Harmo Torpedo Review
2017-04-25 13:35:21
I decided that it was time that I learned to OVERBLOW on the harmonica. This is a way to blow bend on the lower 6 holes. What happens is that the blow read "chokes" and the draw reed kicks in with a tone about a half step up.
TL;DNR - I bought a Harmo Torpedo in order to do overblows. Nice harp, but it didn't work until I tweaked a reed.
This is different than an blow bend, which is done on the 7 to 10 reeds and is like a normal bend on the low notes, only blowing the note instead of drawing. Listen to Jimmy Reed and you'll hear blow bends on the high end of the harp.
Listen to Jason Ricci and you might hear him overblowing on the 4, 5 or 6 holes.
The 6 hole overblow is useful. It bends the 6 hole up a half note giving the harp player the minor third. As you probably know the flatted third is the sound in a chord that will make it a minor chord. This is useful in Blues which often transitions back and forth between major and minor.
I wanted that 6 hole overblow because when you hit the six hole in cross harp style blues playing you have run out of useful notes. John Popper and other harp players who venture into the 7 hole and above sound very "Major" and non bluesy when they go there. It is a sound I don't like and harp players who do it I think of as "Stunt" players, and do it because it is cool, not because it sounds good.
You can't just take a harmonica and play overblows on it. Standard harps won't do it. The reeds are adjusted to produce a loud sound without "choking" and to overblow you need choke the blow reed in order to fool the draw reed into playing. You do this by adjusting the reed height and the bow of the reed. You bend the reed down and shape the reed as a low arch.
Anyway, I have a stock of 15 and twenty year old Hohner Big River harps that I got free back in the day when I ran JT30.com as a going concern. An online company gave me harps in exchange for clicks. My preference has always been Big Rivers because they are big and heavy and hard to bend and last forever. I tried messing with the 6 hole on a few used but usable old Big River harps. There a dozens of websites that try to explain how to adjust a reed and I must have read all of them.
I now have two Big Rivers that won't play the 6 hole at all. I think I can get them back, but it is frustrating.
So I asked mother Google what to do and found a company called HarmonicaLand. For $69.90 they will ship you a harmonica all setup and set so it can do overblows on holes 4, 5 and 6.
This is considerably cheaper than the overblow setup gurus on the web charge for a harp. The Harmo Torpedo is probably an inexpensive Chinese harmonica and not the fancy German ones that the pros use, but I though that it would be adequate for me to test if this old mouth could even do an overblow.
I sent the 7o bucks on PayPal, and two days later I had a "C" Harmo Torpedo in my hands.
The harp played really nice. It plays like a Tombo. I have a couple of Ultimos and at one time I used Lee Oskars. The low notes are nice and clear with loud bends that are easy to control. The high notes blow bend easily and clearly making first position nice and easy.
Now I could learn to do an overblow. I followed the instructions on countless YouTube videos and blew on the six hole as though I was trying to blow bend a high note. Just as the videos said, the blow reed choked, giving me total silence. All the videos agreed that I was half way there.
Practice! Practice! After three days and several hours of trying, I got nothing.
It's not like I have never done an overblow. Gary Primich let me use one of his Filisko harps about 20 years ago and I was able to get a squeaky overblow within a minute of trying. He told me to go out and buy a $150 harp setup from Joe Filisko and I would have no problems cleaning up the sound. (Joe doesn't do harp setup anymore). I could not see getting a set of five or six harps at $150 each and shelved the suggestion.
Not to be defeated by the Harmo Torpedo, I took off the covers and started messing with the draw reed. It only took three or four tries and I was able to do my squeaky overblow!
So the conclusion is that the Harmo Torpedo is a nicely setup harp. It is about the same quality and seems about the same construction as a Japanese harmonica that costs about half as much. It is setup for overblows, mostly. You still might have to tweak a reed or two to get it working right.
Overall I am satisfied. It is cheaper than an R. Sleigh harp at $99, but you have to ship Sleigh a harmonica and he only does certain ones. There are other guys out there, but all of them charge about $150. At $70, the Harmo Torpedo is a good choice for someone who wants to break into overblows, but doesn't have the green.
