The Harmonium Handbook Tradepaper ed. Edition

After a pilgrimage to India in 1998, during which I had the opportunity to visit the Bina factory in Delhi, I began importing harmoniums on a regular basis. But after being flown halfway around the world, most harmoniums arrive in my home of Seattle in less than perfect condition. This has given me abundant opportunities to explore the fine details of the instrument and to find solutions to a wide variety of technical problems.

Kraig Brockschmidt, who also goes by the spiritual name Satyaki, * first fell in love with Indian harmoniums in 1996. He discovered, immediately upon sitting with one for the first time, that he intuitively knew many subtleties of playing the instrument. Since then, devotional chanting has been one of his favorite pastimes, and he is considered highly skilled in the art. After a pilgrimage to India in 1998, during which he had the opportunity to visit the Bina factory in Delhi, he began importing Indian harmoniums on a regular basis. But after being flown halfway around the world, most harmoniums arrived in his home town of Seattle in less than perfect condition. Many hours spent adjusting these instruments gave him abundant opportunities to explore the fine details of the instrument and to find and describe solutions, as befits his professional work as an engineer and technical writer for Microsoft. In The Harmonium Handbook, he is pleased to offer in written form the love of his heart and the depth of his experience as both musician and technician. Satyaki currently lives with his wife and son at Ananda Village near Nevada City, California.

To Know and Love Your Harmonium: A User s Guide

By and large, harmoniums need only a little care to keep them beautiful on the outside and melodious on the inside for many years. As we ll see in this chapter, harmoniums are not terribly complex, and knowing more about how they work is helpful in getting the most out of them.

Nearly all Indian harmoniums, no matter their size or any other external features, share a few elements in common: a keyboard, an external bellows on the back, a lock, some number of knobs on the front, and some kind of case that holds it all together (Figure 2-1). Depending on the manufacturer and the particular whims of their craftsmen, certain bits may or may not be present. The cover glass, for instance, might be all wood instead of glass; small hinges Figure 2-1: Primary harmonium features (collapsible model shown)

Which Knob Does What?

Occasionally one comes across a harmonium with no knobs on the front at all. In this case, it s easy to answer this question: air is always allowed to flow to all the reeds, and there are no drone notes and no tremolo.

Most harmoniums, though, have at least two knobs for the air stops, at least one drone, and a tremolo. As for which knobs serve which purpose well, this varies among different manufacturers, among different models from the same manufacturer, and even occasionally be-tween two instances of the same model from the same manufacturer! (Again, see Appendix A, page 125, for typical Bina configurations.) Some models have smaller knobs for the drones and larger ones for the air stops and the tremolo, but oftentimes the knobs will all be the same size with no identifying marks whatsoever.

Hopefully your harmonium came with some information about its exact arrangement. If not, the sure-fire way to find out is to open up the harmonium and take a look inside, as we ll see in Chapter Four. The other option-which is less exacting, mind you, is to simply fiddle around with the knobs and see what they do. If, in your fiddling, you are holding down a key and pumping the bellows and not getting any sound, STOP you probably don t have any air stops open at all. As I cautioned earlier, too much pumping without making a sound can damage the bellows.

Another caution is to avoid twisting the knobs too much in one direction or the other. By “too much,” I mean something on the order of two or more full rotations. This is not a problem for normal people it s only an issue for those of us who might be described as “categorical fiddlers.” This caution, in other words, comes from personal stops for both male and bass reed sets; the fifth, however, is the tremolo knob and doesn t do anything with the other two open. experience. If you turn too much counter-clockwise, you can unscrew the knob from whatever internal mechanism it s connected to. Too much clockwise rotation can effectively pull the stop out partway, even when the knob itself is fully pushed in.

Coupler

Some harmoniums are fitted with another interesting mechanism called a coupler, which, like the tremolo, is carried over from classical Western designs. A coupler effectively connects one key with its counterpart either an octave above (a super-octave coupler) or an octave below (a suboctave coupler). The net result of this is that you double the number of reeds involved, thereby making the sound more “full” or “grand.” It also more or less doubles the air flow needed to maintain a particular volume, which becomes somewhat difficult if you re playing chords.

The coupler on Bina harmoniums consists of a small lever located on the right side of the keyboard (Figure 2-12). The coupler is typically engaged when the lever is pushed back and disengaged when the lever is pulled forward. Other manufacturers employ a separate, distinct knob for the coupler wherein pushing or pulling the knob engages the mechanism. Figure 2-12: Engaged Bina coupler lever; to disengage, pull the lever toward the front.