Ash’s Harmonium
A hand-pumped harmonium from a music shop in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
ByAsh Verjee
The story
I bought this hand-pumped harmonium on a whim from a music shop called Haken & Bell (now sadly an estate agent’s) in Abingdon, Oxfordshire when I was sixteen in 1995. It’s a rather romantic instrument – in the sense that as much as I love electronic music and electronic tools, it’s nice to have an instrument manually powered and driven by reeds and air.
I did come upstairs once, however, to find that my three-year-old twins had completely dismantled it (it all slots together with wire pins and grooves – no screws) and were meticulously inspecting each constituent part, and spent days putting it back together again. Anyway, it’s as good as new and sounds as good as they day I bought it.
I recorded it with a stereo pair of AKG C1000S’ and have left it untouched other than a touch of EQing down the bottom end. I’d love to map volume intensity to the mod wheel for more expressive playing but I don’t know how to do that! Can anyone help a brother out?
Reviews
Great Sounding Harmonium
Since when have you been American?!
Thanks for recommending this site some time ago... what a great resource. And what a lovely harmonium!
Adam, ex-UPP
Very nicely captured, has some warm and country music texture.
Great sounding instrument! I did not know about harmonium, but it has some country like warm texture. Nice to have and add extra layer to the music.
Very nice, authentic sound...
This library was really well sampled and has a great sound. My only complaint is that the stereo field for the samples is really wide low notes are almost entirely in the left ear and high notes entirely in the right. This can make it a little bit difficult to mix in with other libraries, but it's a pretty easy fix. Not much in terms of a GUI either.