Brendan Power

All the instruments commonly used for playing Irish Traditional Music employ widespread use of decorations to embellish the tunes: cuts, triplets, turns... The chromatic's slide button is very useful to be able to get these fast added elements. However the semitone-up slide interval of standard chromatics isn't appropriate for the modal based scales of Irish tunes, and no traditional instruments in the genre use it. So I invented the Slide-Diatonic: a slide harmonica where every push of the button raises the pitch to the next note of the home scale. This gives you authentic-sounding slide decorations that stay within the mode of the tune, whether major or minor, and fit in really well.

Another useful feature of the retuned slider notes is they give you enharmonics : same-note alternatives for the scale tones. This can be very useful in tricky passages to reduce the amount of jumping around to get wider intervals: simply choose the slide-in option for the same note instead.

Here are some of my albums where you can hear the Slide-Diatonic in action:

• New Irish Harmonica – 1994. All tracks using a slide harmonica are Slide-Diatonic
• Harp to Harp – 2015. About half the tracks
• Harmonica and Button-Box – 2017. Most tracks
• Unadorned– 2018. Most tracks

If you want to learn to play Irish trad tunes using the Slide-Diatonic, I recommend you check out my instructional books “Play Irish Music on the Chromatic Harmonica”. Although they are for standard chromatics, the tunes will play even better on the Slide-Diatonic! I recommend the G/D book for playing in the correct keys:

Play Irish Music on the Chromatic Harmonica: Key G/D
Play Irish Music on the Chromatic Harmonica: Key C

Because it's half-valved, the SlideDiatonic can also be played fully chromatically using draw bends. Check the Tuning Chart below; you will see that all the missing notes in the scale are available from a bend on the slide-out or slide-in draw note:

SLIDE-DIATONIC TUNING CHART, Including Draw Bends

To see the diagram in other keys, use our tuning diagram tool In terms of Irish Traditional Music, while most tunes stay strictly within diatonic modes, there are quite a few which depart from the home scale briefly at a certain point, giving extra dramatic effect. This is where these chromatic draw bend notes on the Slide Diatonic are really useful, allowing you to complete the tune correctly. ‘The Peacock's Feather' is an example of an Irish hornpipe that uses a couple of chromatic notes in the B part, which I get with bends on my Slide-Diatonic:

The Slide-Diatonic has something of a split personality! You can play it in the home key and related modes as intended, with the slider button giving you pleasingly in-tune decorations. However, after awhile I discovered a cool unintended consequence of the tuning… If you hold the slider in, you get a kind of mirror-image harp that sounds quite different! In the key of C, with slide-out your main notes are blow CEGC. But with slide-in, you have those same notes as draw CEGC. All of these notes can be bent with draw bending, giving you a very bluesy sound! It's very similar to the bottom octave scale of a typical diatonic harp, so will feel quite familiar for any of you who're used to playing blues harp using bending. It's a nice 'hidden feature' that will definitely appeal to some 😊