10 easy lessons blues harmonica rapidshare library

Not surprisingly, kids everywhere aren’t exactly clamoring to learn how to play the harmonica, nor are the airwaves crowded with the instrument’s sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy, sound. Makers include Hohner, Schlott, Koch, and Seydel. Top: Mini harmonicas from Harland Crain’s collection. “If your lips weren’t bleeding after a gig, you were considered a weenie.”Ībove: Kinya Pollard, aka the Harpsmith, testing a harmonica in his workshop. “That was kind of a rite of passage,” laughs harmonica maker and technician Kinya Pollard.

It’s often not a pretty sight, and you don’t even want to know about the tonguing techniques employed to block certain holes while blowing out or drawing in, let alone a prolonged period of bloody lips. Unlike windmill-arm guitarists (Pete Townshend), 360-degree drummers (Neal Peart), and flamboyant keyboardists (Elton John), harmonica players anchor themselves to a single spot on the stage, hunched over, eyes shut, their hands obscuring their faces as they huff and puff until they’re soaked to the skin with sweat. Hohner eventually corrected this error, but it took a ragtag group of harmonica customizers and music geeks from around the world to force the 150-year-old German firm to face the music.Įven if a musician gets his hands on a well-designed harmonica and learns to play it as fluidly and expressively as Raphael, it’s hardly a sure-fire ticket to the big time. These and other economizing decisions made the instrument virtually impossible to control, thanks to all the extra air that was now leaking through the reed plates. Most critically, the tools used to punch the slots in the harmonica’s reed plates were sharpened less frequently, and steps were skipped in the tuning of the reeds themselves. Of course, it doesn’t help if your harmonica is so poorly made that you couldn’t play it well even if you were a pro, which describes the state of the instrument from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, when Hohner, the largest harmonica manufacturer in the world, began to cut corners in the production of its ubiquitous Marine Band harmonica.

“These companies don’t know anything about the players, to tell you the truth.” But to be able play melody on it is a whole different skill set.” “If you have a harmonica in the right key for a song, you can play any note and it’ll sound good. “The harmonica is actually pretty hard to play well,” says harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael, who has shared the stage with Willie Nelson for the better part of 40 years. Harmonica players will suck and harmonica players will blow, but mastering the harmonica is tougher than its diminutive size and simple mechanics suggest.

10 easy lessons blues harmonica rapidshare library