…also marching band, WGI, etc. Well we did it again this year at Minnesota Brass. This season’s problem to solve: harmonicas. The 2023 Minnesota Brass production “Speakeasy” used Billy Joel’s Piano Man as the ballad. I thought it would fun to play a little ditty on harmonica, so I worked with our arranger to put it in.

Playing Harmonica

I had never played harmonica, so I did some research. I wanted to make sure it was achievable, and that whatever I ordered would be suitable. I started with this youtube video and some harmonica note charts:

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After using an old Garmin GPS last year, I hinted that I might switch to (also owned by Garmin) the Navionics Boating app. To get the party started, I shopped for cheap tablets during Amazon Prime Day.

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I set out to create a setup similar to MBI Winds’ first season at home in miniature. I knew I needed at last a 4-channel USB-audio interface. I needed at least 3 powered speakers, which can oddly be difficult as many studio monitors are only sold in pairs.

Another quick call to my sales rep at Sweetwater got me to the answer. The JBL 308s are a very popular and highly recommended 8″ powered monitor. They’re sold individually and my rep even let me know when they were going to go on sale.

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I was previously using a Sony HWS-BTA2W bluetooth adapter from 2007 to get sound wirelessly from my computer or phone to a set of non-bluetooth speakers. It had a problem that only happened with my linux computer. I was annoyed with this device because as the workload would increase/decrease on my computer, the audio would speed up and slow down. You could hear the pitch rise and fall if you were listening to music. This is probably by design – as part of the base level Bluetooth SBC codec that everything supports. It makes sense that if you’re talking on the phone you’d want to hear everything someone said, even if it had to be sped up or slowed down for continuity.

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In 2018 I bought a gaming computer to replace my aging Dell 17″ laptop. The game I wanted to play was VRC – which didn’t require a lot of horsepower, but I wanted to potentially play other games. I found an Alienware Alpha with decent specs and bought it. One thing that interested me about all Alienware systems was the ability to connect them to the Alienware Graphics Amplifier (AGA).

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