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Articles & Books From Harmonica
Wail on your harmonica!The harmonica is one of the most popular and versatile instruments in the world. There are several reasons harmonicas are awesome—you can play them anywhere, they’re inexpensive, and you can show off in dozens of musical styles. The friendly and pleasingly tuneful Harmonica For Dummies is the fastest and best way to learn for yourself!
Breathe the blues into your harmonica!Blues harmonica is the most popular and influential style of harmonica playing, and it forms the basis for playing harmonica in other styles such as rock and country. Blues Harmonica for Dummies gives you a wealth of content devoted to the blues approach—specific techniques and applications, including bending and making your notes sound richer and fuller with tongue-blocked enhancements; use of amplification to develop a blues sound; blues licks and riffs; constructing a blues harmonica solo; accompanying singers; historical development of blues styles; and important blues players and recordings.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-12-2021
Learning to play the harmonica starts with playing a single melody with either a pucker or tongue block — and knowing how to read harmonica tablature (tab), how to play a harmonica in position, and knowing the positions for the 12 harmonica keys. How to Play a Single Note on the HarmonicaTo play a single melody note on the harmonica, use your mouth to isolate a single hole.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-01-2022
From the beginning, the harmonica has been an integral part of blues music. The blues is a uniquely American art form that got its start from the collision of African and European cultures in the American South. And the harmonica has a natural genius for the blues, with its ease of producing the moaning, wailing sounds often associated with this style of music.
Step by Step / Updated 03-27-2016
You probably already know how to whistle or hum dozens of tunes. So the best way to get started playing melody on the harmonica is to try to find some of those melodies in the harmonica. Here, you find several familiar tunes that are played in the middle register. The harmonica tablature (or tab) under the written music tells you the holes and breaths to play.
Step by Step / Updated 02-15-2023
The bends in the harmonica’s middle range — Holes 4, 5, and 6 — are shallow and not too difficult to control, so this is a good place to start. When you bend a note, you can isolate a single note either with a pucker (with your tongue off the harp) or with a tongue block (with your tongue on the harp). Each of the following licks has three versions — one for each of the draw bends in Holes 4, 5, and 6.
Article / Updated 02-15-2023
The harmonica is well-suited for the blues. One of the most well-loved (and basic) song forms used in blues and rock is called 12-bar blues, which is like the verse of a song. This verse form is the container for both melodies and solos, and when you understand its features, you can easily find things to play within it.
Article / Updated 07-10-2023
The diatonic harmonica is the most popular harp in North America, but many other types of harps are worth checking out. There are three other popular harmonicas that you may want to explore. You may find chromatic, tremolo, and octave harps in stores that have a broad selection of harmonicas, but many stores stick to the most popular models and keys of diatonics, rounded out by one or two chromatics.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Learning to play the harmonica fast is a little like learning to talk. First you learn to mouth sounds. Then you learn to shape the sounds into words, connect the words into simple sentences, and have conversations. At that point, you become fluent — and your language can flow. When you learn to play the harp fluently, you start with individual notes.
Article / Updated 02-16-2023
Harmonicas can go out of tune with playing, and even new harps straight from the factory aren’t always in good tune. But you don’t have to accept what you get — you can correct out-of-tune notes. Harmonica tuning, as you can watch in Chapter 18, Video Clip 1805, follows straightforward procedures, but it has some ins and outs that you need to know.