When I arrived at the Harmonica Collective teaching event in New Orleans a few days later, Jason handed them to me and said, “Here, figure out how these are tuned and let’s sell them.” They had been offered for sale on eBay and were acquired by Jason Ricci. In early November of 2018, I came into possession of five Magic Harps, all built for a single customer by customizer Jimmy Gordon.
They aimed to have the Magic Harps commercially produced, but that didn’t happen, and the few Magic Harps out there were built by custom harp builders. The inventors were Pierre Beauregard (founder of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra) and Richard Salwitz (aka Magic Dick of J. Every Magic Harp tuning gives a unique combination of chords, by design and not as an afterthought.In the one I’m featuring in this post, it occurs only twice over a span of nearly four octave, but it does repeat. In some Magic Harps, the layout repeats every octave. The tuning layout repeats, instead of changing every octave the way it does on a standard diatonic.In every hole, the draw note is always higher in pitch than the blow note (unlike standard tuning on diatonic harmonicas where, starting in Hole 7, the blow note is higher than the draw note).Not quite – though we can all wish! Back in 1993, two harmonica players from Massachusetts patented a system of harmonica note layouts (or tunings) that they called “Magic Harps.” All the note layouts have three things in common: Uh, what’s a Magic Harp? Is that a harp that will magically make me an awesome player?