gheumann wrote:Walter - I don't understand what you mean by saying "The amped harp sound is too limiting IMO". If you back off from a good microphone, you ARE playing acoustic, and the amp should be able to reproduce that sound cleanly. When you hand-hold the mic and cup it hard, you get a whole new range of tones. I don't understand how that equates to "less". To me it is "more". You don't have to play dirty all the time. I certainly don't.
I don't mean any disrespect, I promise - it is a genuine question. I respect your opinion, just want you to clarify a bit.
Thanks for the reply! I agree with what you said. I will ocassionally cup my vocal mic when playing harp. The recordings I just did were with a fender amp and distorted like most blues harp players do. Give them a listen and you get what I am saying? Walter
I posted this on another forum in response to a harp player that felt I should keep exploring amplified.
I did play amplified when I started out in bands. It was what everyone was doing and all I really knew. I played unamplified up to that point because belive it or not, I had no idea little walter and the amped guys were using amps. I just figured they had some different kinds of harps. I was raised totally isolated from instruments. My parents wouldn't allow them. My father broke guitars I brought home, and I found the harp. I could hide it my pockets and played it in my pillow at night. Once he got wind of this, I took off for good(luckily wilbert harrison picked me up and then Red after that). Everything I knew as a kid was via the record or radio. I knew of sonny boy and jimmy reed, but they were all via records. The live stuff, cotton, nighthawks, bill dicey, carey bell, butterfield,etc, were who I saw live and I tried to emulate them. Mark from the nighthawks took a good deal of time to explain the amped sound to me. I then went to manny's in nyc and bought a brand new twin reverb amp and bullet mic. They didn't have any vintage bassmans and the saleman convinced me to buy the twin. I was making about 500-1,000 bucks a week playing and knew nothing of the music store world. I didn't even know there were vintage shops...... When I hit Ca and put together the below zero blues band, my guitarist was a vintage fender collector. He immediately gave me a tweed bassman. I used that for a couple weeks and blew out the speakers one night. Again I was touching the amped waters only to be redirected back to acoustic harp! After that I went totally acoustic. I understand there are different tones to an amped harp that you will never find unamped. I really enjoyed my days of being a powerhouse amped harp player/frontman. When louisiana red took me in, he shared some acoustic harp stuff (he is quite a harp player and most don't know that). Then I met Sonny Terry and it all clicked for me. I never mess with his stuff because it doesn't fit me, but he shared the root of unamplified harp with me. Since then, I have been driven by the acoustic harp sound. I fronted my trio for 20 years unamplified. It takes having good enough musicians to keep volume down and dynamics and fine tuned stuff up. The problem with most musicians is they get excited and get louder and louder. All the subtle stuff goes away and muddle is the game. Jimmy Carl Black played drums with me on and off during my 11 years in austin. He use to get disgusted with what drumming had become to most. It was and still is, a sledge hammer like approach - high hat/snare pounding. The finess of wrist action on the skins and cymbals is a dying art, much like unamplified harp in a band context. Katherine Stevens, my 61 year old drummer out in Ca (12 years) could play so quiet that we could easily set up our trio on a 10'x10' stage and never drown each other out and converse in normal volume with each other. If you listen to any of the live recordings we did you will hear it. She could swing and rock and still keep it quiet.