Rick Epping interview

Rick Epping joins me on episode 37. 

Rick worked for Hohner USA for 18 years and played a pivotal role in improving the quality of their harmonicas back to their former glory. While at Hohner, he also developed the XB40, the all-bending harmonica. Rick is also an expert customiser of harmonicas and can be credited with the creation of embossing reeds to improve playability.

Rick has a real passion for playing Irish music, to such an extent that he even moved to Ireland so he could immerse himself in the music. He has released several albums with notable Irish groups for us to enjoy his traditional music playing.

Rick is also adept at playing harmonica on a rack, perhaps with the less orthodox instruments of the concertina and the banjo.


Links:
Article by Rick on harmonica types used in Irish Music:
https://www.celticguitarmusic.com/irishharm.htm

Article on reed longevity:
https://www.bluesharmonica.com/rick_eppings_paper_reed_longevity_revisited

Pat Missin page on the XB40:
https://www.patmissin.com/reviews/xb40.html

Easy third tuning:
https://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/board/board_topic/5560960/5490922.htm

Iron Lung:
https://www.brendan-power.com/IronLung.php

Willie Clancy Summer School:
https://www.scoilsamhraidhwillieclancy.com/

HarmonicaUK Virtual Chromatic Weekend:
http://harmonica.uk/HUKBlog/chromatic-weekend/

Videos:

One man show for Irish Cultural Centre:
https://irishculturalcentre.co.uk/2020/04/28/music-rick-epping/

YouTube workshop on harmonica maintenance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yKDUhAgmRg

Another harmonica maintenance workshop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIsHOn-65uY&t=1608s

Session that Brian McDonagh, Philip Duffy and I held every Tuesday for 15 years:
https://youtu.be/Lt-BUD37SwA

NHL Concert: Buckets Of Rain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRvTwBYng4A


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/

Chapters

• 1:25 Born in California and moved to Ireland and love of Irish music
• 2:35 First harmonicas Rick played
• 3:50 Played some blues early on but gravitated to traditional tunes
• 5:12 Rick had some lessons on violin and piano when young
• 5:49 Also plays concertina, banjo and jaw harp, and love of free reed instruments
• 7:35 Plays harmonica on a rack with concertina and banjo
• 9:34 Advice on how to play harmonica on a rack
• 10:51 What to focus on when playing the harmonica
• 11:48 Techniques playing on a rack with the concertina
• 12:27 Learning Irish rhythms from fiddle player
• 14:10 Playing on a rack with other instruments besides a guitar, including piano
• 14:37 Reason why Rick moved to Ireland
• 15:17 Won a music competition in Ireland with his band Pumpkinhead
• 17:13 Opened for T-Bone Walker when young
• 17:40 Won All Irish Harmonica Championship in 1975
• 18:54 Jigging the Blues album with Frankie Gavin and Tim Edey
• 20:29 Did an album of traditional Irish music with the band New Road
• 20:52 Has recorded two albums with the band The Unwanted
• 22:29 Why Rick uses the diatonic harmonica to play Irish music
• 23:15 Irish musicians welcome harmonica in their music
• 23:39 Tremolo harmonica is more commonly played on Irish music
• 24:41 Rick uses an octave harmonica in Irish sessions, to get more volume
• 26:52 What is an octave harmonica?
• 28:00 Octave harmonica uses auto-valve reed plates
• 29:43 Worked for Hohner for 18 years
• 31:03 Was Product Manager on harmonicas and accordions at Hohner USA
• 31:48 Rick improved quality of Hohner harmonicas in late 1980s by improving tolerances between reed and reed plate
• 34:46 Rick is credited with inventing embossing reeds
• 36:07 Early customisers, such as Joe Filisko, had an influence on improving Hohner harmonicas
• 37:10 Rick has recorded some workshops on YouTube of his customisation techniques
• 37:23 What exactly is embossing?
• 39:37 Do people need to emboss and set-up their own harmonicas?
• 41:47 Rick is appearing at HarmonicaUK Chromatic Weekend on June 19/20 2021
• 42:07 Anything different about chromatic set-up to diatonic?
• 43:11 Devloped the XB40 harmonica at Hohner
• 46:24 Brendan Power’s recent SlipSlider harmonica is an example of continuing harmonica innovation
• 47:30 Rick played in a trio, Triple Harp Bypass, with Brendan Power and Mick Kinsella
• 48:25 10 minute question
• 49:40 What harmonicas does Rick play
• 50:29 Different tunings, including Easy Third
• 53:59 Overblows
• 54:32 Embouchre
• 55:24 Amps, mics and effects pedals
• 55:45 Future plans
• 56:39 What has Rick been working on over last year during pandemic
• 57:39 Learns tunes by ear mainly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Rick Eppin joins me on episode 37. Rick worked for Honour USA for 18 years and played a pivotal role in improving the quality of their harmonicas. While at Honour, he also developed the XB-40, the all-bending harmonica. Rick is also an expert customiser of harmonicas and can be credited with the creation of embossing reeds to improve playability. Rick has a real passion for playing Irish music, to such an extent that he even moved to Ireland so he could immerse himself in the music. He has released several albums with notable Irish groups for us to enjoy his traditional music playing. He's also adept at playing harmonica on a rack, perhaps with the less orthodox instruments of the concertina and the banjo. Hello, Rick Epping, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Neil. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. No, it's a pleasure to have you on and your distinguished career in harmonica, which we'll get into. Starting off about yourself. So I think you're originally born in California and then you now live in Ireland. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:30

That's correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31

What happened? What was the story about coming over to Ireland?

SPEAKER_01: 1:34

Ever since I was young, I kind of had a fascination with the music. There was an old 78 of one album, 178 left of an album of Leroy Anderson's Irish Suite. There were two Irish tunes on it and I used to listen to that after I was a little kid. And then once the folk revival in the late 50s started coming on and I had an older brother that kind of got me started, I became mad for tunes. And it didn't take too long before I found that a lot of the tunes that I was learning, Fisher's Hornpipe and other tunes maybe from Doc Watson or others, were originally Irish. So I started looking for Irish tunes and that was kind of the impetus to come over.

SPEAKER_00: 2:30

And were you playing these on harmonica at this stage or other instruments? On the harmonica. Were they typically, you know, Richter-tuned diatonics at that stage?

SPEAKER_01: 2:39

They were. My first two harmonicas were regular tin-hole Richter-tuned. They were actually at the bottom of my older brother's toy box. And when he wasn't around, I was about four years old, I was rooting around through his toys and found them at the bottom. I kind of zeroed in on them, grabbed them without delay. One of them was a Hohner, basically a Marine Bad, but it was a Steve Larravee Lone Star Rider model. The Lone Star Rider was a radio cowboy because my brother, when he was young, it would have been in the radio days. And that was one of the harmonicas. And the other was an all-plastic harmonica made by the Pro Company up in New Jersey, plastic reeds and everything, which was surprisingly good in tune and everything. So they were my first two harmonicas. And then I kind of got, when I was a little older, I went through a few other instruments, banjo and a couple other things. And then I was about 12 or 13 when I was I really started focusing in on the harmonica and bought a 12-hole marine band was the next harmonica I bought. And then I was 15 and my brother said, you should go down to the Ash Grove to see this guy, Sonny Terry. And so I bought my first 1896 tin hole after seeing Sonny Terry at the last 15. So that's... I done told your

SPEAKER_02: 4:08

baby...

SPEAKER_00: 4:09

You started playing tunes, did you then go to playing some blues as well?

SPEAKER_01: 4:13

Yeah, no, the blues... Started playing the blues when I was 15, but the tunes would have been when I was 10 or 11 or something like that.

SPEAKER_00: 4:22

And so now you certainly play tunes or get into your recording career now. That's what you focus on. Some of them have got the bluesy edge and you do have some blues songs as well, but your focus is on playing tunes, is it mainly?

SPEAKER_01: 4:35

Pretty much, pretty much. And I enjoy backing songs as well. A couple of the groups that I play, especially The Unwanted, is actually mostly songs. So I do a lot of song backing in that and I enjoy that in different styles, cross harp and major seven cross harp or sometimes in first position.

SPEAKER_00: 5:12

Yeah, and you mentioned there that you played some other instruments. I know you play banjo, as you say. You play concertina. Did you start playing these at that age as well and sort of learn them in tandem, or did they come later?

SPEAKER_01: 5:24

The music was pretty big in the family. My dad was a fine pianist and had an older brother who was a musician. They started me on violin when I was seven, and I have absolutely no recollection of that whatsoever. So it must have been a fairly unforgettable experience. But I was eight when I started. to take a piano lesson so I had a few years first with my dad and then he packed me off to a piano teacher after that that didn't stick and then with you know with the folk music came along I was about 10 or 11 when I started on the banjo and the ukulele and over the years spent a little time on the guitar mandolin but concertina came along I was looking for one when I was about 12 where I grew up in Culver City was where the MGM movie theater was and in 1968 they sold off a lot of their props and costumes and things. And I went down hoping I'd find a concertina. And there was one big soundstage full of musical instruments of harpsichords and concertinas and everything. And I said, oh, great. Picked one up. And none of them had any reeds in them. Harpsichord had no strings in them because, of course, in the movies, the actors couldn't really play these things. So they would just be squeezing and pushing the buttons with no reeds in it. And there'd be usually a piano accordion would dub over the sound. So I didn't get my concertina then But I was about 19 or 20 when I first finally got a concertina. So that's when I started playing that instrument. And then the jaw harp, I was around that same age, 20, 21, when a great player named Larry Hanks gave me my first jaw harp. So it's another instrument I really love.

SPEAKER_00: 7:08

Yeah, so the concertina and the jaw harp, as you say, they're both reed instruments. Do you see some similarities with the harmonica?

SPEAKER_01: 7:14

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. It's that whole free reed fascination, something about it, you know, something about the buzz you get off it that I really like, whether it's the harmonica or the jaw harp or even the concertina, you know, you can, you feel those reeds playing and it's a great, you know, you know yourself, it's a great feeling.

SPEAKER_00: 7:35

Yeah. And you play quite a lot with a rack, don't you play? You play the, certainly the banjo and the concertina with harmonica on a rack. So that's a skill you developed for a long time, isn't it? and playing those instruments together?

SPEAKER_01: 7:45

Yeah. First time I had a rack on, I was, I think, 15. I was into jug band music. I was listening to Jim Queston's Jug Band. And I thought, man, I want a washboard. So I got an old-fashioned washboard and put straps on it and got 10 thimbles for my fingers and a rack for the harmonica and put on the Jim Queston record and started playing. And it took about two seconds for all the thimbles to go flying all over the room. It just didn't work. So I put it away for years and years. And during Pumpkinhead, which would have been from about 73 through 77 or something. I played a concertina and harmonica, but not on the rack. And it was after I left Pumpkinhead or after Pumpkinhead broke up that I would try it with harmonica and concertina every once in a while. It didn't work. But finally, one night, I was up late one night and tried it out and it clicked. And I was so afraid that if I went to bed, I would wake up the next morning forgotten. So I stayed up all night playing and actually playing dancing around the kitchen playing until the sun came up and then they kind of knew i had it so that would have been about 78 78 or 79 that i started playing on the

SPEAKER_00: 8:59

rack so it's something you do as a more of a one-man show thing isn't you you did a nice streaming concert recently which i wish i'll put a clip on on the on the front page of the podcast where you're playing concertina and the banjo on with the rack on the harmonica so I'm very interested in, you know, how you develop that because we don't get that many good rack players and I think you do do it very well. So any tips about how to play the harmonica well on a rack?

SPEAKER_01: 9:45

One of the things that might have inspired it was that I grew up with listening to a lot of symphonies. My dad, he played sort of late classical and romantic period, like Chopin and late Beethoven and Liszt and Mendelssohn, these guys, but also listened to the symphonies. So I had this big sound and listening to him play, lying under the piano when I was a little kid, going to sleep with this big waterfall of sound of Chopin and Beethoven coming down. I kind of got this... What I really grew to like was a lot of noise, a lot of sound, big sound, you know, and so playing on the rack with the concertina or the banjo kind of gives a big sound. So I guess one of the tips would be just, sometimes I say I do it because I can make a lot of noise that way, and it's kind of that way, but think symphonically. If you spend time on it, like anything, the tool should kind of disappear and just leave you with the rack more or less disappears if the rack fits right and you've played it long enough and you can just kind of forget about it. And it's the same with playing harmonica. In any case, focus on getting a good tone. Focus on playing down from your diaphragm and get a really full resonant tone. And that's important with a rack or without a rack, but especially with the rack because you have the advantage of being able to cup the harmonica to moderate the tone. So just play with a really resonant tone.

SPEAKER_00: 11:14

Yeah, I mean, it's something that I've dip in and out of and I'm currently dipping into it again and I always sort of try it for a while and then kind of give up on it a little bit so I feel I've never quite cracked it but it sounds like I need to stay up all night like you were saying you did but yeah it's that you know it's obviously doing the two things at once and I mean listen to yourself when you're playing tunes I think it works quite well in doing that doesn't it because you've got obviously the tune you can play on the harmonica on the instrument maybe play them in tandem and then you can do a little bit of chordal backup on the harmonica as well and is that how you sort of approach playing tunes.

SPEAKER_01: 11:47

Yes, especially with the concertina. The first concertina that fell into my lap was an English concertina, which is what I play. That's not the type of concertina that's usually played in Ireland. It's not the push-pull system like a harmonica or the Irish concertina. It's the same note, push and pull. And then when I finally came over here and saw what people mostly play, what I like about the Anglo concertina is the rhythm that you develop in the bellow because you're going in and out, just like you get rhythm from your breathing in and out. But I saw no sense in copying the in and out pattern of the Anglo concertina on my English concertina. It just didn't make sense. But at this time in the early 70s, mid 70s, I was playing regularly with Joe O'Dowd, who was a great fiddle player from Sligo here and actually the father of Jamie O'Dowd, who I play with now. And Joe had a great bowing pattern. The Sligo bowing style It's a really interesting style. It's sort of a combination of long bow and short bow. You'll have phrases of so many notes, five or six notes maybe, on the one bow stroke. And then other part of the tune, depending on what's called for, you'll have short strokes to put more rhythm to it. And so I used to, when the two of us would play together, I would just watch his... bow hand. Watch how the bow would go up and down and try and emulate that bowing pattern. So that's the kind of rhythm that I'm putting into the concertina is based on the Sligo bowing patterns. But when I'm playing, I think of sometimes I'll play the tune. Sometimes I'll play drones. I also kind of channel the Iliad pipes, the Irish pipes with the drones and regulators. Also the Irish pipes, the Iliad pipes, they're played with the right wrist plays keys. The play chord accompaniment and so with the with the alien pipes you have the right wrist is playing a chord accompaniment and you have the drones and you have the chance of playing the melodies so so i you know i listened a fair bit of alien pipes and use that with the concertina because like the pipes the concertina the english concertina can play drones and can play chords so it's a combination of cording and droning and playing the melody or a bit of harmony sometimes so that's kind of what i'm attempting on the english concertina and harmonica

SPEAKER_00: 14:03

yeah and it's good to see you playing it on different instruments you know like a banjo and a concertina because quite often you know people do it well usually people do it with the guitar yeah so it can work with other instruments as well oh

SPEAKER_01: 14:12

absolutely sure people do it with the with the piano i saw howard levy didn't use a rack but both he and larry adler saw them both in performances different one when howard in the states at a bach convention and and and larry at one of the festivals in germany but both of them were playing the harmonica holding the harmonica with the right hand and backing himself up on the piano with the left hand. Both of them are great at it.

SPEAKER_00: 14:37

Talking again about your, your move to Ireland. So you're saying it's, it was the love of the music. That's quite a commitment to your music to say, I love the music so much. I'm going to go on. I'm going to go move to Ireland. So that's what, that's what, that's what prompted that move. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 14:49

Yeah. Well, it was actually just came over on a holiday when I got to Sligo, the couple that we formed Pumpkinhead with had been living here since 71. I met them in LA in around 1970 and we became good friends pretty quickly. And, uh, I was telling about the great time I had in Sligo. So in 71, they moved over here. And then when I came over with my partner in 73, we met up, started playing together, and we really liked the sound of it. And Tom, the other fellow in the group, said that, well, there's this song contest in Letterkenny coming up two weeks after our return flight. He said, I reckon we have a chance we might win it. And so we just said, well, why not? You know, we didn't have money to buy another plane ticket if we missed the plane. But, you know, we liked sound that we got so we didn't catch the flight home and instead of a three week vacation I was here for eight years so we won the festival and that kind of gave us a bit of money and a recording contract and a manager

SPEAKER_00: 15:46

These friends of yours in Pumpkinhead were there from the US as well? They were, yeah So you all won an Irish music competition all from the US

SPEAKER_01: 15:54

Yeah, all Yanks Tom was a great songwriter so it wasn't just traditional music one of the things we did was a tune I'll write or a song and a tune, but the other one was one of Tom's songs and he was a great songwriter. So we had that as well. So

SPEAKER_00: 16:11

as you say, you joined Pumpkinhead in 73 and you had a single out, Shepherd and Son. Was that one of your first recordings out?

UNKNOWN: 16:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:34

That was the very first recording. That was actually the first song that Tom ever wrote. Pumpkinhead were pretty successful, yeah? Yeah, we didn't starve anyway. So we had a good run of it for the few years that we were together.

SPEAKER_00: 16:45

And was this your first kind of full-time band as a musician? Or were you doing things in the US before you came over to Ireland?

SPEAKER_01: 16:52

That was the first time I was a full-time musician. But back in LA, I was playing with a fellow named Bob Baxter, a guitar player and a guitar teacher. And he was the head of the McCabe's Music School at McCabe's Guitar Shop. And I was working working there as well. So the two of us formed a group together called the Scorpions of Death. So we played a few gigs at McCabe's and we actually opened for T-Bone Walker at the Ashgrove and it was a three-night engagement. And on the first night, Friday night, Bob developed a blister on one of his left fingers in the first set and kind of sliced it the second set. So he bowed out and the next two nights I opened solo for T-Bone Walker and I played her harmonica and concertina and tin whistle. They were very nice. They were very tolerant of me.

SPEAKER_00: 17:40

And in 75, you won the All-Ireland Harmonica Championship. That's right. That was in Leverkenny.

SPEAKER_01: 17:46

Oh, no,

SPEAKER_00: 17:47

Bunkrana. Sorry,

SPEAKER_01: 17:47

in

SPEAKER_00: 17:48

Bunkrana. So they still have this harmonica category, don't they, in the competition over there?

SPEAKER_01: 17:52

They do. And over the years, they've always had what they call over here the mouth organ or the diatonic harmonica. And that's always from the start, I think they've had that. But over the years, the chromatic harmonica, today they might have a chromatic harmonica category. But back then, the chromatic harmonica was included in the miscellaneous instruments. along with mandolins and other non-traditional type instruments. But yeah, the harmonica is still going on all right in competitions.

SPEAKER_00: 18:22

Good to see you. And so you were with Pumpkinhead, you say, for eight years and you stayed playing with them through the 70s?

SPEAKER_01: 18:28

No, the group was only together. We formed in 73 and we broke up around 77 or so. After we broke up, I started playing with Johnny Moynihan. He was in a lot of the early folk groups. He was in Sweeney's Men, would be the first major group. And so next in your albums is the,

SPEAKER_00: 18:54

was this the Jigging the Blues album you did next?

SPEAKER_01: 19:00

That's right.

SPEAKER_00: 19:01

Yeah.

UNKNOWN: 19:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:18

We moved to the States in 1980. We did a lot of back and forth. Was in San Francisco area for a couple of years, New York for a couple of years, then back to Spittle in Connemara for like three years or so. And then in 1978, we moved to Virginia when I started working at Hohner. And it was while working at Hohner that turns out that Frankie had a mutual friend who was a co-worker with my wife, who was a nurse in Virginia at the time. And so we kind of hooked up again after years we hadn't seen each other. And so we started playing together in Virginia in the mid-late 80s and early 90s. I guess the late 90s, early noughts, we were playing together, did some tours in the States together. And then we all moved back to Ireland around the same time. And it was shortly after we moved back that Frankie and I got together to record Jigging the Blues with Tim Eady. The next group of joiners would have been The Unwanted. And more songs, we did some tunes as well. I played with a few other folks in Ireland since I came back as well. Sean Cain is a singer. I played with his band for a while and did a few things, guesting with De Donnan, and then later on with New Road, put that together, and that's more focused on the tunes.¦So that was good fun, playing with pipes and fiddle.

SPEAKER_00: 20:51

The Unwanted, you mentioned there, some great songs on those two albums. I really enjoyed those two, particularly the recent one, which is your latest album, The Payday, won in 2019. The Unwanted you know the first album with with the unwanted you've got some old time songs and they like to shove the pig's foot further into fire and the sort of blues one on the this morning blues and There's some great tunes on there. And like you say, some singing as well, as well. So it's a nice mixture. So the Unwanted Band are really good. Yeah. So that's your current band then, is it? And you're still working with those guys?

SPEAKER_01: 21:53

Yeah. In fact, we're going to be... playing next month a virtual concert with Leonard Podolek, who runs the Home Roots tour series in Canada. And I think we're going to be getting together for the first time, the three of us, to play together for that next month. But that's still active. And the New Road, we haven't done anything for a while, but you never know. Things might come along. I also spent some time, after moving back in 2005, playing with Arcady, another kind of tune-based band, Johnny McDonough, I think

SPEAKER_00: 22:29

a lot of people now getting really interested in playing traditional music and the harmonica, myself included. And what is it you think that, you know, why the harmonica works so well in that sort of music?

SPEAKER_01: 22:38

Well, I think the diatonic harmonica is really the only one that I play. I never really got too far along on the chromatic. And the chromatic has a lot to go for it. And Mick Kinzel and I have a lot of fun slagging each other on one playing the chromatic and the other the diatonic for the tunes. Certainly the chromatic is great because you have all the notes but I like the diatonic because of the expression because you can slur notes and bend notes and a lot of Irish fiddling and all the instruments you know you have a lot of these kind of glissandi and putting expression into the tune into the notes and that's I think what the diatonic harmonica is really good at.

SPEAKER_00: 23:15

With the Irish musicians you're finding they're really welcoming to the harmonica you know they're like what is probably not that traditional instrument in Irish music although maybe it is given the fact that they've had this competition and some really good Irish players over the years, but you find that the harmonica is well accepted as well in the Irish music scene.

SPEAKER_01: 23:30

Oh, it is, it is. There's not many that play my type of harmonica. Most of the harmonica players here in Ireland play, there's a few, of course, that play the chromatic, but more of them will play the tremolo harmonica. And once again, the tremolo harmonica in the tuning that's played over here, you pretty much have all the notes, at least all the diatonic notes, and you don't have the missing notes that you have in the bottom of the Richter tune. But I kind of like overcoming the limitation And I do that partly with a few different tunings that I use. But one of the things that really has helped me play the diatonic in sessions, for years I just played a regular Blues Harper Marine Band or Super Vapor Richter model and never really loud enough. And I would just really go through reeds in no time at all, just trying to be heard and nearly trying to hear myself.

SPEAKER_00: 24:18

Those fiddles are loud, aren't they? Oh, they are.

SPEAKER_01: 24:21

It was while at Hohner I was messing about and I I wanted to make a harmonica that had a switch on it so that it could be with a lever out, it would be a single reed harmonica and push the lever in, it would be an octave harmonica. So I used a 260 10-hole chromatic and dispensed with the spring and then had, and I used, the slide was actually a modified chord harmonica slide, which was kind of a design that Chamber Juan came up with. It had more holes, All I just had to do was cut a few more holes and I could work it so that with a slide out, single reed, push it in and you're playing octave. And it was kind of cool. I built it on a 260 comb and mouthpiece, but then just out of whim, I took the slide off and just put the mouthpiece straight onto the comb. And the difference in volume, because of course the chromatic mouthpiece is a much bigger hole than the size hole on say a marine band, but the actual size of the hole that the drives the reed is much smaller because you've got two of them on the mouthpiece hole. But taking the whole slide mechanism out, you end up with a mouthpiece opening that's like nearly twice the size of a tin hole diatonic. And that really makes a big difference in the volume that you can get out of it. Plus mounting it on a big chromatic comb. And of course, I had to modify the comb to suit the resonance of the high octave reeds and all.

SPEAKER_00: 25:50

So is this an octave harmonica? It's

SPEAKER_01: 25:52

an octave harmonica. And that's what I play mostly when I'm in a session. I started off with the autovalve reed plates. The autovalve was tuned like the Marine Band, but it was an octave harmonica. Mounted the autovalve reed plates on the 260 harmonica comb and mouthpiece because they're the same reed scale, so they fit. And then it sounds like a melodion and you get great volume. And with this style harmonica, I can be heard in a big session, even with accordions and banjos, you know, I'm right in there. So that's really made a big difference in being able to play the the diatonic harmonica in a session because even with you know other instruments chromatic harmonicas usually in a big session you're not going to be heard and some some players will use a small uh amplifier which is sometimes not as fun you know it's much more fun if when you're when you're you're making your own noise it's loud enough and you're there with the instruments

SPEAKER_00: 26:45

so an octave uh an octave harmonica an auto valve as you say so i i own the most types of harmonica but not one of those so so just explaining again exactly what that is you've got two really reeds tuned an octave apart to play one note and have you got that for the blow and draw so you've got you know the sort of the two different octave notes on the blow and the draw

SPEAKER_01: 27:04

right if you if you start with say a chromatic and a slide out you have blow and draw a single reed instrument all the way up you push the slide in and it raises it a semitone so instead of the bottom reed plate being a semitone higher it's an octave higher yeah and then you don't use the slide there's no slide yeah so it's it's two reeds going all the time but But it's the same tuning, the autovalve, as the marine band. So as far as a learning curve, it was easy for me. I already knew the Richter tuning.

SPEAKER_00: 27:33

But you're playing the octaves at the same time, so you don't need to press the slide in to play the octave. I threw the slide away. Right, yeah, so you just take the slide off and therefore you're getting the octave sound all the time.

SPEAKER_01: 27:45

And because there's no slide bass or the whole mechanism is gone, the dimensions of the mouthpiece hole are the actual size. of the air that's going into the harmonica. So it's a tremendous amount of air you could actually put into it.

SPEAKER_00: 28:00

So how did you get your replay an octave up? Well, the autovalve is tuned that way. Okay, it's from the autovalve harmonica,

SPEAKER_01: 28:06

yeah. And unfortunately, it's been discontinued, which kind of broke my heart. The autovalve was actually, I think that was originally produced by the Pohl factory, P-O-H-L, which was one of the factories that Hohner bought out and brought their tooling over to Trussingen and started some of the models they can But this octave harmonica is still your main harmonica you play, is it?

SPEAKER_00: 28:54

for tunes, not for songs so much. So you're basically, well, making these or maintaining these from previous reed plates you have.

SPEAKER_01: 29:03

Yeah, and I also make them out of chromatic reed plates, like maybe a 280, 16-hole chromatic, you know, and I'll cut sections, you know, for the low octave, I'll cut the lowest 10 reeds and then the highest octave I'll cut higher up, you know, and retune the reeds or change the reeds if necessary and then cut down the comb, you know, to make another 10 holes or some of the harmonicas are like that but it's the same concept as uh auto valve replays on your 260 cone

SPEAKER_00: 29:30

right wow that must be quite a lot of effort to put together uh monica and we'll get into your customization skills shortly but uh yeah so you obviously got the capability but it's quite a daunting task for uh for some people to to consider doing that so let's get into your uh your history with honer then so you worked for honer for 18 years yeah that's right yeah you went back to the u.s you moved to virginia so how did that come about were you invited to work work for them or i

SPEAKER_01: 29:54

was It was, yeah. When we lived in New York from 82 through 84, I was working for an accordion company in Manhattan and working on accordions. And then in 84, we moved back to Ireland where I set up a little accordion shop in Connemara, which was, it was a marvelous place to live. There was great music. I was playing, you know, great music on the weekends and it was a wonderful place to live. And we just very, we're slowly running out of money because nobody was making much money back then in the 80s or So it was in early 87, the fellow that was managing the accordion service department for Hohner in Virginia, the North American or US headquarters for Hohner was in at this time in Virginia. He retired and so Hohner was looking around for someone to replace him and rang up my old boss in New York and said, do you know any accordion technicians? And they said, well, there's this guy in Ireland, maybe he might be interested. So they called me up and I I said, I'll come over and give it a try. And liked it, liked the company. It was a great company to work for at the time. So

SPEAKER_00: 31:00

moved back over to the States

SPEAKER_01: 31:02

again. So

SPEAKER_00: 31:03

you were working on accordions when you first joined them then?

SPEAKER_01: 31:06

Well, you know, they knew that I also was big into working on harmonicas. They had me working two days a week on harmonicas and three days a week on accordions was kind of the idea. And at the time, I could manage the accordion department on my own because it was all good quality German accordions that we were selling and over the years my things that I took on kind of expanded and you know I became the harmonica and accordion product manager and I was working on product development and then I was their main liaison in China when we started getting accordions and harmonicas made in China so I went to China once or twice a year for my entire time there so there's a lot of different kind of things that I was doing

SPEAKER_00: 31:49

So you were quite instrumental in improving the quality of the harmonicas is that right and I think you You did a bit of work with Steve Baker improving that quality as well, did you?

SPEAKER_01: 31:57

I was the only guy that was working for Hohner, really, that knew both how to work on them, you know, how they work and also how to play them.

UNKNOWN: 32:19

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEAKER_01: 32:27

Big trouble began in, I guess, the late 80s. tolerances had kind of slipped. You know, the reed-to-slot tolerance had kind of enlarged just too much, and they were pretty much hard to play. I was complaining about it, and Steve was complaining about it, and it fell to me to come up with new specifications and new toolings. Hohner USA actually paid for the new reed plate stamping tooling for Germany. I had a lot of old harmonicas that were from the service department, because sometimes there'd The policy was if it costs more to repair an old harmonica, especially an old chromatic, than to replace it at a discount, we would do that. So there's a lot of old harmonicas lying around and I could study them. I had a, what do you call that, a microfiche projector. I caught it when it was being sent out to the dump when they switched to CD-ROM for their records and put that into my workshop and I was able to put read plates on the microfilm or microfiche projector and take it out. photos of them. You get a good idea of what the tolerances was. I had harmonicas, old Hohners, new Hohner production, and from the competition, you know, there's Herring and Suzuki and some of these others. I could take photographs of it and send it to Germany and say, look, this is what we used to do. This is what we do now. This is what our competition is doing. So because Hohner USA, we sold about half of Hohner's world production. So we had a bit of clout, I suppose. And so we got them to just overhaul their whole production The other thing that we had in Virginia was a bunch of Herb Schreiner harmonicas, which were basically marine bands with special covers made in the 1950s, a signature model. And I think the story was that Herb Schreiner had kind of died early. And so there were thousands of these harmonicas for years. And by the time I started working there, there were still a good few hundred. So I was able to send a dozen of them back to Germany that they could examine these really good harmonicas from the 1950s. So we had to kind of fight and argue to get the tolerances down. They say, oh no, we can't have it that tight. It's too hard for the workers. But we came up with tolerance specifications that everyone could agree on and that made a big difference for the playability on the harmonicas.

SPEAKER_00: 34:45

You're credited with inventing embossing. Is this part of the story? And would you credit yourself with inventing embossing?

SPEAKER_01: 34:53

Well, yes, actually. It was in the 1970s, in the mid-70s, I was living here in Ireland and a friend had given me a phone a copy of a repair manual for the American reed organ, like the harmonium. In this manual, there were line drawings of special reeds, reeds that were like kind of a cross-shaped reed and a trident-shaped reed, you know, that had three prongs on the end. And I was fascinated with these reeds and wondering what they would sound like. So I made one of these reeds. It was an accordion reed that was shaped like a trident, you know, one reed at the back, at the rivet end, but branching off to three ends. I spent the whole day, cutting and filing, put it together and it worked. But the tolerance read, the slot tolerance was not that great. And so I didn't want to start all over again. And I didn't think I could probably do any better the next time. So that's when I came up with the idea of actually embossing the slot to close up the tolerance and it worked. And then fast forward back in, I was working for Hohner and we had this problem with the bad tolerance on the reads. The project for the new tooling was, it took probably nearly a year between the research and coming up with the designs, the new tooling and all. So in the meantime, we had to deal with these harmonicas, especially with a couple of the early customizers. Joe Felisco, he was probably the first of the diatonic customizers that I would know about. There was a few others before him, but doing chromatic, Dick Gardner was around for years and years for chromatic customizing. So Joe would send these harmonicas back, and not just Joe, but players would send new marine bands and diatonic back that were leaky. It was at that point that I remembered this technique I developed in Ireland on the accordion reed and started embossing it. And it worked pretty good. So I taught the technique to Sissy, who was actually running the harmonica service department at the time. And we were embossing all these returns that the customizers and players are sending back. And that went on for a good few weeks, but more and more were coming back. So it was at that point that I started telling people about it. I think it was in 95 when I first posted a message on to Harpell describing this technique and it caught on pretty quick after that.

SPEAKER_00: 37:07

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are very familiar with it now. So you've done some workshops on customization quite recently and I'll put a link up for that so people can find that on YouTube. So that's an invaluable resource that people want to check out going back to the source yourself to see how you do it. But if you could just explain very briefly what embossing is and then obviously people can refer to the video for exactly how you do it.

SPEAKER_01: 37:29

Okay. One thing feature of a good reed, whether it's a harmonica reed or an accordion reed, is that the fit of the reed within its slot be nice and tight. That is the tolerance, the space between the reed and the slot wants to be as close as possible. Same with the jaw harp as well. Really good jaw harps, you know, they have a very close tolerance between the tongue and the slot. The technique I developed was to actually, I called it burnishing, was the term I started using, but emboss was the term that was adopted, using a tool to push down on the upper edge of the reed slot. That raises a burr on the side facing the reed, so it actually helps to close up the space, tighten up the tolerance between the reed and the slot. So that alone improves the performance, the response, and the clarity of tone and the volume. But there's another important thing that embossing does is that burr acts as a kind of a sharp edge. It's this sharp edge that I think the way it works is that it defines the moment that the reed cuts off the airflow. This is something that's well known in both accordion and the jaw harp manufacturer that sometimes on accordion reeds, the edges of the reed will be thinner than the middle of the reed. And on jaw harps, where you really want good response, and a lot of overtones, the edges of the reed and the frame can be as sharp enough to actually cut yourself on it. And when you define that moment when the air is cut off and then opened up again like that, that makes a more responsive reed, increases the volume and the response time and the clarity of the reed. There's more signal and less noise. So embossing does this as well by raising that little edge on the inside of the reed slot to give you that kind of kind of a sharp defining that one point when the reed cuts off the slot. So there's two benefits to embossing.

SPEAKER_00: 39:37

On that, I mean, what would you say is the importance of people setting up the harmonicas? I think some people are maybe a bit daunted about doing it. They're afraid of breaking it. But do you think it's something that people should be doing to all the harmonicas for sure, particularly now where the quality of the harmonicas is maybe better than it was for a time a few years ago?

SPEAKER_01: 39:53

Well, I haven't bought any new harmonicas for years, but... You've

SPEAKER_00: 39:58

got thousands of

SPEAKER_01: 39:59

replays from all... kind of but I have had a chance to play a few and I've done some work for a friend of mine who sent me some Thunderbirds and when the first owner I think it was a marine band that was with the improved reeds and with the bamboo laminate combs and so I've played some of those and some of them are great harmonicas and you can play great music without doing a thing to these that said pretty much no matter how good a production model harmonica is you usually hand-finishing the instrument, whether it's setting up the reeds or doing a bit of embossing or champering the reed itself. Little things like that can only make it better, but certainly it's not absolutely necessary with a lot of modern harmonicas that you modify the harmonica because, I mean, there's some of the players. I remember Phil Wiggins.

UNKNOWN: 40:56

¦

SPEAKER_01: 41:04

I remember he was playing at one of our parties, the Horner party at the president's house. We'd given him, this was probably in 1996, because we had these gold-plated centennial marine bands with the really bad replays, right? They were really leaky. But I remember Phil could make even that harmonica when the marine band was at its worst quality. Phil could get a great sound out of it. It's also, it's not just the harmonica, but the better the harmonica, the better than music but you know some folks can can play great music out of nothing

SPEAKER_00: 41:39

well i think it's all that old adage isn't it you'd rather hear a great player play a bad instrument rather than a bad player play a great instrument so sure

SPEAKER_01: 41:46

sure

SPEAKER_00: 41:47

so yeah so with customization as i say i'll put some links you're going to appear at the uh harmonica uk chromatic weekend which is coming up for june so you'll be you'll be showing some customization there as well for chromatic specifically so people can come along to that weekend it's an online event and check that out so obviously you'd doing chromatics on that weekend. So anything particularly different about the chromatic setup?

SPEAKER_01: 42:09

Well, as far as the reads themselves, it's the same principle, you know, in adjusting the gapping of the read and the curvature of the read. And, you know, if you want to get into embossing and tampering, it applies to chromatics as well. But one of the really important things about chromatics, where a source of air leak that can cause problems with chromatics is in the slide assembly. What I was thinking, the format that I would do is just to start off and see what the players want to talk about, what they want to know about. I think how to service the instrument for sure, how to take the slide assembly apart and clean it and put it back together so it's airtight. And I don't know if they want to get into actually taking the replays off, which is no problem when the replays are screwed on, but with nailed on replays, you know, there's things that we could do, but there mightn't be enough time for that. I would basically just see what the players want and then talk a little bit about little tweaks you can do with the valves to help the valves a bit.

SPEAKER_00: 43:11

Another thing that you did at home is you developed the XB40 harmonica as well. That's

SPEAKER_01: 43:15

right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 43:16

So you want to talk a little bit about that harmonica and the concept there? The

SPEAKER_01: 43:20

concept is, the idea is a harmonica that all the notes will bend like a regular blues harmonica will bend. All the notes can bend, blow and draw and bend to any desirable amount. It's an idea that I first heard about, it would have been around 1981 or 82, I guess. My wife and daughter and I were living near Berkeley in the East Bay, East San Francisco Bay area, and Will Scarlett was living around not so far away, and he called in one day and showed me this idea. He had a little single-reed prototype with just the three reeds on it and the one mouthpiece hole where you could bend the blow and the draw. Brilliant idea. There's been a few folks, I think, who came up with the idea as well. Will might have been the first, but Brendan power, came up with it independently, I think, and as did Richard Slay. In any case, 10 years or so later, I was working for Hohner. You know, I had all these parts, harmonica parts around, so I decided to give it a try to see would it work actually making a harmonica. It worked, but I found that there was a problem with using this system. In other words, the way it works is, you know how on a standard blues harp, you can bend a reed within one hole if it's higher pitched than the other reed. You can bend down to the lower pitched reed. So with an extra reed with no offset, that'll allow the lower reeds, say on the blow reeds, on say the four blow on a marine band, if you tune this extra reed below the four blow, then you can bend the blow reed as well. But when I put together a harmonic like this, I found that bending a note on one hole would cause some of these reeds, extra reeds in other holes to start playing spontaneously. And then you have all these reeds going at the one time. And it was when I came up with a design that would eliminate that problem, that gave me the idea to actually come up with a design and patent it. So I took out a patent just on that valve system that I could control that.

SPEAKER_00: 45:17

Basically, an old bending harmonica, you could bend the draw on the blow knob. That's right, yeah. So that's not manufactured anymore, is it?

SPEAKER_01: 45:25

No, it was a few years back when the same time the auto valve was discontinued, the 260 ten-hole chromatic was discontinued. A lot of the tremolo and octave echo models were discontinued. They just kind of really cut the product line way back because a lot of these models just weren't selling enough in there.

SPEAKER_00: 45:45

Not economically viable.

SPEAKER_01: 45:47

Yeah, yeah. It was like the whole time that I was there, you know, there was always threats to, you know, wanting to cut the product line this out and that out. My argument was that, you know, you shouldn't really look at these lower selling instruments on their own or look at any of the instruments on the Roma, just look at the whole range in terms of brand loyalty. People would play with, say, play a honer because we had all these different models. And there were, I forget how many different models, not counting different keys, there were at this time in the 80s, there was, you know, maybe 30, 40 or more, totally different models.

SPEAKER_00: 46:24

But now you're getting customizers who are certainly working still with this concept. I know Brendan Powers just done this recently, this slip slider harmonica. Yeah, yeah. Which is the same idea yeah because you you're able to bend both the blow and draw knots by moving the this kind of adjustable replay to the yeah

SPEAKER_01: 46:41

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 46:41

same idea as the xp40 basically isn't it from what i understand

SPEAKER_01: 46:44

the construction of course is totally different but the the idea of providing more reeds pairing them with a reed where you can bend it like say like say on your four blow once again normally you can't bend that down but with the slip slider you know you can push the button in and and the the replay will actually move to another position where you have now have a lower read there where you can bend the flow reach so great idea and and then the the real achievement is to make something like that airtight yeah because once again like when you have a slide mechanism there's always potential for air loss and that's just like the problem with chromatics

SPEAKER_00: 47:20

yeah i'd be interested to try one out but yeah again uh brendan i've had on the show he's uh he comes up with all sorts

SPEAKER_01: 47:26

oh he's just such an inventive mind amazing

SPEAKER_00: 47:29

how he comes up with it all i know you so you played with him and uh and mick can sell it in this uh in in the trip poor heart for bypassing. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:37

Yeah. Yeah. We did a few tours. It was great. But Brendan was always coming up with new ideas. I remember one night we were getting ready to play a gig and we were backstage in the dressing room and Brendan came up with a new tuning just like right then and there. And just before going on, he retuned a harmonica to this new tuning and then went straight on stage with us and played it and played it great.

SPEAKER_00: 48:19

That's

SPEAKER_01: 48:20

gutsy.

SPEAKER_00: 48:21

I think he dreams about harmonica.

SPEAKER_01: 48:24

Oh, yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 48:24

yeah, yeah. One of the questions I ask each time, Rick, is if If you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_01: 48:31

I would, the first thing that comes to mind is what I would do. I would go all the way back to basics as if I couldn't play the harmonica at all. What does it feel like to put it in my mouth and breathe through the harmonica? When you get to a certain level of accomplishment, you know, sometimes we kind of, little bits and pieces of the beauty of the playing might get subdued or forgotten, you know, and taking back all the way to the very beginning allows me allows one to kind of rediscover the tonality, your embouchure playing, you know, how you're breathing, what your posture is, rediscover the rhythm of breathing in and out, playing a single note, what does a single note sound like, listen to it. And that, you know, I like to do that with all my instruments from time to time when I just start off with one note and see what it feels like, see what it sounds like, and rebuild it from there. And of course, 10 minutes is plenty of time to recap the whole learning process from the first time you ever picked up a harmonica. So I think that's a valuable exercise.

SPEAKER_00: 49:31

Yeah, really going back to basics and say something you still do now, yeah. Let's get on to the last section now, talking about gear a little bit. We've already talked on gear to some extent, but what harmonicas are you playing now? You're saying in sessions you're playing these octave harmonicas and, you know, any other particular harmonicas you're playing nowadays?

SPEAKER_01: 49:48

In sessions, mostly that would be the only one. Sometimes I might play, there's one tune, an Irish hornpipe called Paul Hapney. It's actually one of the tunes that Frankie and I, Frankie and Tim and I recorded on. the Chicken and the Blues album. I think we played that, recorded it in the key of D on a G harmonica, but it's traditionally played in the key of A, and it really lies nicely in cross-harp on a regular D harmonica down at the low end. If you play a regular D harmonica in a session, you're going to be heard. There's a few tunes that I might use a regular harmonica, other than the session tunes, playing in a small ensemble or solo, or on stage with a microphone. I'll often use just a ten-hole harmonica in one of a number of different tunings. I really like playing the major 7th harmonica. I started tuning my harmonicas to that about, I think it was 1968 when I started messing with that tuning.

SPEAKER_00: 50:43

So the major 7, that's with the normal Richter tuning in the bottom octave and just the raised 7th on the 5th draw and maybe higher, but the 5th draw.

SPEAKER_01: 50:52

Yeah, what Holner calls country tuning is just with that 5th draw. I always tune the 9th draw as well because I like to play in octaves.

SPEAKER_00: 51:00

The you don't tune up the three blow.

SPEAKER_01: 51:02

No, for the same reason, because I like playing in octaves and my style of playing, I liked a chordal accompaniment, a bit of vamping. And in that three blow that we like, the Paddy Richter tuning, I guess, you know, it's great for picking up that missing sixth, but you lose the octave and you lose the subdominant chord in second position or the tonic chord in first position. So I don't use that tuning.

SPEAKER_00: 51:26

Because it's interesting to me, because I do play a lot of tunes and I pretty much exclusively use use the Paddy Richter tuning because I like that sixth note in the first position, you know, the A on the C harmonica on that three blow. Seems to me pretty critical to most tunes. So I find that, you know, maybe I'm just used to playing it very much. But yeah, it's interesting to hear that you don't really feel you need that note.

SPEAKER_01: 51:47

Well, you need that sixth note, right? But the way I get it is I tune the two and three draw notes both down to semitones. The scales starting on hole one, you read do, re, mi, Fa, So, La, Do. You're missing the T, the seventh down there, but you get the sixth. So on the

SPEAKER_00: 52:07

three draw, you're selling that down. On

SPEAKER_01: 52:10

a C harmonica, the three draw would be B. That goes down to A.

SPEAKER_00: 52:15

So that's like this, that's this, what do they call it? They're calling it easy third. Easy third, yeah, easy third. Yeah, I do have a couple of easy third tunes.

SPEAKER_01: 52:23

That's mostly what I use. And even with the octave harp, on the single reed harp, like the marine band style harmonica, the seventh note is usually or very often is not a really critical note and you can gloss over it or I'll throw a valve on the inside of the fourth hole blow and I can bend the fourth hole blow down the semitone to pick up that missing seventh but it's once again the tune will dictate what I use usually it's either that tuning I use or the standard Richter tuning and that depends on what kind of tune what kind of implied chord or what kind of notes are needed so I'll go back and forth or sometimes I'll do a lot of fast switching of harmonicas as well

SPEAKER_00: 53:02

yeah it's interesting i'll check out that easy third with some tunes i've used it a bit you know i tend to use it for kind of third position stuff but yeah i'll check it out on tunes

SPEAKER_01: 53:09

check it out in first position it's really nice because you can play octaves nearly the whole harmonica you could play in octaves and first position the other great thing is in third position like in irish music say you have a g harmonica draw on the on the on the draw chord on the g harmonica down to the low end you have a d major you you tune the two and three draw down and you're changing that D major to A minor. So for a lot of Irish tunes, A minor tunes, mostly the two chords that you'll need to back up an A minor jig or a reel is A minor and G major. And those are the two chords you now have. Same with E minor tunes, tune the D harmonica in the same tuning. You draw, you get an E minor, you blow, you get a D major. So it's great for third position Irish tunes and first position.

SPEAKER_00: 53:59

Do you play any overblow? at all? You say you're putting valves on to do that.

SPEAKER_01: 54:04

No, Will Scarlett was the first I learned about overblowing and I kind of practiced it for a while. I think in Pumpkinhead there was this one song where there was one note that was an overblown note and on the album, the LP that recorded in 75, there is one overblown note on it, but I was never very good at it. As they say here, I gave it up for a bad job. But it's amazing what some of the players these days are doing with it. Yeah. What about embouchure? I tongue block and I pucker. And when I'm playing, especially with regular blues harp, I'll go back and forth constantly between, I mean, between tongue blocking and puckering because I, you know, I like the bins and chords you get from puckering, but then I like the vamping techniques and octave playing and other intervals with tongue blocking. So I always, with students, I always say, take some time, you know, I know it feels really weird to try and learn tongue blocking, but it's a fantastic technique. I always recommend people study it, but I use both all the time.

SPEAKER_00: 55:24

What about gear, you know, equipment do you use and amplifiers and microphones, anything there?

SPEAKER_01: 55:30

None, really. All the bands I've been in, I just play through the PA.

SPEAKER_00: 55:35

So with a kind of acoustic mic in front of you?

SPEAKER_01: 55:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 55:38

So you're going for that natural sound. So no effect pedals at all, no reverb or anything?

SPEAKER_01: 55:42

No, nothing like that. Leave that to the sound man.

SPEAKER_00: 55:45

So your final question on future plans, you talked about you've got a streaming gig coming up. So that's your next, you've got some gigs coming up, any live gigs coming up, any physical gigs? No, nothing yet. I'm just

SPEAKER_01: 55:56

keeping the head down and trying to play it safe until the coast is clear. There'll be also, I think, Mick and I teach at the Willie Clancy Summer School this year. The Saturday night concert will be a virtual concert, so that'll be something I'll be recording to send out. I assume it'll be streamed around the time that the festival would normally be, first weekend in July. So that and a few local live stream things. I'm doing. No in-person gigs yet. I've just got to bide the time until the coast is clear.

SPEAKER_00: 56:29

Yeah, I'll put a link on to that William Clancy Festival. I did have Mick Kinsella on previously, so yeah, I've talked to Mick and your association with him and meeting and doing those festivals there. And over the last year in the pandemic, have you been particularly working on anything? You've been working on your solo stuff, I guess, because you've been locked at home by yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 56:48

Yeah, really, just the solo stuff. I'm playing a lot of banjo and harmonica, practicing my drop-thumb technique on the banjo, which I'm... just making a bit of progress on coming up with new songs, working on not writing new songs, but finding new traditional songs and just enjoying the time and opportunity to come up with new material and working on harmonicas as well. I'm doing a bit of repair work for folks still.

SPEAKER_00: 57:38

Oh, yeah. When you're learning a new tune, do you tend to learn that by ear or do you use the dots?

SPEAKER_01: 57:43

I don't use the dots, no. Someone asked someone years ago, do you read music? Do you read the dots? Well, I do, but not enough to hurt my music. But I usually learn by ear. That's how I learned. In sessions, you know, like I played fiddle player and mandola player, Philip Duffy and Brian McDonough, and I played for every Tuesday for 15 years in Sligo. And then Leonard Berry and Brian and I played for a few years at a different pub every week, Sligo. And so playing that for so many years, you know, a lot of tunes. The great thing about the harmonica is that you can, when you learn cording and you learn vamping and you get the feel of the tune, especially when you know the music all right, you can can you can do a pretty good job of backing a tune up as you're learning the tune over the course of weeks or months so a lot of the tunes that i played in session i just learned over the years but the other thing what i'm really fascinated with a new tune i just throw it into transcribe or amazing slow downer and slow it down great learning tool is these these apps

SPEAKER_00: 58:45

yeah they're amazing aren't they so well let's hope that the sessions come back soon and we can all get back out to those sessions really missing those and it'd be great to attend some sessions over over in Ireland. So thanks so much for joining me today, Rick Epping. Thanks a lot, Neil. And

SPEAKER_01: 58:58

whenever you make it over to Sligo, call in. And thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00: 59:03

That's it for episode 37. Thanks again, everybody. Over to Rick to play us out.

UNKNOWN: 0:00

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