How to Play Harmonica

A Complete Guide for Beginners

Blake Brocksmith, Gary Dorfman, Douglas Lichterman

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781507206652
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This easy-to-understand beginner’s guide provides an introduction to playing the harmonica and includes helpful information about basic techniques, tools, and music knowledge.

Learn to play the harmonica with this step-by-step guide perfect for beginners. With just this book and your harmonica in hand, you’ll learn basic music skills, discover how and why your harmonica works, play some simple tunes, and start to improvise your own music.

First, this chapter examines the different types of harmonicas available to help you become familiar with the instrument and choose the one that’s best for you. Next, it covers the fundamentals of reading music to get you started or as a refresher if you’re not new to music. Finally, it focuses on some of the specific techniques you’ll need to learn to take command of your new instrument. These include controlling your breath, shaping your mouth, and using your tongue in order to produce the notes and sounds you want, as well as the proper way to hold the instrument. The goal is to get clean single notes out of your harmonica.

Types of Harmonicas

Let’s talk briefly about the different types of harmonicas. There are two basic kinds: diatonic and chromatic. They differ in how the reeds are tuned when the “harp” is made. (There are many further variations within these two categories, but we’ll stick with the basics here.)

HARP TIP

A reed in a harmonica is a piece of thin metal that vibrates to produce sounds when air is blown on it. Reeds are also found in mouthpieces of clarinets and oboes, and in accordions.

Chromatic

The chromatic harmonica is a more advanced style of harmonica. It has a button on the side that allows the musician to control the number of notes available to play. When you press the button, you can play all the major notes in a scale, plus the half steps (or notes in between). When the button isn’t pressed, you can only play the major notes. The chromatic harmonica is used most often in jazz and classical music.

Diatonic

The diatonic harmonica is a simpler harmonica because it doesn’t have a complete selection of notes like the chromatic harmonica (although many of the notes that are not naturally found on it can be acquired by “bending” certain notes like blues players do—you’ll learn about bending in Chapter 2). Most professional harmonica players are diatonic players. It is typically used in blues, rock, country, and folk, but it can be found in all styles of music. The diatonic harmonica is sometimes called a blues harp, short harp, or standard ten-hole. This book uses a C diatonic harmonica for teaching purposes.

Most people learn on (and often stay with) diatonic harps because they are designed to never have a wrong note. This is accomplished by leaving out some of the tones from the chromatic scale and using only the diatonic scale. Diatonic takes only the notes that create chords and leaves out the others. (The difference between the diatonic and chromatic scales is that diatonic contains only five of the tones of a given scale while chromatic contains all eight.) What is important to remember is that some notes do not exist naturally on the diatonic scale, which is the scale this book focuses on.

HARP TIP

In music theory, two notes played at the same time make an interval, and three or more notes played at the same time make a chord. Major and minor chords are made up of intervals called thirds, which are formed when you play two notes of a scale that are separated by one note. For example, a C major scale is made up of the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. If you play the notes C and E together, omitting the D in between, you have a third. Playing D and F together or E and G together also make thirds, and so on.

Reading Music

How will you know exactly what notes to play? Through a type of musical notation called tablature. Tablature is a form of notation specific to the harmonica that tells you exactly what to do and when. There are only two ways to draw sound from a harmonica: by blowing and by drawing. When you blow out through the reeds it makes a sound, and when you draw (or suck) in air it creates another sound. Blowing is represented in tablature by an up arrow, and drawing is represented by a down arrow, as shown in the following image.

FIGURE 1-1. BLOW AND DRAW ARROW SYMBOLS

HARP TIP

A diatonic scale is one with eight notes from octave to octave, which contains only the notes in the scale of the key being played. A chromatic scale is one with thirteen notes from octave to octave, which includes every possible note in the scale that exists between the two octaves.

Next there are single notes, shown on the harmonica by the numbers over the holes. So if the song or exercise wants you to play the 2 hole by drawing air, you will see 2↓. The number corresponds to the number that usually appears on the upper plate of the harmonica and the arrow indicates what to do with your breath.

FIGURE 1-2. HOLES 1–10, WITH BLOW AND DRAW NOTES

There are a number of different ways to draw and blow through the harp, and you will learn some of those techniques in Chapter 2.

Get Comfortable with the Instrument

The first thing you’ll notice when picking up a harmonica is how easy it is to play chords that sound good right off the bat. This is one big reason why the harmonica has become such a popular instrument in folk music as well as in rock and jazz, and why hundreds of millions of them have been manufactured over the years.

Spending some time just breathing through your harmonica is a good way to get a sense of how the instrument feels and the degree to which you feel comfortable with it. In fact, it can be very relaxing just to breathe through the low end (holes 1, 2, and 3) of the instrument and listen to the hypnotic alternating chords your breath produces as it blows and draws over the reeds. This is also a good focusing exercise to shift your mind from the other concerns of your day to preparing to play the harmonica.

HARMONICA HERO: JOHN POPPER

John Popper (b. 1967) is one of the leading harmonica virtuosos in the contemporary music scene. As the singer, harmonica player, songwriter, and founding member of Blues Traveler, Popper has been thrilling audiences for years with his dazzling and hyperactive harp style, born from listening to great jazz improvisers. His musicianship has pushed the harmonica to the forefront of soloing instruments in the modern rock setting. Here’s a fun story about him: As a high school student, John Popper ran in a student election. When his turn came to make a speech he pulled out a harmonica and started to wail. The crowd responded with wild applause and dancing. But instead of winning the election, Popper got suspended from school. Popper has also been a leading proponent of the use of effects to create his harmonica sound, using devices including wah-wahs, fuzz tones, synthesizers, digital delays, and octave generators to stretch the limits of what is possible on the instrument.

If you then play around a little by just blowing and drawing chords up and down the instrument you’ll begin to understand what your harmonica is capable of doing, and how your breath affects the low, middle, and high reeds differently. As you get up to the higher reeds and the space the air is coming through becomes smaller, the amount of air you can blow or draw through the reed is reduced, and thus you’ll find it takes less air to move the reed and get the note. Consequently you’ll be inhaling or exhaling less volume of air when playing at the higher end of the harp and using more volume of air when playing at the lower end.

HARMONICA HERO: BIG WALTER HORTON

Big Walter “Shakey” Horton (1921–1981) was a harmonica luminary said to be one of the best blues harp players of all time. Besides developing a unique hornlike tone on the instrument and a completely distinctive virtuoso style, Horton was one of the earliest proponents of the amplified harmonica sound that defined Chicago-style blues, claiming to have begun using an amplifier around 1940. He was also a teacher and mentor to many players, including har-monica icons Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson II, and later t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• How to Use This Book
• Chapter 1. One Note at a Time
• Chapter 2. Bending Notes
• Chapter 3. Understanding Rhythm
• Chapter 4. Playing in Different Key Positions
• Chapter 5. Songs You Can Play in First Position
• Chapter 6. Improvisation
• Chapter 7. Practicing
• Chapter 8. Gear and Accessories
• Appendix A. The Essential Harmonica Recordings
• Appendix B. Resources
• Appendix C. Glossary
• About the Authors
• Index
• Copyright