Reply To: Overtones
Hi Per Chr
Welcome to the forum!
The dissonant overtones you’re hearing are definitely common to the melodica, – many notes which sound great on their own don’t work well with other notes, as chords.
This must have something to do with the construction of the instrument, as other free reed instruments such as the accordion don’t have this problem.
You might be able to experiment with alternative, perhaps more natural tuning methods, such as ‘Just Intonation’, where the frequencies of the scale notes are related to one another by simple numeric ratios, or the similar Pythagorean system. It would be interesting to see what happens…