ramos handmade harmonicas

The New Tony Ramos Handmade Harmonicas are available

The L.A. born harp player Tony Ramos is an excellent alternative to the top professional harp technicians, i.e., Joe Filisko, Richard Sleigh. Tony who is actually living in Munich (Germany) is specialized in custom-made Marine Band Style Harmonicas and offers repair service for Filisko and Sleigh harps, as well as a number of custom tunings. I knew of Tony work thanks to his buddy Peter Krause when Peter came for some gigs in Italy last year. At that time, I was looking for a fast and accurate harmonica service since Joe Filisko became oriented to the pros and his last shipment reached me 14 months following my original order. So I decided to try the Tony Ramos harps. My first impression was excellent: Tony is a very nice guy, he listened to all my needs and best of all he said me that his workaround time was 4-5 weeks only. In Feb. I received his first customized harps. Herein are my impressions on his work:

external view: cover plates are reshaped for increased tonal projection; comb edges are rounded for maximum confort when playing; nuts are conveniently soldered for easy allignment of the cover plates.
internal view (coverplates removed): plates are secured with three m-2 metric screws for improved sealing. According to my experience with Filisko's harps these mods comes very, very close to the Filisko Marine Band rebuilds I own!!
Next I started to play some notes and immediately realized that:
- sealing was greatly improved when compared to the stock MB
- responsiveness and tonal projection was optimal
- tuning was steady
- overblowing was easily achieved on 4-5-6 blows (I ask for OB setting)
- to my surprise, overdrawing (7 and 9 draw) was easy and even better than in my Filisko's harps
- the only drawback was that due my amplified playing style (I have a good sealed cup) the offset of 4 and 6 draw reeds was set too low so that at times I missed 4 and 6 normal blows; so I widened the gap by myself and asked Tony to do the same on my next harmonicas.
In conclusion, Tony work is accurate, fast and to the point. I strongly recommend Tony Ramos Marine Band custom harmonicas.