[Alan Brinton]

I was hoping this kind of conversation was about to break out. As always, I’m inclined to defer to the professional musicians on such questions. But doesn’t it depend somewhat on the kind of music and its demands? Lowboy, for example, is playing blues and wants to bend notes and manipulate sound in other ways (acoustically, not just electronically), which is easier with some melodicas than with others. It’s easier, in my limited experience, with less stable reeds (reeds for which it’s hard to get stable readings in tuning). Ofir and M-M both play jazz, but in very different styles, M-M’s requiring more facility in manipulating sounds. In my experience, two melodicas that sound very similar in just playing a scale or chord or even a melody straight up may sound very different from each other when you start trying to bend notes or otherwise manipulate the sound. Ofir’s piano (and melodica) playing strikes me as more classically oriented than the playing of most of the good players on this site. It’s much more common to see a Jazz guitar player changing guitars during a performance, isn’t it, than to see a classical guitarist doing that? And it’s common to see (some, though of course not all) Jazz keyboard players switching between different keyboards, though not between different pianos.