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About The Harmonium Handbook
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. To Know and Love Your Harmonium: A Users 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 well 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, its 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 purposewell, 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 well 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, STOPyou probably dont 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 peopleits 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 doesnt do anything with the other two open. experience. If you turn too much counter-clockwise, you can unscrew the knob from whatever internal mechanism its 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 youre 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 t
