by jbone1 » Sat Jan 03, 2009 4:05 pm
i'm a shopping slut. musician 123, GC, musicians friend, c2c, it just depends who's got what when i need something or if i can get a deal on something i'm willing to try or retry. example, i bought a case with 5 LO harps at musicians friend recently after many years of not using them. my case is a hodgepodge of different brands i like. sp20, big river, LO, bushman. my experiment with the hering diatonics has pretty much ended due to the hassle you're talking about. i HAVE to have harps and plates available. the fact that hering seems to have real issues getting stuff into the usa in a timely fashion had really turned me aside from most of their products. not sure what i'll do when i need a reed plate/comb for one of my 5148 chromatics at this point, maybe i'll get lucky. or try another brand of chromatic. this is part of why i use several different brands and styles. it's not a perfect solution, but the choice is either find what i need with a single brand and make that brand work, which means tuning, gapping, and repair (ugh!), or adapt to what's readily available in the market place.
aside from cleaning on a regular basis and swapping plates here and there, i am an out-of-the-box kinda guy and that suits me. the up side is, every harp has features i like and some i don't, and i feel like it builds a well rounded musician to explore the differences.