I have played Crossovers from my start. After trying the slider and listening to a chromatic I think I will stick with the diatonic. It is tougher on some notes but when I listen to the really good players all seem to have a diatonic in their hand. I feel its what music you like and what sounds best to you. I have yet to see the best players topped by a chromatic and the notes I get from a good crossover seem to beat any of the slides I have. They get little play, primarily because of the note quality. Cost factor is lower and when some maintenance is needed the diatonic beats em all hands down.
I have heard Buddy Greene live and Charlie McCoy recorded, both had diatonic harps and sounded about as good as one can get. just my 1 cent worth,
if you think about it (not you specifically, more of an expression), there is a large paradox of choice: there’s also tremolo’s/orchestra/octave/trochilus/etc, but one might go even further and include pocket trumpets. Here I’ll actually go with the “wisdom of the crowd” and stick to diatonic for now, otherwise it’s easy to spread yourself to thin
They are different instruments. I like diatonic, but Chromatic has a major advantage in that you can play any key on 1 harp!
My solution: Play both. I carry a A and C diatonic, and one Chromatic. That covers quite a bit of music in a small package - especially if you learn multiple positions on diatonic.
I mostly play on the diatonic, but I do have a chromatic. I mainly use the chromatic for melodic lines and the diatonic for my lick/fill oriented stuff. I primarily play a lot of rock and country music for my gigs, which many of the songs in those genres are played on the diatonic (though for rock, it usually is pretty terrible because nearly everybody except for the session players mimic Bob Dylan).
Most of the country harmonica I grew up on, mainly the stuff with Terry McMillan on harp, impacted my style more than anything else. Most of my time learning the harmonica during and after the pandemic was just consuming as much of Terry’s playing as I can and trying to “hack” into his mindset, for a lack of a better term. It especially helps that my teacher, Todd Parrott, is also a huge fan of Terry so he really gave me a lot of the tools to immerse myself into that sound. For me, it was a combination of the lack of a positive role model, the embouchre police dogging on me for not tongue blocking everything, and there being literally zero chromatic songs I want to learn which are both single note heavy and bluesy that made me lose faith in my chromatic playing.
I like country as well. I have a couple of hybrids like a Game Changer but the notes just do not compared to a Crossover. The G C is easier to play single notes on but the quality of the notes cannot be compared. A ten hole diatonic played by a good harp player sounds fine to me. Problem is I am not one of them. All things considered I/M/O a well tuned, air tight Crossover is very hard to beat. The Rocket is a close second.
On a separate issue do you use a teacher to watch you play periodically to point out what needs changing and what out should work on to get to the next level? I do not tongue lock as it may help in certain situations like 1 4 chord. Lip pursing is my preferred method. I have no access to a good teacher to critique my playing so i do my best not to grove faults. I have found its the seemingly little tings I pick up that make the most difference in terms of improving. An example is a harp tech told me to play the *1 lightly and create as much capacity inside. He suggested I play it like trying to get a large cucumber in my mouth and did really help. I took B T B and Luck mentioned to play the eight draw was about as much pressure you would if you were trying to make a small candle flicker but not blow the flame out. Sure did help as I hated the *8 when i started but now its another note.
When I first started lessons with Todd back in 2022, I really didn’t have the resources available for learning how to play like Terry. At the time, a lot of people online would rather openly mock me for liking Terry’s playing or tell me I need to do XYZ instead of letting me do my thing. I knew that I needed a teacher who is not only supportive of my goals, but needed to have a clear understanding of what’s going on in the harmonica licks he played.
Anybody could say “I can play like Terry McMillan” from what they’ve heard him play, which is usually a incredibly small fraction of what he’s done due to the online blues harmonica community’s disregard for other country players who are not Charlie McCoy. But it actually takes a lot of time to find and listen to the works he’s played on as well as putting in the effort to getting the phrasing to sound right. This actually scares those who claim who can imitate his style, therefore they would rather insult me instead of actually showing they can play like Terry.
So at the time, I thought that Todd would be the best choice for me, not only because of his country/gospel music background but also because he lists Terry as a main inspiration for his harmonica playing as well. Because who would I rather go to for advice on playing the music I’m interested in: the people on Facebook who would bully me into learning the stuff THEY want me to play (either strictly pre-bluegrass folk music and Chicago Blues) or somebody who shares the same influence as me and has a country music niche? Even after hear a few clips of him playing on Youtube, I knew I made the right choice when I chose him to be my teacher because his phrasing was so much like Terry’s (often with the huge throat vibrato and a lot of the bluesy grit Terry had) but he can also sound like himself too.
I do the online Zoom lessons with Todd (Skype has unfortunately closed down, but I’ve been using Zoom since 2020). I clearly remember my first lesson with him being an incredibly sweet first encounter with somebody who shares similar interests as me. It felt like I was chatting with a childhood friend when we were discussing about how we got introduced to Terry’s playing, why we play the models we use (Todd and I both mainly use the Hohner Golden Melody), and things like that. The one thing I remember the most about that first lesson, other than his extremely detailed explanations of what Terry was doing (which was the moment that clicked for me that he was the teacher who would help me get that sound), was when we were talking about his signature growling technique. Todd was explaining a little bit about growling and I said to him that I can actually do that. So I played a lick involving the growl and what happened next was a real treat to say the least. Todd was just laughing his ass off and proceeded to call me “Amy McMillan”, which made me laugh as well. He still calls me by that nickname sometimes, which I’ve gone to treasure over the years.
As the lessons went on, I’d record some audio of me playing what I was working on and he would give me feedback. For example, I was learning throat vibrato through him at the beginning of my lessons because I felt like a lot of the online tutorials for harmonica vibrato didn’t work for me as they were all the “reverse coughing” or diaphragmatic vibrato which is a lot more shallow than what I was looking for. I wanted a richer sound for my vibrato like what Terry used, which happened to be throat vibrato. I often would just send Todd clips of the progress on my vibrato with me playing alongside a metronome, then without the metronome. I eventually got it down through putting in the effort and his kind words.