General Discussion

When you are studying an Instrumental, if you want the backing track to practice, you may be lucky... chances are high that the Lead Harmonica on the mp3 was mixed as if it was the vocal, and sofor easy to remove (thank you David for the hint)

I found the free program Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ ) and the plug in "Center Pan remover" ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/nyquist/centerpanremover.zip ) to be an easy way to end up with an accaptable jam track of the instrumental you are working at. continue reading...

I might be wrong but it looks like Sonny Boy II gets it 'wrong way up' at the opening of his rendition of Ninety Nine with Otis Spann during one of their European tours with the American Folk Blues festival in the 1960's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS62SfV10FE

The SPAH 2011 Convention is in Virginia this year, in August.
Is anyone here going?
Can anyone share previous SPAH experiences and advice?

Thanks.

It is almost 3 weeks I'm done with Gary's blues which acoustically sounds just fine, and what I'm busy at the last 20 days is to make it sound acceptable amped, with not the slightest success. I mean normally anythingh you study emplove with time, with the amp it sounds as bad as when I started experimenting.

The strut amped isnt too bad, do you also find low key to be harder to play smooth with the amp?

I would like to know if I'm alone in that, or if someone of you experimented the same trouble moving from acoustic to mic, and if so how overcomed it. continue reading...

Good tip on the space bar David. It's also useful for other applications like iTunes, Amazing Slow Downer and Transcribe and probably most other 'playback' applications. Starts and pauses the playback. And its so much easier than scrolling around with the mouse to the play or pause button.

I was going to write this to David, because I was embarrassed to share it with the group, but improvising is hard to face, so I thought maybe others would relate to this. Do other people go through this:

If only I had more time to give to the harmonica. Work can be so demanding, I'm too tired to do the hard stuff when I get home. Now that I'm settled into my new place, I hope I can give it more time. So, today too many chores (finishing settling in), so opted out of Lindy Hop practice. (I'll dance and socialize tomorrow.) continue reading...

My focus is on three very important subjects right now: improvising, theory and accompaniment playing. Once these are completed, my focus will be on adding material to the beginning section of the website where needed.

For those that have completed the beginning section of the site and are working on, or have completed, "Gary's Blues" (Tongue Blocking Study 3) and "The Strut" (Bending Study 3) please share with me...

1) Where you had the most technique DIFFICULTY in your studies on the site... this is technique focused and how well the study material/songs helped you. continue reading...

Just watched the video of the finale with you, Steve and Joe. Man, that looked like fun and sounded great!!!!

Just got my first Manji harps in and along with blowing, had to capture the moment digitally.

http://www.digitalaspirations.com/images/Manji.jpg

Enjoy

Keith in Austin

Bought my Marine Band C harmonica a couple of months ago and have been fooling around on it for a while without making much progress. I was excited to see a Facebook link this morning that offered me 21 days of free lessons because of my recent Hohner purchase.

I get here, go through the signup drill and what do I see for my first beginner lesson-- Get out your A harmonica. We might use your C harmonica later. In fact, why don't you go out and buy a bunch of other harmonicas.

Are you kidding? continue reading...