I improvised this piece in my kitchen, recording live into the Zoom H4 from a couple of feet away. The recording quality is surprisingly good, and the piece hangs together well enough, with a couple of themes and a little bit of development. It’s always nice to have a recorder around for those moments when you’re ready to play, and I love my Zoom H4. I bet you could make a solo recording worthy of commercial release with one of these things in a good-sounding room.

Back to the piece. It’s played on an SBS-tuned Hohner model 365 in G–essentially a regular G harp with bottom-octave tuning in the second octave, and an extended high range. The basic motif is a simple, hale-and-hearty-American line that might have appeared in an early 1800s folk song–it’s definitely got a Stephen Foster vib to it. The cool thing about this harp is that you can move that line all over the place and surround it with some cool bluesy stuff wherever you are. Groove is important to any solo piece, and this harp lets you play the groove in different octaves, which lets you take it to new places.

Hohner Model 365 SBS
Hohner Model 365 SBS 14 hole diatonic

Lotsa fun. Enjoy.

SBS365 by Richard Hunter Copyright 2011 by Richard Hunter, all rights reserved. Commercial use without permission is prohibited by international law.