Posts from — May 2010

The newest trend in music today is one of the oldest trends.  I refer to the lowly reed organ.  Some folks call them pump organs or Granny organs, preacher organs, melodeons, or harmoniums.  Today there are more and more people using these instruments in rock bands in their homes, churches, and solo artist videos and CD’s .  Just check out youtube and search reed organ and those other names above and you will come up with over 12,000 videos containing these instruments.

You may be able to pick one up for the cost of moving if you are lucky…or find them in antique shops, second hand stores, thrift shops.  They cost from $50 or less up to thousands.  Most reed organs operate on suction generated by the foot pedals and have one keyboard.  A few of the larger ones may have two or three keyboards and a full pedal keyboard and they may have a lever or crank for a second person to furnish the wind or suction to the instrument while the organist plays.

There are several kinds of reed organ.  The tiny melodeon is usually a single rank of reeds and some have legs that fold up for easy trasnport.  They are short and unfortunately many of them have been gutted out to make a uselessly tiny writing desk.  That was something that Better Homes and Gardens magazine suggested in the fifties and many people decided to gut their Grandma’s melodeon.  Their kids are really disappointed in them today.  The later version folded up into a suitcase called a preacher organ for military chaplains and evangelists to carry with them and those were built into the 1950’s or 60’s. Most of the others ceased production in the twenties or thirties some earlier than that as the popularity and quality went up in the American piano industry.

A step up from the Melodeon, there is also the larger version or the full sized reed organ with 2 or more sets of reeds playable with drawknobs similar to a pipe organ console.  This is the most common.  They often have very opulent cases with fine woodwork, often a decorative top with mirrors, gingerbread, latticework, and sometimes music and book storage cabinets.  If the back wall of the organ has plain dyed or black back boards, it was built as a parlor organ.  If it has a back that is fine finished wood , it will likely also be short enough for the organist to see over and possibly direct a choir over it while facing the choristers.  This would be called a chapel model.  This will often have a decorative grill in the back board so that sound can be heard to the back of the organ directed at the choir or the full church.

Some instruments are quite different.  These are mostly built in Europe and they run on pressure.  These are the true harmoniums.  Many people in America call these reed organs, but many in Europe call reed organs harmoniums.  These both seem to have become generic terms for the other as well.

The Reed organ was first coming out in the mid 1800’s.  The first man building these seems to have been George P. Bent who built several models of organ in his long run as a major builder.  He built the King Organ, the Queen Organ, the Prince Melodeon.   The most prolific reed organ builder would be Estey in Brattleboro VT.  Musically the finest was often found bearing the Mason Hamlin label.  Story and Clark and Ann Arbor, and Chicago Cottage organ were good names as well. Beckwith was the brand sold by Sears Roebuck while the Windsor reed organ was sold by Montgomery Ward.

Too often these organs are found missing their tops.  These often highly decorated tops had to be removed when moving the organ and they seem to have not survived some moves.  Also in the quest for modernity the old Victorian tops would be burned as firewood when Victorian went out of style leaving a rather plain organ case below that would better blend in with later styles of furniture.  You can tell if there was a missing top by looking at the top back corner where the back wall of the organ meets the top board of the cabinet.  If there is a stairstep here from right to left, then there is definitely a missing top that should go there.  If the back top is square then it may not have had a top originally.  Also if there are screw holes in the top boards of the organ then likely there were brackets missing that were part of the top.

The condition of these reed organs after more than 100 years, surprisingly, is sometimes good enough to be playable.  The bellows are the most susceptible to the ravages of time.  The pedals had canvas webbing straps going to the feeder bellows and these straps are usually rotted and broken and replaced by previous owners by now.  The leather flap valves found on the outside of these movable feeder boards are usually not usable by now.  In some rare cases replacing these flap valves and straps will allow the organ to play once again for a short time.  Take note:  after 100 years every reed organ MUST be restored at some point very very soon.  While just recovering the bellows system with new cloth will make it functional in some cases, don’t think you can get away with never finishing the job.  The whole organ action is full of felt and leather, both of which oxidize over the years and turn into powder.  Usually moths have eaten holes out of all the felt and in some cases all felt throughout the whole organ Is nothing more than powdered moth poo left by marauding moths.  Mice have often left signs of nests and in a few cases have wrought such damage as to make the organ unrestorable.  In several decades of restoring several hundred of these instruments I have only found two instruments that were too badly damaged to restore and those just weren’t worth the money it would take to go ahead and restore them.

So what does a total restoration do?  It should make the instrument totally functional and musical.  It must include tuning as reeds do go out of tune.  However these instruments were not tuned to modern standard A-440 in most cases.  They are usually higher in pitch.  A normal tuning will tune it to itself at the pitch at which it is found.  In rare cases the customer will pay the extra hourly fee to get the organ tuned to modern standard A-440.

A restoration should recover the bellows system complete with replacing the hinges, bellows cloth and all flap valves and gaskets.  If the reservoir was originally glued to the foundation board or bellows table, this joint should be gasketed and screwed together when reassembled.  All wood should be sealed with shellac as 100 year old wood is now porous.  All pallet valves under the keys should have new felt and leather and spring tension should be checked for evenness of touch.  All stops or mutes over the reed cells should have new leather and should be regulated to be completely off when the stop knob is in the off position.  All keys should be rebushed, and regulated for dip and leveled so the keyboard is totally even across its length.  The name board should be restored and the name itself should be saved or if not in good enough shape, it should be scanned and replaced to look exactly like the original.  The couplers should be regulated to push the key down completely but not push up any keys when activated.  Stop knobs should be repaired or replaced and the correct stop names put in place.  Sometimes that takes some research to find out what goes on a knob that originally had a blank missing label.

The end result in a restored reed organ is to be a fully functional, MUSICAL piece of history that will continue to play for many decades.  While we restore to make our instruments last 30 years before any major work is needed they may very well last far longer just as they did originally.  I seriously doubt that those American artisans who built these wonderful reed organs ever thought they would be around 30-50 years later.  They would be amazed to know that their organs lasted over 100 years and then some yutz like me goes in and restores it to last possibly another 100 years.

I mentioned that these organs are a new trend.  I have restored these for decades now but in the last two years my shop has had a backlog of reed organs waiting to be restored reaching perhaps 8 patiently waiting in line.  Perhaps it is the economy…people want to fix what they have and enjoy it at home.  Or perhaps they see more reed organs in music videos and they just like the music.  With the resurgence in popularity of the reed organ’s little cousin, the accordion the reed organ now enjoys a resurgence of its own popularity.  Luckily even complete restoration is so inexpensive compared to piano restoration, that the restoration of Granny’s organ is well within the means of most Americans with an interest in their own family’s musical history.

To see more of these reed organs check out the pages of organs that I sold or offer for sale over the last 2 years.

<http://thepianoworld.com/Carton-Collection.html>

Or listen to several reed organs played on my youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/pianoworldenterprise

Doug L.  Bullock at http://thepianoworld.com

I have been overweight since junior high school, not massively but enough to seldom remove my shirt in public.  Enough that I knew I did not look good in some clothes.  I quit wearing T-shirts in my twenties because they made me look fat.  I have tried to manage it for decades and have worked really hard and did so several times.  I usually got myself down once I reached a weight or a pants size that outraged and enraged me enough to take action and get back to lifting weights and taking metabolism supplements.  I am highly averse to using drugs or anything non natural so I did it in the past with just raw willpower, workouts, and grit.

So I personally never thought I would actually lose much weight using OsoLean Powder, the new peptide technology that targets fat for removal while building up bone and muscle.

I have used it since the rollout and I had absolutely no results for 5 months.  Then I noticed I had lost 3 inches in my waist as I had to add a hole to my belt and I had dropped about 10 pounds.  I knew I felt better and I liked my clothes fitting better.

Once the hoopla died down over the newness of OsoLean, I kept using the peptide powder for the last year.  While at first I made some permanent changes to my diet to help lower calories, I haven’t done any depressing draconian so-called diet.  I have not gone hungry.  I eat when I am hungry and I don’t crave anything.  What did I do to step down 500 calories per day as advised in the OsoLean Plan?  I was more often substituting plain iced tea instead of soda most of the time.  I also changed to no dessert unless it was real fruit (and not cherry pie or some cobbler–just fruit).  I have added clementines or other tangerine to my regular purchases for that little healthy snack.

I get my Osolean powder almost every day.  I try to use it morning and night but you know how things go without a regular schedule, I missed from time to time.  I got the night OsoLean serving 90% of the time and the morning OsoLean serving about 50% of the time or more.

Well I had stopped expecting any more weight reduction but I kept on using OsoLean powder because it is very healthy for you in building bone and muscle so that is what I was looking for–more muscle and bone density.  So I continued every few months to add a hole to the belt as I got smaller, but noticed no change in weight because muscle and bone is heavier than fat.

Well today I got the shock of my life.  I stepped on the scales and noticed to my absolute shock—–I am now down a full 25 pounds from the day OsoLean Powder rolled out on the Mannatech stage.  The last 12 pounds seem to have rolled off in the last two months.  I think there is another factor in play here as well.  I saw the video on youtube called “Sugar: the bitter truth” which taught me that I never want to put high fructose corn syrup into my body ever again.  Unfortunately finding a food that does NOT have that in there is almost impossible but I have worked hard to remove it from my diet as much as I can.  HFCS has horrendous catastrophic health effects on your body and they are the same as if you became a raging alcoholic—-all the major health problems associated with being a lifelong alcoholic without any buzz or intoxication involved.

Well I think using OsoLean powder and avoiding HFCS together put me on warp speed targeting of fat and removing it.  I may just go shopping and see if I can fit into a pair of 36 inch waist jeans this week.  I haven’t been able to do that since I was age 25 so that would be really cool.  If they don’t fit, I now know all I have to do is keep using OsoLean powder and check the jeans every month or two until they fit.

I just got out my older slacks that I have worn for years and I noticed they swallowed me.  I looked at the label and they were a 42 inch waist.  When I wear them the belt looks like the drawstring on a nearly empty laundry bag, cinched up and wrinkled around the top.  I can’t believe I have gotten this much smaller and I didn’t even notice it.  I only stepped on the scales because I had a couple of friends comment that I had lost weight.  I responded that no, that is not likely but sure enough, they WERE right.  I counted holes in all my old belts and I find that according to the creases in my belts, I use 7 inches less of my belts than I did when I started.  I need to add another hole to everything as well.  Where’s my leather punch?  Perhaps a new belt is in order.  Looking for a new belt used to be a very depressing activity because I could never believe how long a new belt needed to be to fit.  But this time I think I will enjoy doing it.

So without going on a diet, without being hungry, without losing energy, in fact I have more….without running a mile every day or even running at all, without doing what I used to do to get thinner which is lift weights…..without any of that…by making a couple of permanent changes in my eating habits and adding OsoLean Powder to my everyday life, I have dropped 25 ugly pounds and I didn’t have to cut off my head (old joke reference LOL)  Of course there is one other thing that I do that I know helps as well….I also use  a couple of Optimal Support Packs from Mannatech every day like clockwork.  Even before OsoLean arrived I found that adding these high tech real food technology products to my everyday life had almost totally stopped my junk food cravings which got me overweight decades ago.

So I am not going to try to sell you anything because I am not the hype type but this new peptide technology works.  It cranks up your body to build more bone and muscle and target and remove 3 times as much fat as you normally would lose in muscle using a regular old fashioned “diet”.  It actually “builds” your body thin.  It worked for me and I did not have to work hard to make it work.  Yes it was slow for me because I did not start a workout routine.  If I had I am sure my results would have come much sooner.  But the point of my story is just keep plugging away.  Watch what you eat and use OsoLean powder to help you deal with hunger and help reverse the muscle loss that occurs when you diet the old fashioned way.  If you think it is time to get slender again or for the first time, just ask me and I can help.  I don’t know if there is a link to get the stuff on this blog, but maybe I can put one up just in case you are shy and don’t want to contact me personally.

Doug L. Bullock

(Okay, okay!  Per request, here is the link to get the stuff:)

So why is it so easy to get sick today in America?  You see it every day.  Friends come down with or develop some nasty disease way too often.  We love our friends and sometimes we feel so helpless.  I am not a doctor and you probably aren’t either. But today even doctors are discouraged by how much disease there is and how little their work of doctoring actually helps people get well or avoid getting sick.  The World Health Organization who compares the general level of health of all countries  in the world rate us as spending more for our healthcare system than all the other countries put together.  But where do we rate in quality of our actual health?  We are number 72 behind Mexico Sri Lanka and even several third world countries.

This would indicate to me that too much of our health expenditures are misdirected or perhaps wasted because something is horribly wrong.

Well drugs are good and they have their uses, but they should always be temporary.  They do nothing to keep us healthy on a daily basis.  Even doctors will tell you that the thing that determines how well someone responds when they need a drug is their general level of health.  Doctors prefer to do their work when the body HELPS!  If your body is not in a good enough level of health then it cannot respond in a favorable way when a doctor tries to get you well.

So how do we build our own wellness so that when we do need a doctor he or she can actually help us?

Drugs don’t cause the body to build good health.  There is only one thing that does build the body and that is food.

So what’s wrong with our food today that it is NOT keeping us healthy?  Do you want a list?  Well it all boils down to one thing and that is THE main problem with our health in 2010, the reason we are number 72 in our level of health in the world—Missing Nutrients.  In Grandma’s day she and many of her friends grew their own food.  She used organic fertilizer swept from the barnyard floor.  They picked their dinner fresh from the plant at the peak of ripeness and freshness.  When the tomato bugs moved in, she picked them off or used other plants to make them leave.  What she planted often helped control other garden pests.  Grandma grew what we now call organic vegetables.  In those days the government measured the nutrients in the produce and set Required Daily Amount levels.

But they never expected those levels to change over the years.  Today we don’t farm like Grandma did.  We use heavy duty pesticides and herbicides to protect the crop and those get into the plant and cause– missing nutrients.  The soil is not enriched by barnyard soil, it has synthetic chemicals to fertilize the crops—missing nutrients.  Pretty is more important than nutrient levels to the big agra companies that now own 99% of all farms these days.  Nutrients that may be missing in action are not even thought about.  Then the veggies are picked green and shipped to the store thousands of miles away where they are gassed with ethylene to make them look pretty and ripe without actually BEING ripe—more missing nutrients.  Today the big chemical companies now grow seeds genetically modified so the plants contain their own powerful pesticides.  Some are designed to protect the plant from herbicides.   While the animal studies on GMO have shown severe organ and reproductive damage caused by their eating those GMO foods, the GMO producers don’t seem to think there will be any human damage from our eating them so we eat them almost every day without even knowing.

All this combines to make the perfect storm of missing nutrients.  Since the government measured the nutrition in our veggies in the late 40’s and early 50’s the measurable levels have drastically changed with one main result—missing nutrients:

Vitamin C level—Then = 1 orange /  Today = 10 oranges to get the same now missing nutrients

Vitamin A level —-Then  = 2 peaches / Today = 53 peaches to get the same now missing nutrients

Iron level—-Then =  1 cup of spinach / Today =  65 cups of spinach  for the same missing nutrients

Lets face it with the food we have in a modern grocery store, we need to eat enough food for an army to get enough of the missing nutrients to keep a body healthy.

So what do we do?  How do we fight back for our good health?  Well learning to grow a garden is a good start, even if it is in your sunny kitchen window.  Also, in order to not have to eat enough for 10 people every day of our lives, we MUST supplement our diets or we could die, quite literally, from malnutrition.  It won’t look like the starving children on TV but when our body can no longer keep us well or protect us from what pathogens are going around, it is caused by malnutrition or simply—missing nutrients.   Even extreme overweight is caused by malnutrition and that problem is epidemic these days.

But I warn you.  Don’t go out and buy a bunch of vitamin pills at Walmart and think you are supplementing.  If your supplement is not 100% food sourced then it is synthetic chemicals and chemicals are not food…If you have a problem with missing nutrients you need REAL FOOD.  Next time we will talk about how to get that without eating for 10 every day.