I was listening to Rick Epping play an Irish tune on the XB-40 harmonica and wondered what others thought about this beast. Rick sounded great, but I would expect that coming from a professional and the designer of the XB-40.
I was thinking of gettign the low d. I wonder if you re-tune the 3 blow on this diatonic as well?
Jon
The following remarks apply to my use of XB40s in “our kind” of music only.
I have XB40s in G and low D. They are somewhat larger than a typical 10-hole (no problem) and considerably louder. To me they have a strange, dry tone, but when you listen to recordings of yourself playing it this isn’t really evident. You do have to give 'em a bit of welly to get good response from them, which is something I don’t like and which actually means I play them very little. As for the easy bending, this is good as long as you’re good at keeping your bending under control already, otherwise the beast puts you on a learning curve. They are so easy to bend that you find yourself at first (a) overdoing it, (b) bending too low so that you’re out of tune. You also have to be careful not to bend when you’re not intending to. This is just about technique and not a criticism of the harp, after all easy bending is its raison d’être.
You can retune reeds like any other harp (I’ve done mine). As you’re tuning up the 3-blow you can just leave the auxiliary reed alone (all it needs to be to maintain the bendability of the retuned reed is to be pitched below it), or if you’re a purist you can tune that one up as well, but why give yourself the work! There’s a fair bit of dismantling and rebuilding to do with XB40s to get at the 3-blow, unfortunately. As I’ve always opted for retuning the 2-draw instead of the 3-blow I can do it with without all that hassle as the draw reeds are accessible from the outside.
The quality control that had been applied to both mine was absolute crap, and I had to do a load of work on them both to get them playable. There were some reeds out of tune and some so badly gapped that they wouldn’t play, and several of the auxiliary reeds had been mistakenly gapped like the sounding reeds instead of being given zero offset. I still have a squawky wind-saver on the low D but as I hardly ever play it I haven’t as yet been motivated to dismantle it to see what’s up. The whole upper end of the low D is so stiff and unresponsive that it completely puts me off using it.
If you want a harp for occasional tunes with accidentals in, usually C naturals or F naturals, I would go for chromatics in D and G. I’m thinking Carolan’s Draught, Give Me Your Hand, Jenny’s Wedding, Ashokan Farewell, Old Resting Chair, Roslyn Castle, that sort of thing. Getting a bent note dead on pitch as soon as you hit it without slurring up or down to it, especially in fast tunes, is a skill I honestly can’t be arsed to acquire. It’s so much easier to push a button!
For the money Hohner charges you’d think the XB40 would be a premium harp set up properly.
They have been criticised for poor quality control quite a bit and they may have got better since I bought mine a couple of years ago, it’s only fair to say.