Quick and Easy Inspection of Your Seydel Chromatic

One of the things I stress when I teach seminars on the chromatic harmonica is that as a chromatic player, you have to be comfortable performing minor maintenance and troubleshooting on your chromatic. As I am fond of saying, "the chromatic is made to modulate and made to maintain".

However, you can very quickly inspect and troubleshoot almost half of your chromatic components by merely removing the two (2) cover screws and taking look. From there you easily see half of the reeds and half of the valves.

If you pull off the mouthpiece, you can see even more. So within just a few minutes, you can easily track down that sticky or rattling note and figure out whether you have a valve problem or maybe something just a little more complicated.

The serious chromatic player has to spend some time learning basic maintenance but it really is much easier than you might expect. Take a look at the pictures below and you will see how simple it is to access almost all parts of your chromatic.

Removing the reed plates is a little more complex and takes some practice, but you could easily go years of playing and never develop a problem that requires it.