Solo Harmonica Study 1 Ex. 1.4 and onwards
Hello David,
I would like to ask you a question concerning the Solo Harmonica Study 1. I got my first harmonica, which is in key of C, checked out your intro lesson for C harmonica and after one week of playing simple melodies on holes 4-7 using tongue blocking technique I jumped into Solo lesson since this is a style of playing that I'm really interested about. Perhaps it was my mistake as I'm not used to sound of harmonica yet, and I only have C harmonica so I can't apply the sound from your videos directly.
Here comes my question: in Ex.1.4 on first two beats you draw 123, blow 123. To my very anti-musical ear the second chord sounds higher than the first one in your video, but when I do same on my C harmonica the second one sounds lower. Am I mishearing it? One thing I could assume is that when you blow you also cover 4th hole which makes the highest note.
Cheers,
Evgeny
Pleasure to meet you Evgeny and welcome to the site. If I did play 4+ in the blow chord it was accidental. The goal is to play 1 2 3 draw twice, then 1 2 3 blow twice and then move down to 1 2 draw twice and then back to 1 2 3 blow twice.
You can use software like The Amazing Slow Downer (http://www.bluesharmonica.com/practice_tools_amazing_slow_downer) to change the key of the MP3 examples so you can play along. The added benefit is that with this program you can loop sections of music for practice, so it's money well spent.
Best wishes on your studies.
Among that I forgot to say that I really enjoy using your web site so far. It is very encouraging to me. I would love to buy suitable harmonicas to keep studying but currently I just live in a such place where it is not possible to rich a music store. I have enough time to practice on the other hand. :)
Cheers,
Evgeny