Easy Bend Songs
Practicing my bends and getting better with time, practice, experimentation and harp ninja. After watching numerous interviews here everyone seems to agree the best practice to get the bend and hear if it's correct on your own is to use the bend in a familiar song. Can everyone recommend good basic beginner songs with tab to learn bends?
Amazing grace (2nd position):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPhq-MyKI_w
watch the video again, he does a great job of explaining it.
If you start "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on Draw 3, you can really work on the middle (two-semitone) bend in that hole:
3 3" 3+ 3" 3 3 3 Mary had a little lamb
3" 3" 3" 3 4 4 Little lamb, Little lamb.
3 3" 3+ 3" 3 3 3 Mary had a little lamb,
3 3" 3" 3 3" 3+ Its fleece was white as snow.
For anybody reading interested in beginning overbending, I recently tabbed out a traditional Maori song, which is a nice easy song where the notes and chords are quite familiar to us (I, IV, V and vi), but the only unusual thing is that it has one 'convenient' overblow in it.
'Convenient' because of where the note is placed. This particular part goes 5+ 5+ 5+ 5OB 5+ 4 ... I haven't learned overblow, so I thought about how I would go about changing the song so that I didn't have to play it, and decided that you would just stay on the 5+, as in 5+ 5+ 5+ 5+ 5+ 4 ...
Then I thought that was quite useful, because you could try to play the overblow, but if it doesn't happen and you end up playing 5+ instead, the song still works. With little practice, I can now hit it maybe 50/50, but that's in mind that I haven't set up my harp specifically to play OBs.
Here's the full tab; the OB is only in the first part. Track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uldszkwcW0 (for those hearing Maori for the first time: no, there is no cursing in this song... the Maori word whakarongo, pronounced "fa ka ro ngo" means 'to listen', and here we also have whakapono meaning 'believe')
E Te Ariki (Key of G, tab for C harmonica in 2nd position)
3 4 5+ 5OB 5+~
5+ 5+ 5+ 5OB 5+ 4 3 4 4~
3 4 5+ 5OB 5+~
5+ 5+ 5OB 5+ 4 3 4 4~
5+ 6+ 6 6 6 6 7 6 6+~
5+ 5+ 6+ 6 6~
6 7 6 6+ 5+ 6+ 6+~
3 4 4~ 5+ 4 3~
6 6 6 7 6 6+ 5+ 6+
6 6 7 6 6+ 5+ 6+ 6+~ (x2)
Dang, i've started a reply to this thread like 3 times, but I keep getting distracted and not finishing it. Hopefully this one sticks
a few that I like are:
Home On The Range:3+ 3+ 4+ 4 5+ 4+ 3+ 3' 5 5 5 5+ 5 6+ 4+ 4+ 4+ 3 4+ 4Oh give me a home where the buf - fa - lo roam where the deer and the an - te - lope play
(you can really Dig into the 4 draw at the end with a dip and it'll sound like a nice drawl)
The Star Spangled Banner:
3+ 2+ 1+ 2+ 3+ 4+ 5+ 4 4+ 2+ 2' 2
3+ 3+ 5+ 4- 4+ 3 3'' 3 4+ 4+ 3+ 2+ 1+
This one is really good ... it has some half step bends, hole step bends, and bends on more than one hole. Its really best to watch the video on this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSXcXTCAXb0
I'll post a few more as I find them.