I just purchase This One from eBay. It seems like a good starter harp and sounds nice. I purchased several things from this seller and he seems good to deal with. I also got a Snoopy Jaw Harp just for kicks. My coworkers thought it was the coolest thing!
I picked up a Beginners Harmonica box with a harp and loads of books and a DVD (by Don Baker, but it wasn't very good) and I was going to learn whilst my left arm was in plater in JuneJuly but I then found out Mrs Me hates the sound of them :(
Tom/Nick, can you help me again with the dropping or raising of the key from what everyone else is playing? And why the change? Would the harmonica just blend with the other instruments?
"Nothing...can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts."
I play harmonica and guitar, although not at the same time.
The key of harmonica you use actually depends on the role the harmonica is playing in your music. (Warning, oversimplification ahead:) If you are using it as a melody instrument in, say, folk music, then often you play in "first position" or the key the harmonica has listed on the side. If you are using it as a solo instrument, or as a rhythm instrument, then you typically play in second position, which is a fifth from the key the harmonica has listed.
Probably 90% of the harmonica you hear on recordings is played in second position. The reason is because the normal harmonicas are "diatonic" instruments, which means that they only have the notes that are part of the scale in their key. So if you are playing melody, the melody notes are present in the harmonica (ignoring bends for the moment). But the flatted seventh is not, so if the band is playing in C, and your harmonica is in C, and they play the extremely common G7, you can only play a straight the G chord , which sounds terrible, and not very bluesy.
However, most of the notes in the G scale are also in the C scale. In fact, the G blues scale, which includes the flatted seventh, can be found in the C scale, started from a different location. So if the band is playing in G, and you have a C harp, you have the entire blues scale available to you quite simply, and you can hit that D7 when they do no problem. Plus, we all know how nearly all popular music today has descended from the blues, so it just works a lot better.
In short, your tonal pallete has a more bluesy feel in second position, because you have some notes out of the scale easily available.
It turns out that the notes missing from the G scale are a lot easier to bend into when playing cross too, but as a beginner you shouldn't worry about that too much.
It's all about bending the notes, or flattening them for the blues scale. The easiest notes to bend on the harmonica are the 2 and 4 draw. Well, bending blow notes is a pretty advanced skill anyway.
So you are looking for the right note in the right hole with the right breath direction. That's why the harp is in a different key than the guitar.
The A harp is
First postion A
Second E
Third Bm
Fifth C#m
If you look at a A harp to play in E you'll see the 2 draw note is in fact E and 4 is B
Well yes, that and what Gallileo said above.
books you should take a gander at...Anything by Jon Gindick
Somewhere around here I have a Hohner Marine Band C harp. It came with a book that Gindick wrote called "Country and Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless".
I really have to do some cleaning up one of these days. I have a lot of stuff that is "around here somewhere" :oops:
I wrapped a newspaper ’round my head
So I looked like I was deep
I have been playing guitar and harmonica regularly for some years. I wouldn't classify myself as excellent, but I've found my ways of playing that works pretty well in many genres. What I like a lot is playing "straight harp", i.e. you use a harmonica with the same key as the melody (play in first postion that is) - a lot of Bob Dylan's songs are played this way. Try john wesley harding in C with a C harmonica for instance. Also playing minor keys is interesting. E.g. all along the watchtower - you'll play a C harp in 4th position to play the song in a minor - the risk of hitting bad notes is much greater here - takes some practice to get a feeling.
In general: it is fun, and it's fairly simple to get the basic technique (playing single notes, bending) down. The rest is just (!) practice
Good luck
LaRS
...only thing I know how to do is to keep on keepin' on...
LARS kolberg http://www.facebook.com/sangerersomfolk
I'll second a recommendation by Nick.
Long ago I tried to take up the harmonica. Unfortunately, the book I picked up at the time was horrible. It was supposed to be for beginners, but jumped into complicated tongue blocking methods. I got frustrated with this pretty quick and gave up.
Several months ago I was given a copy of David Harp's Instant Blues Harmonica book. In less than an hour I was sounding better than I had ever had before. It is a very good book which presents the harmonica in such a way that a complete beginner can jump right in. Some copies even include a cd so you can hear what your supposed to sound like.
