Brendan Power Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Brendan Power is famous internationally as a phenomenal harmonica player in many genres and also as an instrument innovator. He's invented many unique harmonicas to increase the expressiveness and range possibilities of the instrument family and is constantly experimenting. His website is linked in the description. Brendan also has a fascinating personal story in that he discovered the harmonica in his university years and changed his life in order to master it. He's completely self-taught, and you may have heard him playing on albums with Sting, Kate Bush, Van Morrison, movies like "Shanghai Noon" and "Atonement", or over 20 of his solo albums. I was thrilled to have this opportunity to speak with him, but unfortunately we had some really big internet delays, which you may notice as a few instances of unavoidably choppy editing during the episode. Brendan demonstrates a few of his harmonicas in different styles, and I've added time stamps to the description. Let's just say, hello. Thank you so much Brendan Power for joining me today.
Brendan Power:
Thanks Leah. Nice to, yeah. Nice to be asked.
Leah Roseman:
Yes, I-
Brendan Power:
Yeah, I can hear you.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I found out about you through Fiddler Janie Rothfield and then I just found out about this whole world of harmonicas that I didn't realize existed. And what I find so inspiring about your story is not only that you're such an incredible musician, but that you were motivated to become an inventor in the pursuit of more expressive playing. And I find that so wonderful. So to start off-
Brendan Power:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
... I know you've developed so many harmonicas and you're always developing new harps. Can you show us some of those and different styles that you can play on and then we can get more into your story?
Brendan Power:
Sure. Well, I've got a whole box of different ones there, and another box of more there. But maybe I'll start with this one here. Well this is one I, it looks like a standard chromatic harmonica, but it's actually been substantially changed. And I call it the AsiaBend. So it just gives you lots of big bends. I was inspired by Chinese music to play this one. So maybe if I choose to...
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful, thank you so much.
Brendan Power:
So that's, hopefully you recognize that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Brendan Power:
Ah, Amazing Grace it was.
Leah Roseman:
I did recognize it and I was trying to... Yeah.
Brendan Power:
Yeah. Did you recognize it? Yeah. Okay. So basically... Yeah. I mean, this harmonica just allows you to bend every note really expressively. It was inspired by the Chinese instrument, the Erhu, which is a fiddle instrument with a kind of a snake skin gourd at the bottom, and it's incredibly expressive. So that's what I altered the harmonica to try and get that sort of Chinese sound, but I found it's really good for all sorts of-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Brendan Power:
... western music as well.
Leah Roseman:
I expected you to play something Chinese. So when you started playing Amazing Grace, I was sort of like, my ears were wrapping around the sound I thought, "Is it that tune that I recognize?" And I think for all kinds of middle Eastern music and Indian music as well, that the type of bends you can do very easily.
Brendan Power:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Indian music I just love listening to, it's such a huge, quite imposing sort of discipline and area that, I mean, you'd have to almost, I feel like I'd have to give up everything else in my life and just devote myself to that to do it justice. But I do love Indian music, but I mean it's just, I think, to do it well you'd have to really commit yourself to it-
Leah Roseman:
Right, yeah, but I meant for players in that tradition.
Brendan Power:
... 100%.
Leah Roseman:
... for musicians playing other instruments in Indian traditions, they could pick up one of these AsiaBend harmonicas and find the notes they need.
Brendan Power:
Good point. Yes. I did develop it partly for people in those traditions, to try and explore themselves. I mean, there's quite a history of, in Indian music for instance, they've taken all sorts of Western instruments and Indianized them. Like the way they play the violin, where they sit on the floor and the actual head of the violin is in the crook of their foot, supported. And that allows their hand to slide up and down, they don't have to support the instrument with their hand. So it means their hand is totally free to slide up and down the neck and get those incredible bending sliding pitch things that happen in Indian music. So they haven't changed the instrument it's... Well there are some, there's a guy called Subramaniam, I think he's made some amazing, weird violins. But most of them just play a standard violin, but they've really changed the whole way of playing it, that they're sitting down.
And then there's other instruments like what we call the slide guitar or the Dobro, they've really done some amazing stuff that the way they play added sympathetic strings and played in a whole new way. And even on keyboards, there's some people playing amazing stuff on keyboards. And the most recent thing is the iPad. Indian music musicians have just taken to the iPad incredibly well. Because of course, on the iPad screen it's just a slippery, slidey, thing. And there's apps now which allows you to get micro-tones between the different finger positions, and there's some amazing stuff being done on iPads actually by Indian musicians. So this harmonica in a way was in a way to give harmonica players there something that was, would give them a sound that was more authentic for their own music.
The only other thing about it is it's a pretty quirky harmonica, it's an all draw harmonica. Most harmonica are blow and draw, you blow, you get a note on the out breath and on the in breath, this is all draw. So it's really quite a tricky instrument to play for anyone who's used to playing a normal harmonica. So it might not get a lot of acceptance there.
Leah Roseman:
Do you find you might hyperventilate because it's all on the in breath?
Brendan Power:
No, I mean basically it's just the mirror image of all other wind instruments, apart from the harmonica, where it's an all on out breath, saxophone, flute, recorder, or whatever. I mean, they've been doing that for centuries, thousands of years probably. And what they do is they just blow for a while. And when they run out of breath, they go do a quick little in breath and then keep playing. This one is the opposite I just play away. And as soon as when I get full, I just do a quick out breath and then keep playing. So yeah, that's not actually a problem. It's just the reverse of what you do on a saxophone.
Leah Roseman:
That's interesting. So Brendan, you and some of my listeners might be interested to know, I did speak with a Carnatic violinist in the series last year, Southern Indian. And also an Erhu player as well.
Brendan Power:
Wow!
Leah Roseman:
Very recently a Kamancheh player. So I try to really, yeah. All kinds of musicians and styles. And actually, because of when I was researching you, because of your really cool Bulgarian album and what is the name of that musician, the gadulka player, Georgi Petrov, I was looking at that whole style of music, which I've always loved. And that then I was looking into speaking with a gadulka player, which is the Bulgarian violin. It's just so interesting to me.
Brendan Power:
Those Balkan musicians are just so high level. I mean we think we're quite clever in the west if we play a couple of odd time signatures, but they live and breathe sort of irregular meters like 7, 5, 9, 11, 13, 15 it's just like their mother's milk, they just do them. I remember when I first met Georgi, it was really my first exposure to things like 7/8 or whatever, but I was sitting next to him, I was in the Riverdance show, the band for the popular dance thing, the Riverdance show that happened in the late 20th century, early 21st. So we were sitting in the band for about a year or two together, or yeah, two or three years we toured together. And he'd play after the gig and I listened to the music and it was just so alien, but also very enticing and really interesting.
So over time I asked him more about it and he explained more and I went over to Bulgaria and got to know some of these amazing Bulgarian musicians. I mean, I'm just - scratched the surface really. But I did get sort of enough of a feeling for it that I composed a tune or two in a Bulgarian style. But yeah. I've got so much respect for those guys, because not only can they play amazing Bulgarian music, you go over there and they play incredible rock music, jazz, and all the other stuff that we're used to as well, classical music. So then I think, yeah, amazing musicians those Balkan musicians.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you started tinkering and inventing almost as soon as you started learning the harmonica, from what I understand.
Brendan Power:
Yeah. Correct. I've just got that kind of, I guess some people are like that, aren't they? They want to pull things apart, see how they work. So, yeah, pretty soon after I started playing, I started figuring out that, "Oh, it's those reeds that make the sound, the little free reeds, and that you could file the end of a reed and it would go higher in pitch or you could put weight on the end, it would go lower in pitch. And that means I could alter the tuning. So quite quickly I was doing things like that, changing tunings within a year or two of starting to play. And that makes a huge difference to what the stuff you can play on the harmonica and also how well you can play it for a particular style. So I now use harmonicas' many, many different tunings.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And actually, so we started with the AsiaBend harmonica. So you were doing Daoist Studies at university when you discovered the harmonica, and you didn't have any kind of music background. I find it so fascinating that you just became so absorbed.
Brendan Power:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it was like what they call it a Damascene moment, wasn't it? When you just, something hits you and, yeah, I went to this concert, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, someone dragged me along cause it was free. And I'd never heard of them before but for any of your listeners who don't know them, they were two great blues players from an earlier era. I mean, I think they, I saw them in '76 and they were probably in their 60s by then or 70s maybe even. But they had Sonny Terry, who was blind, played the harmonica in this most amazing way. And Brownie McGhee, a great singer guitarist. Funnily enough, by the time they'd... Well, at the time I saw them, they hated each other, basically. As many of these long term duos go. And they were on opposite end of the stage. And they'd make sort of snide remarks about each other to the audience, but they didn't actually talk directly to each other.
And Brownie would play tricks on Sonny where Sonny was blind and he had his harmonica is in a kind of a belt around his waist. So Brownie would start a key in a certain tune and Sonny would hunt around and eventually find the right one. As soon as he got the right one Brownie would change key, so Sonny had to go through the whole process again. So there was all this kind of thing going on in front of the audience. But I mean, when they did play together, it was just amazing, mind blowing. And I was just so inspired by the sound of the harmonica I went out and bought one the next day and it was a whole... Yeah, it just, I don't know how those things happen in life, and I was 20 by that stage, so pretty late to start at it.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking, so you didn't grow up with that much music in the house, certainly not popular music. You didn't have a TV as I understand, but your dad had a workshop. So that huge part of your career as an inventor was he influenced you that way?
Brendan Power:
Yes. I mean, it's probably one of those things you inherit in your genes. So he was a really fine metal worker he had lathes and all sorts of things, quite big machines. I deal with smaller machines, but I've got that same bent. And one of my brothers, Steve, is similar. On my mother's side, she was more artistic she painted and did Batik and stuff. So it's a little bit of that as well, I love calligraphy and things like that. But yeah, definitely something for my parents has transferred into what I do now.
Leah Roseman:
And your early days, so you were in Christchurch and then you went to Auckland and you were just learning and starting to play with people. But the scene there was pretty rich in terms of opportunities to play with different kinds of people?
Brendan Power:
Yeah. I mean, New Zealand, is it's a small country, a long, long way away from anywhere. So there is, there's definitely a scene. It's nothing like the scene, of course, in the US or Britain, or Canada, I guess. But there's definitely a thriving music scene. But most of the musicians, I suppose, because it's partly we don't have our own long tradition As you do say in Ireland where people grow up, there's been something going on for centuries. New Zealand's a young country with people have gone there from many, many parts of the world. So we tend to just be like magpies. We listen to what's coming in and learn it. So most of the musicians there would've learned from records or CDs or whatever from overseas, and most would play many different styles pretty well.
So that's another thing about if you want to make a living as a musician in New Zealand, you can't really specialize too much in just one thing. You have to be quite good at different things so that you can get enough gigs to survive. But yeah, there was a very thriving scene, certainly in Auckland in the early 1980s, or throughout their whole '80s, it was really lots and lots of gigs and lots of opportunities to play. And also did quite a bit of studio work, started to do some studio work there as well.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were first learning by yourself you really didn't know what you were doing from what I understand, you were kind of doing things wrong?
Brendan Power:
Absolutely. Yeah. I had no idea really what a scale was or a tune. So, yeah, it was just totally from scratch. Even now I've never learned to read music, so I just do things by ear. But I've learned enough about music theory in terms of what chords are and why certain runs sound good over certain chords. But I don't think in terms of the names of notes, I sort of think in terms of numbers, a bit like the Nashville System. So if you've got a scale you've got your one, you've got your three, you've got your five, those are the main notes. So everything's numbers for me. Well, I'm not thinking numbers really explicitly, but that's how I relate. And also with a harmonica, I mean, basically certainly with the diatonic harmonica, I mean, you've got one harmonica for every key.
So if you were trying to think, "Right, okay. D sharp now is that hole five draw or is that..." So on one harmonica it would be hole five draw, but on another one it might be hole seven blow. So it's really, in some ways thinking about note names is actually really difficult. Whereas if you think more numbers, then the numbers transfer from every harmonica and one harmonica to the other. So your one is always in hole two or hole five or whatever. So that's how I think of it.
But yeah, I mean, I really admire people who can read music though. I've met some people who can read brilliant music and it sort of almost inhibits them from playing freely. They need to have a piece of paper in front of them, or they literally cannot play a note. I mean, I've met people like that, quite a few, which I think is terrible. On the other hand, I've met other people, there's plenty of people like myself who can't read a note, and we miss out in many ways ourselves, but we sort of find our own ways. I think the best is the people who can read, but also can play by ear.That's really the best-
Leah Roseman:
So, when you moved to London you did a lot of studio recordings. You've been on major movie soundtracks and written soundtracks. So how did that process work since you're not a note reader? Would they give you a recording to listen to, I guess.
Brendan Power:
Good question. Yeah. Mostly they give, yes, they would give me a recording to listen to beforehand and then I'd sort of get a feel for it. I mean, yeah. And also, I might write things out in sort a primitive sort of tab as well like you can actually with harmonicas, there's a sort of a tab system a bit like guitars where you can, instead of notes, you can say, yeah, if it's hole three draws, it's hole three with an arrow going down. So I'd write out a few basic ideas like that, but I couldn't actually site read them it was more just as an aid to memory or something like that.
Leah Roseman:
So you became very well known as an Irish player, which is interesting. It's not exactly in the tradition of Irish music to have a harmonica. And you won this championship, I think in 1993?
Brendan Power:
Yeah. I mean, I came over to Britain in 1992, and I'd already been playing some Irish music because of my grandfather's Irish and my dad had some Irish records at home. So I heard the music as a kid, even though I didn't play it. But then after I'd been playing blues for a bit, I started to try and play some of these Irish tunes that I'd heard at home. So by the time I got here, I had a small repertoire Irish tunes and I was just playing them on harmonica and I had sort of tuned up harmonica especially for it. And then I heard about this thing called the All-Ireland competition, which is kind of an annual gathering of Irish traditional musicians and there's categories in each instrument, I guess a bit like they have in sort of bluegrass kind of things, but this is a national competition. But there's sub competitions in all the countries that have Irish diasporas around.
So in Britain there's quite a big Irish community. So I went into the all England one and went into the harmonica area and sort of won that. But then there was some muttering behind the scenes and some complaints from the other musicians because I was playing a harmonica with a... If I find one here with a button on the end, the chromatic harmonica. So...
So I could do little trills and things like that which they weren't able to do on their diatonic harmonicas. And they said, "But he's cheating." So I got shifted into the miscellaneous instruments category, and that was really bizarre. I mean, there was people with banjos with huge long neck banjos, melodicas, hammered dulcimer. So I was in that area, but anyway I won that and then I went to Ireland then won the miscellaneous instrument category on my chromatic harmonica. So yeah, that was a funny episode.
Leah Roseman:
And what was it like being in the scene in London? It must have been very frenetic with doing a lot of studio recordings?
Brendan Power:
Yeah. I mean, I was playing gigs. I was more playing in the folk scene in Britain than playing gigs in London. I mean, I did play some gigs in London, but I was more touring around and playing in folk festivals around Britain, Ireland, bit of Europe. And so that was really, I was more in that touring folk area than London based pubs. Most London gigs are pubs basically, and they tend to focus on things like popular music, pop, rock, and things like that. So I wasn't really doing a lot of that.
Leah Roseman:
I noticed you've played with several really famous musicians, including Sting on his Ten Summoner's Tales album you're featured along with Larry Adler.
Brendan Power:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So-
Brendan Power:
Yeah, that was sort of just out of the blue. I mean, I'd only been in Britain about six months and I sent off a cassette to various, I'd looked up the who's who in the music scene in terms of record companies, sent off cassette at that time, early '90s of some demo bits and heard nothing back. And really money was running out and things weren't happening. I was thinking, "Oh, maybe it's time to go back to New Zealand." And then I got a ring and said Sting wants you to come and play on his record. Which is kind of like from nothing to an international superstar. So anyway, he picked me up in his car, we went down to the studio and I did a bit of playing and then I ended up playing on a video recording for the album, Ten Summoner's Tales in one of his, he's got houses all over the world, Italy, America, and a really nice one in London and then a lovely homestead in Salisbury near where Stonhenge is.
And so anyway, I went down there for a few days and played with these extraordinary musicians, like David Sanchez on keyboards and Vinnie Colaiuta on the drums, Sting. And so, yeah, that was quite an amazing change of pace from being nothing happening at all to suddenly that happening. But it was only a limited period of time while they promoted the album.
Leah Roseman:
Did you get to meet Larry Adler?
Brendan Power:
I met him actually in a different context, but not in that context. Unfortunately by the time I went to Salisbury I think Larry was pretty ill and he couldn't go. And so I ended up playing a track that he played on the album, I forget the name of it now. But anyway, it's a lovely track that he plays on the album. But anyway, I played on that on the video in Salisbury because I think he was, I'm not, yeah, I can't remember. But he definitely, he couldn't be there for I think health reasons.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It was interesting when I was researching that album, I was saying, "Who else was on this album?" And I saw that you it's just a small little footnote, but for violinists Simon Fisher played and he's super famous as a violin pedagogue, he's written tons of books. So for any classical violinist, they would probably know that name Simon Fisher. That was interesting. And this CD in 1994 is documented as the first item sold on the internet. Just one of those little facts that came up, I thought that was interesting.
Brendan Power:
Wow. That's a-
Leah Roseman:
And you're kind of an early adopter of-
Brendan Power:
Wow. You mean as a streaming as a download?
Leah Roseman:
No not as a download. I believe it was purchased on the internet and shipped. That was my understanding. It was first, because it was 1994. Maybe I have to check the facts, but it was said it was the first item securely purchased over the internet. So I don't know if it would've been a download back then because that would've taken 10 days to download. Yeah. Maybe it was just the transaction.
Brendan Power:
No. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when you say the first item purchased on the... the first item of any kind-
Leah Roseman:
I think I read this on Wikipedia.
Brendan Power:
... like dolls houses or flowers or first item of any kind.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah I'll have to double check that, but that's what I read. We were talking about Irish music and I really love the recording you did with Lucy Randall, the bodhran player. It's really so beautiful. Yeah.
Brendan Power:
Yeah. She's great. She's fantastic.
Leah Roseman:
Could you play an Irish tune for us actually? Would you be willing to do that?
Brendan Power:
Yeah, sure. I'm just trying to think. Okay. So maybe a jig going into a reel, so.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. So it'd be super interesting. Yeah.
Brendan Power:
That was two Irish tunes. That was, I don't know if you picked that up, I think is it second one is called the Corner House. I can't remember the first one. But they were in two sort of really popular time signatures the jig, which is 6/8. That's that's the jig. And then the real, which is more like 2/4. That kind of, so those were two different types of tune. I mean, normally you'd play each one, three or four times before going into the other one, but I just put them one time each. And then the structure of them is normally, yeah, sorry. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering like you have a 3D printer, so in terms of the, what's the word I'm looking for? The customizations you can do for your customers, it's not just your own harmonicas you've developed, but you also do custom work?
Brendan Power:
Yeah. Yes I do. You can do all sorts of things with harmonicas, amazing amount of things. But retuning is one obvious thing. All my harmonicas are in alternate tuning. So I'm really good at retuning harmonicas. Most people play in a couple of there's sort of two stock tunings. Like the chromatic normally comes in a particular tuning called solo tuning. And then the diatonic often comes in what's called Richter tuning. So probably 90% or 95% even of players in the world play it just in those two tunings. That's all they know and are interested in. But there is like sort of probably a growing interest in alternate tunings. And so one of the things I was doing when I was doing that work was retune them. And then you can also make them work a lot better by doing fine, intricate, reed work under a microscope just you get the reeds passing through the slots at finer tolerances.
And I was also doing more radical things like chopping harmonicas up and making smaller and bigger ones and stacking them up one on top of the other. So all that kind of thing. To be honest, these days, I've learnt CAD design and I can make far more interest complicated and interesting harmonicas, but I more do that sort of stuff for my own pleasure. And for trying to make strange new harmonicas that I can play. I'm not sort of so doing custom work for other people or hand work for other people so much anymore.
Leah Roseman:
So we started talking about AsiaBend harmonica at the beginning of this conversation and the harmonica, it descended from an ancient Chinese instrument, right? Like the sheng or how's it pronounced the-
Brendan Power:
Yeah, the free reed principle if you like, where you've got this vibrating reed. I don't know why they call it a free reed cause it's actually fixed at one end. But this reed vibrating through a slot it's really ancient. I mean the jew harp or what you be called the Jew's harp that's a free reed instrument and you've got a whole family of those kind of things in Asia. So that whole thing came from Asia, maybe China. And it was really only in the early 19th century that those free reed instruments started to become made in a Western forms, like the harmonica, accordion, concertina, bandoneon, all that whole family of instruments is all, yeah, essentially based on far older free reed family from Asia, east Asia.
Leah Roseman:
So Hohner was a watchmaker. And I think I was reading, I think it was before him there was like a trend in Germany that men wore these harmonicas as like a like jewelry. They were like little wrist ornaments before it became a thing. And I think like, did you read that? Have you heard that history?
Brendan Power:
No. No.
Leah Roseman:
Really? Okay. Yeah. And that they were first developed to tune pianos, like around 1820. And then after that it became like a little ornament and then Hohner, like a man's hand bracelet, and then after that he developed it into a real instrument. So yeah, I was really fascinated. I was wondering about the iPad you had mentioned about using it in different ways, but I know you use it with harmonica to get cool effects that are freely available to people, I've seen some of your videos. Can you show us some of that today or would that be too complicated?
Brendan Power:
It's be too complicated today. I'm sorry to say, it's all in another room. And it's tight, so yeah, so I couldn't really. But yeah, the iPad, I don't know if you've ever explored one for music yourself or?
Leah Roseman:
I haven't.
Brendan Power:
Okay. Oh, well I'd really recommend it. It's an incredible music machine. I mean, for not just could be whatever music you're into, but there's huge number of amazing apps. I use it mostly for, well, various things. Looping is one, there's a great looping app in there, but also through using a MIDI harmonica. Again, I don't have that in this, I'm just sitting in my kitchen right now so I don't have all that stuff with me. But these MIDI harmonicas that have come out recently, and these are really interesting. They have no reeds, but they use breath sensors a bit like the EWI. I don't know if you've heard of the Akai EWI and various wind senses in the form of saxophones, whatever Michael Brecker was a great exponent of them.
Anyway. But now there's MIDI just about everything. There's MIDI recorders, MIDI violins, MIDI there's, MIDI that and MIDI harmonicas. And yeah, they're mind blowing because basically you can just play any sound you like, and there's all sorts of amazing things they can do, which traditional harmonicas can't do. So I've been enjoying exploring that and the iPad is actually my main interface. So I just plug in my MIDI harmonica into the iPad and there's a whole bunch of apps... You you're a cello player I believe, is that right?
Leah Roseman:
I'm a violinist.
Brendan Power:
Oh, sorry, Leah. Okay. Well you would be amazed by this. Have you heard of SWAM Audio Modeling the SWAM company, an Italian company called Audio Modeling? No. Well, you'd be amazed, I mean, the realism that you can get now from these, the company's called Audio Modeling, but the apps are called SWAM apps. So you get SWAM violin, SWAM cello, SWAM saxophone, et cetera. So the actual realism you can get from these things is just mind blowing. And so, yeah, I really recommend you check it out. So yeah, I really love-
Leah Roseman:
One of your videos-
Brendan Power:
... playing that stuff.
Leah Roseman:
Sorry, it's hard with the delay. One of the videos I saw you were showing people was just a regular diatonic harmonica with effects on an iPad, it sounded amazing. Like you made it sound like an electric guitar, but just through these free effects, I thought that was really generous of you. Because a lot of the stuff you're showing on your YouTube channel is just to help people out like how to tinker with their own harmonicas and open them up to make their own changes.
Brendan Power:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just get enthusiastic about a certain thing and then just, I think, "Oh, I bet other people, so a few other people might be interested in this," so sometimes I'll make a video about it. But yeah, amplifying the harmonica as a whole thing and how to use effects and how to cut the microphone and stuff like that. That's a whole, what's the word? A whole scene, I suppose. And some people are just that's all they do, they play amplified harmonica, but you can get some amazing sounds just from the harmonica by putting it through guitar effects. It transforms the sound altogether makes it sound huge, like a saxophone. So yeah, I enjoy that as well.
Leah Roseman:
So when you started playing, you were playing blues, because that was your first inspiration. And from what I understand like regular Richter tuning isn't the best for bending notes. Like it's kind of hard to do?
Brendan Power:
It's a funny thing actually the way it all happened though. I just wonder if I've got a harmonica I can demonstrate what happened. Yeah. So I think this one... So basically Richter tuning was devised by the Germans in the 19th century. Okay. This was before blues had been, well maybe it was being played by the African Americans but before the recording age, so no one else had heard it really. And it wasn't a thing. So the harmonica was designed before all that, but they came out with a thing called Richter tuning. So it's got two chords in the bottom. So... So you just get a blow chord on your out breath and you get an in chord, you get the tonic chord on your out breath, and the dominant chord on your in breath. And so this is the bottom octave of the harmonica. Now it's not really intended for playing melodies purely for chordal accompaniment.
So in the middle octave, you got your melody notes. So the idea is to play out of one side of your mouth, slap your tongue off the bottom end and you get chordal accompaniment. So roughly, sort of... So that's how the Germans intended the harmonica to sound. But what happened was it was a small instrument, cheap, and it got disseminated widely in the millions around the world and the African Americans picked it up and they discovered that if you played it essentially in the wrong key, if you played it in the dominant key, instead of the home key, all your main notes were draw notes and they could all be bent. So the tune like Mary Had a Little Lamb instead of going, it would be more... So just a totally different flavor. Of course they wouldn't play Mary Had a Little Lamb, they'd be... They'd play more sort of bluesy sort of stuff on it.
But it's a pure accident of history and a clash of cultures or something that the whole blues harp style eventuated on the harmonica. But getting back to your question, there are certain limitations from the Richter tuning the early tuning that mean that only a small number of notes can actually be bent. This sound, there's 20 reads and only eight of them can be bent. So a big part of my tinkering history has been try to bend more notes. Because I love the sound of bent notes and the expression you can get from them. So yes, the Richter tuning is great. It turned out to be amazing for blues, even though it wasn't designed for blues, but it still has some limitations. And yeah, I really love to try and expand what the harmonica can do.
Leah Roseman:
So you developed this Paddy Richter tuning early on that made it better.
Brendan Power:
That was one for Irish music. And basically like on this harmonica, this is pure Richter. So you've got, you got two notes of the same in the bottom octave. Those two, that note is in each chord. So you have two notes the same, but for playing Irish music it's much easier to... So this is a D harmonica. So now instead of two notes the same as they would be, I was playing on this one. I change one of them too, and that note makes a big difference. So that's a note that I put in there, I changed one of these ones, that one to, I've just brought it up to there. You can get it on a normal harmonic, you have to bend down to it. So it doesn't exist on the harmonica, but you can bend another note down to it.
But to try and play fast melodies using that bent note is really too difficult to do in tune and clearly. So yeah, I just altered one note and because I was playing Irish music on it and it was still mostly in the Richter tuning I called it Patty Richter tuning. And that's become really quite a popular tuning now. It's used a lot for not just Irish music, but pop music, old timey music, bluegrass, et cetera.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I'm curious, most serious harmonica players. How many harmonicas do you estimate they might own?
Brendan Power:
Well, if you do get into it, you need at least 12 because just one for each key. And then there's, then there's sad cases like myself who have lots of different tunings. So I've probably got a 50 harmonicas in my case that I carry around, but that's probably a bit extreme. But any pro harmonica play, if you look in this case, probably you've got about 20, at least.
Leah Roseman:
For beginners, would it make sense to just get a chromatic harmonica and be able to play all the notes?
Brendan Power:
That's a good question. Well, the answer to that is yes and no. Chromatic harmonicas are great, and they do have all the notes, and some people like Toot Thielemans and Stevie Wonder and quite a few classical players do amazing things with chromatic harmonicas. But there's these things on harmonicas called valves, wouldn't say this, and what they do is they isolate reeds from the others. And the whole way you get this kind of this thing that I do in the AsiaBend. That bending sound that's called interactive reed bending. So basically it's what happened when you get a blow reed and a draw reed and you get an interaction between them. It's really quite fascinating on a technical level. It was only really worked out what was going on in the 1980s, even though people had been bending notes.
But you get the sound between the two it's called interactive reed bending, that's one of the most appealing and soulful sounds of the harmonica. Now on a chromatic harmonica, you can't get that because these valves isolate the reeds from each other. So even though you can play all the notes, you can't really play them with as much guts and soul as you can on a diatonic harmonica. Depends what you want to play, if you want to play pure clean notes without too much inflection, and you want to play maybe classical music or whatever, definitely the chromatic is the one for you. If you want to play a bit more earthy, soulful music, I recommend a diatonic and then maybe, or even you can mess with the chromatic harmonica and make it sound more earthy and diatonic, which is what I do with mine.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. What do you do to achieve that?
Brendan Power:
Well, one of them is to take the valves off, these little wind savers, I take half of them off. That's one of the things that, I came up with that in 1980 and a lot of people do that these days. This is a chromatic harmonica here, it's quite an interesting one. Some people say it looks like a mobile phone. It's actually made by the Hohner company, the ones you mentioned back in the day, but I'll just show you. So this one pulls apart. So there's a slider there, which it shifts your air around and this one just pulls apart. So here are the actual reeds, you can see them there. And there's blow and draw reeds. The ones you can see on the outside are the actual draw reeds and the blow reeds are the ones set inside. And you can see there's no valves on the outside, so that's what I've done. I've pulled all those off.
And it means I can now bend the notes, like on a blues harp. It's good. So now this chromatic harmonic, that was a fairly, maybe in my opinion a little bit of a stiff sounding instrument, now I can bend. So for instance a chromatic scale, normally you have to go with a button and that's how you'd normally play it on chromatic. Now I can go, so I can actually get the in between notes, so I can bend them as well as play them with a slide. So now it's a much more... So it's now more of a soulful instrument in my opinion. So that's what I do. One of the things I do.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks for showing us. And in terms of your experimentation that you're doing now, are you willing to reveal some of the stuff you're trying to do?
Brendan Power:
Yeah, sure. I mean, well, I've just put out a harmonica, I don't have an example with me now, but it's called the SlipSlider. And I mean, it's a way to give the diatonic harmonica more bends. And this one here it's a shape shifter really. In order to get more bends you have to have different note interactions, this blow draw interactions that I was telling you about. So for instance, in this hole here, you've got this, that's the blow note. And then you've got the draw note. And you can bend the high note down to the low note, as I told you, but the low note can't bend. So what I do is I've made a harmonica where you can actually move a lower note, that one there, that draw note there, I can actually move that physically up to the same hole as the blow note. And then suddenly I can bend that blow note and I can move that both ways.
So that's called the SlipSlider. So this one is, I'm just demonstrating with my thumb, but one of the real ones actually the whole harmonica slides from left to right. And that's something that allows you to get more notes. A thing that I'm working on for my own use is to try and get some sort of hybrid between the AsiaBend and the normal diatonic. So it plays like both of them, you can actually switch between them and sound like each depending on how you're feeling just by pressing a slider. And that's quite a tricky one to make, but it's one that really appeals to me quite a lot. So those are a couple of little areas that I'm working on at the moment.
Leah Roseman:
And some of your harmonicas have extra bass, which is really cool. And some are double.
Brendan Power:
I have made double harmonicas, yes. I don't have any with me right now, but yes, the harmonica's got a fairly high range. I mean, on the lowest harmonica is C3 note which is the deepest note on a four octave chromatic harmonica. And I think that goes up to about C7 or something like that, ish. That's four octave range. So if you want to go down below C3 into the more bottom end, it's the reeds become really sluggish, they don't respond quickly. So I've started making harmonicas using accordion reeds which are much bigger and louder. And so I've got a few sort of hacked up prototypes with these huge accordion reads in them. And they do play a lot better in the, in the bottom end. I mean, another way to go is simply use electronics and use pitch shifters and things like that, which can sound very effective as well. And it's actually much easier in many ways. Do you use effects on your violin?
Leah Roseman:
I don't, I'm really, I'm a classical player and I'll actually be interviewing very soon Tracy Silverman. Who's one of the people who developed the six string violin, and we'll be talking a lot about that with him. But yeah, it's a, it's a different world for me. I'm thinking harmonica is used a lot of rock bands, and are people mostly now using MIDI now that they have that accessible?
Brendan Power:
No, not many people are. I mean, one of the big drawbacks with the MIDI harmonica is that you can't get interactive reed bending. There's no reeds in it. There's just these breath sensors. And they don't respond to, I mean, the way you get this bending notes is by altering your vocal track, your embouchure. It's what don't think you can see. My jaw drops down and various you get all sorts of stuff going on in your vocal track to make the reeds bend that just has no effect on a breath sensor. So you can't get that kind of sound. You have to use pitch benders with fingers and things. And they're not really that responsive. So to be honest, no, there's not a lot of interest so far in MIDI harmonicas. I mean, there's a niche interest, but yeah, they're not, however great they are, they do lack that immediate bending expression that it's a big part of the harmonica's appeal.
Leah Roseman:
You were just saying in the vocal tract. So is the larynx actually activated when you're playing to some extent?
Brendan Power:
I don't know. There are a couple of sort of x-ray videos on YouTube of people playing harmonicas, and there's all sorts of stuff going on with... So yeah, I, whether the larynx is activated, I don't know. But certainly your mouth chamber shape and everything and your tongue movement, there's huge amounts going on. Same with singing, I mean like they've done singers and put them in an MRI scan and, opera singers, and then do their thing and it's mind blowing what's going on in their mouth, you know? So yeah, the harmonica is very similar. There's an awful lot of fine tongue control, embouchure changing. And I mean it changes throughout the range because when you bend a low note, you have to use a very big mouth. When I bend a high note, it's much more of a small mouth. So as I go up through the harmonica, my mouth shape and everything is changing a lot. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on, but most of us don't even know what we're doing because we can't see what we're doing. So that's-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So to end, I was just wondering if we could circle back to your early days when you're just learning the harmonica and you were very poor, right? You were shoveling coal and sleeping on friends' couches?
Brendan Power:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Looking back at your life then, is there advice you would give yourself or things you could say to your younger self just starting out?
Brendan Power:
Good point. Well, I mean, it's such a different world then. I mean we're talking the late '70s. Nowadays I think people are in far better situation in terms of learning. I mean, there's just, YouTube, it's just an incredible resource for learning. I had nothing like that. It was all just, I was living in the back of beyond in New Zealand and there was just the odd record that had some harmonica on. So try and transfer, when you say that my younger self back in 1976, what would I tell myself then? I think I did everything I could at that time. I mean, but yeah, if I were growing up now, I think I'd definitely have way more stuff to access in terms of learning. I could probably learn a lot faster just because I, for instance, the way you play the harmonica, there's several different embouchures.
There's a what's called tongue blocking. And then there's what I do is called lipping. And there's another one called, what's it called? Where you actually roll your tongue and play through a roll. That's how I started this rolled tongue thing because I could get a single note easier. It was only after about a year or two, or a year and a half that I found I couldn't do what some of these blues players were doing. And I realized there must be something I'm doing wrong. What was it? So then I tried experimenting with other embouchures. Discovered that, okay, if I do lipping, which is just using your lips without the tongue on the harmonica, suddenly I could play way more stuff. So I probably would've picked that out within five minutes nowadays.
Leah Roseman:
Were there, I guess what I was partly thinking was there must have been times where you were attempted to give up, but you're obviously so persistent.
Brendan Power:
Yeah. I mean, I just got obsessed and totally driven. So no, I never thought of giving up really.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Brendan Power:
So yeah, I mean, it's despite the fact that it was a hand to mouth existence for many years. I was just tunnel vision.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for sharing all your perspectives and your beautiful playing with us today. And is there anything I didn't ask you about that you'd like to talk about in relation to your business or your teaching or your, anything at all?
Brendan Power:
Off the top of my head I can't really think of anything. I'm just really thank you so much for getting in touch, and it's really nice to know we've got a friendship with Janie Rothfield in common. I'm really sorry about the technical side of today. I know it might come out a little bit stilted with the delay. We couldn't avoid it really, but I hope that won't put people off watching the video anyway.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I think I will just edit it so that some of the delays that we experience, they won't experience. Yeah. It was funny. We had some very spotty internet today, so I couldn't see you much of the demonstration you were saying, can you see this? But actually for my podcast listeners, they also will not be able to see everything you're doing, but they can check out the video version, which should be clear. Yeah.
Brendan Power:
Okay. Yeah, we battled through didn't we Leah? So thank you so much for getting in touch, really nice talking to you, and I look forward to seeing it when it finally comes out and checking out some of your other ones as well.
Leah Roseman:
Season one of this podcast had 20 episodes and season two continues with a really interesting mix of musicians talking about their lives and careers with perspectives on overcoming challenges, finding inspiration and connection, through a life so enriched with music. Please follow this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, to be informed about each new episode.
