twocats Thank you!
twocats My husband is going to India in October and maybe I'll convince him to bring back a harmonium (j/k)!
It used to be a dream of mine to visit India for the sole purpose of auditioning all the harmoniums and buying one.
If you can swing it, why not? The cheaper ones are lighter because they have less reed sets, but they can sound quite charming. Some of them might even fold up suitcase style, so they'd be easier to carry. The fancier harmoniums also tend to be significantly heavier because of the additional reed sets... but many of them fold up as well into a relatively compact suit case.
If you get a standard form, you'd want to have it professionally packaged. They have this down to an art.
More recently, there are harmoniums with more compact designs. They can be a bit hit and miss unless you can get one from a reputable maker. They are also priced on the higher end compared to regular harmoniums. The makers were impacted pretty badly by COVID.
One note here while shopping for a harmonium — it's better to focus on the sound quality of the instrument rather than aesthetics and perfection in the construction... these are all hand built in very basic workshops with basic tools.
rsl12 Thank you so much!
rsl12 How are you able to get so much volume while seated and without a mic directly at your mouth??
I didn't have a very good set up as you can see, but the Roland R-26 has four mics in it, including XY directional mics which are pointed right at me. The gain was cranked up, and in fact I was blowing past the red levels on earlier recordings and had to find the right balance.
Ultimately I had various tracks I had to mix together and make the best of it. Logic Pro has an incredible feature called Stem Splitter which made the job more pleasant.
diretonic Wow, thanks! 🙂