Great videos
Just want to add my thanks for the videos you're doing. It's really helpful to sit in on these sessions because they're full of tips and subtle advice that you don't always get elsewhere. I agree with you that it's better to practise little and often rather than for long sessions and I like what David said about approaching the study songs - that it's better to play along with them almost casually each day, working on a couple of things, rather than trying to get the whole thing perfect from the beginning. I tried labouring over every detail to start with and it just ends up frustrating - though there's always got to be a healthy dose of that, I suppose. Getting to the point where you can submit study songs follows the same pattern - the point comes when you know you're ready. As you said about the drums, your body will learn it through repetition, perhaps despite the mind's attempts to frustrate the process! Anyway, thanks again for all the insights.
Comments
Great Videos
I am pleased that the videos of my lessons are helpful. It makes it worth the extra effort.
Regards
Joe
Great idea!
Hi Joe,
After reading you were a student I decided to check your videos. I went to "playing Walk with me with a band (1)", because I thought you'd be at this point playing with a full band, and then "open" for the same reason. Walk with me is very useful, because Dave explains the important details to you, and the explanations are quite clear, because he's working with you. Then, watching "Open", it was very cool, because it reminded me of my first days with harmonica, around '98. My beginnings were long before then when my childhood friend's father gave me a chromatic as a birthday present. Then in '96 I bought a $6.00 harmonica in South Carolina, and I finally found enough resources to learn in '98. So I was trying to play my cheap harp and those weird sounds came out of holes 2 and 3... I thought it had to be the harp! That very afternoon I went to the shop and bought a marine band, just to come back home and find it had the same problem (my mouth attached to it!). I understood it couldn't be the harmonica and I went on to tame it. Then, trying to bend, getting back to those flatter sounds, took a lot of time and effort!
A couple of years later I had the chance to open a harmonica workshop in my school, the national university of Mexico. I remember many of the people struggling to play single holes, finally playing them after a while... My experience is that the harmonica is for stubborn people: we all most likely learn any technique, but some will cost a lot of time and practice. It was very hard for me to start tongue blocking. I used to drool too much through the harmonica. I even used to try playing facing up... Then I was able to control that...
I don't practice as much now, but I still love the harmonica and this online class is among the greatest resources I've had to learn.
Keep playing and keep uploading your classes. Showing your work on video is yet another great resource for the rest of us, more distant students. I am looking forward to seeing you play with the band soon!
All the best,
Bernardo
Mexico City, most times