After spending most of my performing career playing standard harmonicas through microphones, I was introduced to the world of MIDI four years ago, after being sent the first prototype of the Lekholm DM48 MIDI Harmonica to evaluate. Not having any experience of playing a MIDI instrument, it was quite a shock to discover all the amazing possibilities opened up by accessing this alternative music universe via an instrument that looked and played like a harmonica, but was something else entirely! You can tell how awestruck I was in my first demo video of the DM48 in January 2017, showing off many of its astonishing features: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwgIAFOnJVs&t=26s The DM48 is part of a family of electronic wind controllers (EWIs) that emulate saxophones, flutes, etc. It has no reeds, just tiny breath sensors that trigger as you blow and draw. It makes no noise of its own, but sends electronic signals via a USB cable to any synthesizer that can generate sounds using MIDI. Here is the
MIDI HARMONICA vs HARMONICA+MIDI Brendan Power Patron
Wikipedia definition: “MIDI /midi/; an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music.” The DM48 is amazing, giving you access to literally millions of sound patches for thousands of synth hardware and software choices. My favoured sound generator is the iPad; it’s so simple to use, and is a nice small size - great for home playing or live gigs. The iPad has a large and growing range of brilliant synth apps (free, or very reasonably priced), giving you sounds ranging from the utterly bizarre to very realistic emulations of real acoustic instruments. You can play it in any key with a press of a button, with a range of up to eight octaves, and in any tuning you want - all in the one instrument! It’s also very expressive, with great dynamics between hard and soft blowing. Since it makes no noise of its own, you can play it silently through headphones at any time of the day or night: a boon for good family relations in these lockdown days! I love the DM48, but found it had one glaring flaw: I couldn’t bend notes using my harp embouchure technique. This was a big problem for my playing since I use bends all the time, on both diatonics and chromatics. I partially solved the issue by creating a little finger-operated gizmo called the Mini PitchBender, which can be stuck to the top of the DM48 to give note bending: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZZkkb_qBqo It works, but it’s not nearly as easy and intuitive as bending on a normal harp.
April - May 2021 • Harmonica.co.uk
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