harmonetta. That's probably the most difficult harmonica to repair in the world. Hence why there's only about six people that repair them. So when you got it working, So I've got it working. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're a phenomenal instrument. You
SPEAKER_00:know, people do play them. You've won a few awards as well, haven't you? I think, was this back for your sax? Your sax, Dan, you won a few awards for.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've got a couple of innovation awards for saxophone stands. I made a saxophone stand for disabled players to play the saxophone without needing a strap around their neck. So anyone who's got a neck issue, I made a stand that they could play the saxophone off of the stand. I won an export award. Couldn't believe it. But I won an export award for shipping stuff out
SPEAKER_00:to Europe. So you're clearly, as you've touched on a few times now, you're clearly pretty obsessed with tools, John. So you have all sorts of tools. You've talked about some of them in some of the Harmonica UK magazine articles that you've written. So what are some of your favourite tools you've acquired? The one I'm most
SPEAKER_01:proud of is that, oh, it must have been maybe five or six years ago now, I was sitting at home and a friend of mine, Trevor Yeo, he's a prolific... harmonica enthusiast he he was in a pub once and he phoned me up and said there's on ebay there's they've knocked a house down in a town just outside of uh throssing them where the honer factory is in a town called rotval they've knocked the house down and in the rubble they found some machines and the guys put them on ebay anyway so i rushed onto ebay and i looked at these machines and i They were now machines for putting the nails through the reed plates into the comb of a wooden comb. And they were laying on the floor. They were probably from the 1930s. Anyway, I bought them and I got them back into the UK. And I've got two of them. I've got two original Hohner nail machines that probably put together marine bands back in the day. Two pieces of equipment that I'm very proud of. I've got these Hohner tuning tables, which I'm probably the only one in the world with these old Hohner tuning tables. I've got some Hohner riveting machines that I've got. But anything that comes up on eBay or anywhere that looks old and needs restoring. I mean, I've got a 19, I recently bought a 1903 horizontal milling machine. which I'm using for making harps. So, yeah, it fascinates me, these old machines.
SPEAKER_00:So, I mean, what do you think? Do you think these old tools do a better job than modern technology? Is it your love of old things, or do you think they really do a great job?
SPEAKER_01:Some of the tools that I've got, you would certainly not buy them if you had the money to buy, you know, if you had to do something, if you wanted to make it easy for yourself, put it that way. These machines... They're very, very well made. I've got some very old presses that I own. They do the job, but if you were setting up a factory, the machines I own are the machines that people throw out. I just love the way, you know, I just find it a shame, you know, people are throwing these old machines out, I suppose. That's my thing. And if I can put them to use... I'll try and find a use for them. But it is fascinating when you look at a machine that's 150 years old. How on earth did they make that machine? To me, they're pieces of art. I'm looking at a drilling machine at the moment from about 1912 that I bought. It's a work of art. You'd have it in your home.
SPEAKER_00:So, I mean, a lot of this as well has really led you into really researching the history of how harmonicas have made you. So, yeah, you've really looked at it. As you mentioned earlier, you've written a book about Julius Berthold And did he make the first harmonicas? He made the first reeds, did he, around 1890? So you've really delved into the history of the harmonica making as well,
SPEAKER_01:yeah? That, to me, has been a fascinating topic to research. So harmonicas have been around, obviously, for many, many years. There was a turning point, a eureka moment in 1879, and it was when Julius Berthold invented a machine called the reed milling machine. What happens when you make a reed is that back in the old days, they used to mark out a reed from a piece of brass, and they used to cut it out with some tin snips, and then they used to file it to be in tune. And they'd done this really from about 1840 to 1879. And then Julius Berthold was this industrialist toolmaker. He was a toolmaker like me, but he was an industrialist that went to Klingenthal, that was really a sort of a farming town, was making harmonicas at the time. And he looked and he said, you know, I can make a machine that makes these a lot faster than you guys are filing them. And he got a lot of resistance because people were saying, they're not going to be as good, you know, and we're doing very, very well. Because they didn't really know the capacity of the market. They just thought, well, we're selling what we're making. Surely that's what we want to do. So these guys were making reeds by hand and they were making them in their homes and they were getting their children that had very, very good ears for tuning to tune these reeds up. And it was a terrible process. They used to be covered in brass dust. So Julius Berthold invented a machine, this reed milling machine. And he went from making something like you could make, let's say, a thousand reeds a day that he could make 10,000 an hour. And it completely revolutionized harmonica making. Everyone who made a harmonica would buy his machines. And Hohner bought his machines. Seidel bought his machines. And if you couldn't buy his machine, you were put out of business because you just really couldn't keep up with the big guys. So Hohner would just buy his complete stock off him. And then no one could compete with Hohner. And he made this machine. And it fascinated me. No one had written about him. I found a very, old book that I paid to get translated it was a book written in about 1890 and there was a chapter on Julius Berthold and I couldn't read it So I sent it away to be translated. And it came back translated. And it fascinated me. It told me the whole story of how harmonicas were made back in 1890. And I thought, right, that's it. I need to jump on a plane and go and find this guy's house. And I went to Klingenthal. I flew into Prague. I jumped in a car. And I drove to Klingenthal. And I had this old map of where this guy lived. And I had inklings of where his factory was. He had a factory along the river so I went into a hotel the next morning I got up with a rucksack on my back and my camera and I went to find where this factory was and I pulled open an old gate and there was his factory it was completely derelict all falling apart and the guy I spoke to a guy and said to him can I get in there and he said no you can't get in there it's derelict we're going to knock it down and it was the original factory that made the equipment that made the harmonica It was absolutely fascinating. And so I researched it and I wrote his story. And anyone who wants a copy, they can go onto my website. It's free. I've just made it as a PDF. And you can go onto my website and just look the Julius Berthold story. And you can download it. And I just wrote his story. And it's a very, very fascinating story.
SPEAKER_00:All this then, your history of moving from being interested in tools as a boy with your father and grandfather, working for Ford as a tool maker, starting making your own saxophone racks, starting taking on harmonica repairs, and then getting interested in the history of harmonica, have all led you to this moment where you have now, over the last year or so, set up the Great British Harmonica Company. So what's that all about?
SPEAKER_01:How that started was that I was doing some workshops in here and I was showing people the making of reeds by hand the old way because one of the things I have when I repair when I repair a harp I've got some reed blanks now I can't think where I got them from but I've got a pot of reed blanks and these reed blanks are basically a 25 mil reed that haven't been tuned so if ever a reed breaks on a harmonica I can put this reed on and I can cut it to length and I can make any reed and tune it on any harmonica because I do some repairs, a lot of repairs for museums where you can't get the parts anymore. So you have to make them. And so I was showing how I made reeds and someone said to me, look, you make the comb, you make cover plates, you make reeds, you could make your own harp. Why don't you make your own harp? And I thought to myself, well, you know, I'm a bit too busy. And then it sort of, the seed was sown though that I used to think to myself, you know, I could probably make a harmonica but i would need to get the tools because there's a reason why people don't make harmonicas in fact they're in the world i don't know of anyone that hand makes one harmonica you know, one person that makes one harmonica in his garage. There are some people that have tried in the past and you can certainly do it if you throw money at it. You know, if you take a harmonica and say to someone, can you make me that part? And can you make me that part? And they'll say, yeah, that's 10,000 pounds. That's 20,000 pounds. You can certainly get it outsourced but i was fascinated with the way the harmonica industry were making harps before the big machines and the big corporations took over because one of the things the fascinating things if you go to klingenthal where's idlar that town had something like 150 harmonica companies in in the town. And the town's very, very small. And I thought to myself, how can there be a town with 150 harmonica makers that surely they haven't all got big factories? And they haven't. They've got small little tools in their garage making these harmonicas. And I thought, right, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try and make the tools so that I can make every part here in my workshop. When you're going to try and copy the process's of 1870. It does help if you can buy some machines from 1870, because then it really makes it authentic. And so I started looking on eBay for very old presses and and equipment that basically looked like the equipment that they were using back then you know that you could buy today so i'd buy a horizontal milling machine and i would make the jigs the tooling that milled the reeds and i would make some tooling and that's really where i'm at at the moment i spent a year now making the tools and you will see them if you go onto my youtube channel you'll see me making the tools that make the harmonica so i registered the name the great british harmonica company uh so far all i've made is a pitch pipe i've made a one a one read a c pitch pipe but we're close we're close to it it's not for a commercial venture i'm hoping that one day that i can run a a workshop here where people can come to my workshop and for maybe three days we get a piece of wood we get a piece of brass and we make a diatonic harmonica from scratch Now, if you take home after three days a harmonica that you've made, I think that would be something worth taking home.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that'd be fantastic, yeah. So these harmonicas, you're making a harmonica completely made in the UK, which has never been done before, and you're using traditional tools to do this, some of which you've acquired and some of which you've made yourself, yeah? So as you say, this isn't really a commercial venture. So you're not planning on mass-producing these or selling lots of them. What are you sort of thinking around selling them? If people want to buy them, what is the plan?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. I'm going to see how it develops, to be honest. I mean, the idea is that it's going to just be handmade. I'm trying to follow the processes from the 1870s in that I've got to make 20 reeds. I've got to punch out two reed plates. There's another business that I'm in. There's another business, if you want to look up, which is called johncookengraving.co.uk, because I'm also a hand engraver, and I hand engrave the cover plates. So the idea is that it's going to be solid silver cover plates. They're going to be hand engraved. I just want to use things like British woods. I'm going to try and find some woods where the trees have been felled naturally. They've fallen. And I make the combs from a specific wood from a specific area in the UK. I'm going to hand engrave the silver cover plates. I've got a hallmark, a John Cook hallmark. So I'm going to send it to London to be hallmarked. So it's just going to be, I just want it to be a nice, handmade harmonica i don't know of anyone that hand makes a harmonica i know people that hand make trumpets and i may know people that hand make guitars and violins but there is a reason why no one hand makes a harmonica is that it's a very very difficult instrument to make as i say i've been a tool maker and i've been working as a tool maker or on tools for nearly 40 years and even i struggle and I've been doing it for 40 years, there's some very, very difficult processes. So when you get a harmonica out of a box from one of the big manufacturers, you need to give it a little bit of respect because there's a lot of work that's gone into that. I'm always amazed how they sell them so cheaply. People say to me, harmonicas are going up in price. You know, I paid£40 for this. And I say, believe you me, if you try to make that harmonica, it's going to
SPEAKER_00:take you 40 years. Do you expect that your handmade harmonica will be of a better quality than mass-produced harmonicas, factory-made harmonicas.
SPEAKER_01:I'm at least hoping they're going to be the same. The beauty of something that's handmade is that if it's not right, you're going to work on it till it's right. So I'm going to say that anyone that plays one that I hand out to play is going to play really, really well. You're never going to get one that's not. They are going to be good. I've got some very good processes for reed making. One of the things I'm going to do with the reeds is that if you look on a reed, they mill the tuning mark on it. You'll see some milling marks where the machine cuts the tuning of the reed. And that sometimes creates some stress marks along on the reed and they break along where they, where they tune them. And so I know that Zydle grind those now, but I'm going to, I've got a process where I'm going to hammer form them. And they used to hammer, they used to hammer tune them. Back in the day, and I'm going to go back to that process to see if I can redefine that. See, the beauty of hand making something is you're not constrained by having to make a million. You have to make a million, like Hohner have to make a million special 20s. There's certain processes to making a million, to making one. And so if I have to just make one, I can hammer every read. where you couldn't hammer every reed if you was making a million of them. So there's certain processes that a handmade item can be significantly different from that of a mass-produced one. One is hand engraving. You know, I'm going to hand engrave people's names on it and those sort of things.
SPEAKER_00:So we talked about the different parts. You're going to have silver cover plates, which are going to be engraved. You're going to have some sort of British wood. Do you know what sort of wood yet? And the qualities obviously are resisting the swelling and things like that. Are you going to treat that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yes, so there's a process that woodworkers use called vacuum infusion. It's where you put the wood in a resin, in a vacuum chamber, and you suck all the air out of it and you replace it with resin. I'm looking at that process. Then the wood will never swell. As I say, you can only do that if you're hand-making each one. It's not something that mass-produced people can do. And the reeds themselves, are they going to be made out of brass? I'm probably going to make them out of phosphor bronze. When I started to look into reed making, I found some old harps that played really, really well. And I took them apart and I sent the reed to a laboratory to be analysed, to tell me exactly the constituent parts of the metal that made that reed up, because I wanted to copy the exact makeup of the reed the amount of zinc the amount of copper that was in that and the lab came back to me with a report and they said this is the brass that um that was used to make those reeds and you can't get it see one of the things that the big makers will say is they're not going to tell you where they get their brass from and being a one-man band in Hornchurch I don't need 25 miles of brass I only need a sheet of A4. And so no one's going to sell me a sheet of A4 brass. So there's a big problem, again, with handmade items is that you just can't get the economies of scale to be buying some of this product. But one of the things that I have got, I can get quite readily, is phosphor bronze. So the phosphor bronze, I think Suzuki make phosphor bronze reeds and a couple of the other companies. I'm going to possibly use phosphor bronze. One of the things that I'm working on at the moment is if you look at a diatonic, you got 10 slots and they go down in size. Hole one is longer than hole two. Hole two is longer than hole three. You know, it's on a diatonic. Because I can hand make them, I don't necessarily need to do that. I can make the first three slots the same length. So what I'm doing at the moment is I can really play around with optimizing exactly the read length, you know, that resonates based on the chamber size. So I can play around with that. That's the beauties of hand-making something. There's the Holmherz theory of resonance, that there is an optimum size reed to the chamber that makes it sing. So you know when sometimes you pick up a harp in a certain key, and a certain note really plays better than another harp. And it's all to do with chamber shapes and sizes. And so that's what I'm going to be getting into next. I just want to sort of harp that I can say is really handmade. But they were
SPEAKER_00:originally handmade.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and they were hand engraved, but obviously couldn't
SPEAKER_00:keep up with demand. So are you going to rivet the reeds or are you going to put screws in them? Screw them. Because there's always this idea, isn't it, that if you had individual screw, then you could just easily change them like a guitar string.
SPEAKER_01:The thing is, it's quite easy to tune a guitar, but it's not so easy to tune a harmonica. If you put a reed on, you've still got to sort of tune
SPEAKER_00:it. When are you planning on producing your first one? By the end of the year. Well, I mean, how many do you think you'll make? And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this might be interested in buying them. So how many do you plan to make? Is it going to be just a very small number or...?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know yet. Again, I'm not interested in selling any yet until I'm really, really happy with how it looks and plays. Sometimes you can make your own market. Let's say it's£500. Who's going to buy a£500 harmonica? But collectors may buy it. I mean, I'm sure it's going to be a collector's piece in that it's going to be the first handmade harmonica since 1870. What I like about where we're at is that we're at the beginning where Hohner was when he made his first one. It's a case of we're making one, but who's to say that we make this one and it costs£500 to make, but people really like the way the cover plates look and the way the comb comes out. So maybe it grows and we say, okay, with a bit of tooling, I can probably make these now half that price. And then I'm selling a few more. And then I say, okay, so maybe the Great British Harmonica Company that starts out as a bit of a hobby thing for me just to satisfy, can I make a whole harmonica by hand, is the start of something. I haven't ruled that out. No one makes a reed plate because no one makes a reed and no one stamps out a reed plate. A lot of people do make harps, but they don't make the reed plate. The reed and the reed plate, if I can crack that, that's the key to it. When you can make the reed and the reed plate, you can stamp it the Great British Harmonica Company.
SPEAKER_00:So making the reads and the replay then, once you've got the tool set up, there's a video of you putting the first read made in the UK on there. I saw that video. And then you did the second one straight. So presumably once the tool's set up, you can reasonably quickly kind of mass produce the reads and replays.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, I've still got a manual press and I still stamp one at a time. There's a YouTube clip from Zydle where he stamps out a thousand a second. I still stamp mine out by hand, each one by hand.
SPEAKER_00:I know you've made videos about embossing reeds and getting those tolerances really small, and particularly the corners, which I know you like. So are your reeds going to be very, very precise to cut, maybe more than mass-manufactured reeds?
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So that's where we really see the differences here. Your reeds maybe are a lot higher quality, and they really do play really nicely.
SPEAKER_01:I'm just trying to think, where would a situation be where you need it that great? I'm just thinking, I'm not trying to decry my own harmonicas but i think it's going to be a market for collectors i mean it's hard to say i mean who who do i know who buys a 5 000 pound watch i know people that will pay 50 000 pound for a watch the funny thing is i i talked to someone once about i'm making these harmonicas and they're going to be 500 pound each and he wanted three
SPEAKER_00:you get this kind of premium good sort of market don't you which is you know people like you know obviously cars and clothes and all sorts of things
SPEAKER_01:So you're quite right. There is a premium. So at the moment, I think I've got to get my head around the handmade thing and not try and sell it to someone who wants a£30 harmonica and try and convince them that my harmonica is worth paying extra.
SPEAKER_00:I think at the moment, obviously, you're still in quite early stages. You're not quite sure what you want to do with it, whether you want to you know, make it kind of affordable and maybe that kind of 250, you know, sort of mark is maybe affordable for some people or pushing it up to 500 where you're only going to get people who've got a serious amount of money sort of starting to trust them and buying those. One of the problems with harmonicas, isn't it, is that you can't try them before you buy them, you know, effectively. No. You know, that's a bit of a barrier, isn't it? But once you get good reviews...
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think the other thing is that there's a market, dare I say, for it sitting on someone's desk with their name on. You know, their dad used to play harmonica. He doesn't play it anymore. They want to get him a retirement present. They go online and they like the story of the handmade harmonica.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it's really fascinating to see what you do with it. So yeah, thanks, John. Oh, really looking forward to your harmonica being your first harmonica, being really hopeful by the end of the year and then seeing where you go with it and where it section. I'm sure people will be very interested in checking that out when it comes out. So yeah, obviously now we're in pandemic time. So just finishing off your own future plans. Are you still nice and busy repairing harmonicas and doing lots of work? And obviously you're working on making your own harmonica.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So with regards to the harmonica repairs, I am still busy. One of the things that I did, I did phone up a local medical supplies. I wanted to buy some equipment with reference to the coronavirus so that I could increase the sterilization of harps, one for my own health and safety, but also for the customers. So I added an extra ultrasonic cleaning machine that I bought and I use a certain fluid. So the process is that when they come in, obviously I'll get my gloves on and I put them through this medical ultrasonic cleaner and then I can sort of work on them. And then they go back to a two stage. And one of the people, if anyone's have had one of my harps back, you'll notice that they come sealed in a bag. And that is that after I've worked on it, I then strip it down again i then put it through the ultrasonic cleaner and then with the gloves on i put it into a heat sealed bag so that no one has touched it from when it's come out the cleaner so i don't know whether other repairers are doing that but um be rest assured that um it's been very very well cleaned and no one has touched it or blown it or you know touched it by hand before they've got it back that has meant that um i've been
SPEAKER_00:able to
SPEAKER_01:sort of carry on
SPEAKER_00:really yeah that's brilliant a lot of people are particularly upset this time with the virus are very interested in the you know the hygiene factor of harmonica so this this ultrasonic cleaner that you're using is doing the job for you there is it's not it's not the cleaner so much as the
SPEAKER_01:fluid i think i bought about two liters of this stuff and it was nearly 100 pounds for it but it's what they use at the operating theaters to sterilize all their products so it really is a high high quality um sterilizing and on the side it's got stamped covid killer So it really is a medical-grade ultrasonic fluid. It's very expensive, so I'm not going to say that people can rush out and buy this, but because I get through so many harps, it's something that I needed to have, really.
SPEAKER_00:Great to talk to you about. I could talk to you about harmonicas all day, but I'll have to stop it there. So thanks very much for joining me today, John. No problem. Thanks for having me. That's it for today, folks. Final word from my sponsor, the Longwolf Blues Company, providing some great effects pedals and microphones, all purpose-built for the harmonica. Be sure to check out their website. And thanks to John Cook, the man who can fix just about anything.
SPEAKER_04:Luma, luma, toodle, luma, luma, toodle, laya Any umbrellas, any umbrellas to men today Bring your parasol, it may be small, it may be big He repairs them all with what you call a finger-me-jig Pitter-patter-patter, pitter-patter-patter, here comes the rain Let it pitter-patter, let it pitter-patter, don't mind the rain. He'll mend your umbrella then go on his way singing toodle-oo-ma-loo-ma-toodle-ay toodle-oo-ma-loo-ma-toodle-ay