I was first introduced to JDR through my man Kinya Pollard, who encouraged me to try the Trochilus — also known as the Bushman Game Changer — harmonica.

It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the instrument, and I soon shelled out for two full sets in different tunings (Richter and Solo, for those interested).

Over the last couple years, these innovative harmonicas have opened the door to entirely new musical worlds for me to explore, and I truly can’t imagine playing without them.

JDR Assassin is the top diatonic model in the JDR line.

I do not know how they achieved this, but I actually switched from custom German harmonicas (over each of which I spent 10 hours sitting under a microscope and removing air loss) to factory Assassins.

All overblow and overdraw are easy available and controllable out of the box, the bend are easy. I'm not going to lie - I'm doing some easy setup to my taste, but it doesn't take more than half an hour now. I haven't fixed any gaps in most of my Assassins, I haven't made any embossings or tuning, and I've already played several concerts on them.

Moreover, I tried to make a full custom on the Assassin - I embossed it completely (although there is almost nothing to emboss, literally in some places), polished the reedplate, sealed the covers.

In general, I did everything that I did on the Germans - I’ve found a certain increase in response (10-15 percent subjectively), but I like the sound without customization more so I made a strong-willed decision that I didn't want to do this nonsense customizing anymore and would play Assassins out of the box.