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" Harmonica
SuperStart Secrets "
E Matthew Shelton
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Secret #2:
Good Tone is the "Holy Grail"
of Playing Harmonica - and You May Be Surprised How You Go About Getting
It! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Good tone is a big issue for harmonica players and is something
that many players do not have, even after years of playing.
Why is that?
There's a few reasons, really:
Sometimes it's because they were told to start learning to play "single
notes" as a beginner, and with all that "pursing up" and "cramping down"
they were told to do with their lips, they got the idea that their mouth
has to be made small in order to play.
Nothing could be further from the truth
That sort of conception is almost guaranteed to produce thin and unpleasant
harmonica tone.
"What's the big deal, here?" you may ask. "Why should I
care?"
"Can people really tell if I've got good tone
or not?"
Yes, they can tell in a heartbeat -
they may not know what it is they don't like, but they know there's
something there that they just don't like, no matter how many techniques
you throw in or how fast you play.
You see, of all the mouth instruments on the planet, the harmonica offers
you the most flexibility in its' tone.
Everything you change inside your mouth on the
harmonica immediately changes what the harmonica is doing.
There's a great and fascinating reason for this:
The harmonica is the only inhale ("draw" in harmonica language) and
exhale ("blow") instrument.
The inside of your mouth literally becomes part of the sound.
This means that you have the opportunity to make your harmonica sound
different than any other harmonica player in the world, by taking advantage
of your genetics, your lips, tongue, teeth, and so on that are uniquely
yours.
You can develop a sound (acoustically!) that people can recognize just
by your tone, your tonal quality, and people can say "Oh, listen, that's
so-and-so!"
The really cool thing about it is that it doesn't take any
special equipment for you to develop your own unique and wonderful tone
- it doesn't take such-and-such microphone, such-and-such amplifier:
Fancy equipment does not and will not ever
substitute for good tone, or make up for the lack of it! People
can always hear the difference.
On the other side of the coin, if you have good tone with your harmonica,
it
will shine through,
even if you have to play through very basic (or even crummy) equipment
-
what do you think most of those old blues players that people rave about
had to play through most of the time - they didn't have the electronics
we have now!
The good news is that there are some simple
and basic things you can do that will change the tone of your harmonica
playing right away, for the better.
Remember, when you play the harmonica, the inside of your mouth becomes
a sound chamber, becomes part of the sound of the harmonica. This
is a great thing about the instrument, because you can manipulate the sound
so much within your mouth.
However, if the inside of your mouth is held in a very small and cramped
position then you aren’t able to take advantage of all your natural tone
possibilities.
The first step is to think “relaxation” and to
be aware of any tensing up when you are playing.
It can be a hard thing to think about playing harmonica and being relaxed
at the same time, because you've seen great players wailing away and they
seem to be all emotional and their eyes are scrunched tight, so it's easy
to think that they are tense and "scrunched up" all over - but they're
not.
If you are enjoying the tone they are producing, then their mouths
are being held open for the tone, not crunched tight.
The first thing we want to do is to get that sound chamber (the inside
of your mouth) BIGGER.
Here's an exercise: open your mouth,
put your thumb underneath your chin, grab your lower teeth with your first
two fingers, and pull down. (if you have TMJ or some other problem
with your jaw, then you may want to skip this)
Pull down your jaw as far as it will go, and hold
it there for a count of 10.
Now let go. Now do it again.
Now this time when you let go of your jaw, move
it around a little bit - does it feel like it's being held a little
bit lower, a little bit more relaxed than usual?
Most of us go around with clenched jaw muscles, and it doesn't
help with our harmonica playing - this should help you become more aware
of it, and make this next exercise more effective:
Now, while your jaw is in a mid-dropped
position (like you are surprised) say “AHHH” just like you are at the doctor.
While saying “ahhh”, notice that your tongue has dropped to the bottom
of your mouth.
Between dropping your tongue and dropping your jaw, you
are providing a much bigger air chamber for your harmonica to breathe and
resonate in,
plus you are going a long way to letting the harmonica’s reeds blow
and draw at the notes as they were tuned to play, rather than an inadvertent
“sour bending” sound that comes from playing with tension and too small
a place inside the mouth.
Let's see how this translates to the harmonica:
Using relaxed lips, and a dropped jaw, play
a blow chord at holes 1,2,3,4 - your mouth must be opened big enough
to play all four holes.
Now bring your jaw up to where your teeth almost touch - do you hear
this change the tonal quality, perhaps even the pitch?
Now let's do the same thing, starting with jaw dropped, blowing holes
1,2,3,4, and have the tongue in the "aaahhh" position,
then bring it up to a position like you were saying "eeeee":
Do you hear the difference?
Now let's do the same thing, except on an in breath
(you might want to exhale before you do this)
aaahhh,
eeeee, aaahhh, eeeee
Do you hear how the dropped jaw, dropped tongue position gives you
the best tone?
Now, if you already play single notes on the harmonica,
here's a simple test for you: compare your draw #2 and blow #3
notes:
On the 10 hole diatonic (aka blues harmonica or folk harmonica)
the #2 DRAW (inhale) and the #3 BLOW (exhale) are
the SAME NOTE, pitch-wise.
If, when you draw #2 and blow #3, the notes
don’t sound the same, if they aren't the same pitch, then there is a breathing
and mouth position challenge to be resolved.
:
this clip has draw #2 "off" first, then #3 blow is "off"; then they are
both correct at the end.
Incidentally, this exercise, draw #2 and blow #3 comparison, can almost
be a riff:
As you know by now Harmonica SuperStart gets you started quickly by
playing
with chords and by using doublestop tongueblocking,
instead of starting you off with single note playing -
this is very advantageous to you for developing good tone
in your playing very quickly.
Why? Because chord playing forces you to
listen to your tone - there's no way to fake it - the chords either
sound sweet or sour, there's very little in-between.
When you learn to produce good tone playing chords, this locks-in
your tone technique - it becomes automatic.
This then transfers over to when you begin learning to play single
notes - you've already got it down.
If you start by trying to play single notes, all you are doing is concentrating
on "was that a single note, or two holes?"
and: "what hole am I on, anyway?!" and then once you've gotten that
nailed down somewhat, finally, you move on to other techniques such as
learning how to bend notes, which tends to mess up player's tone even more.
The whole thing about developing tone gets thrown over to the wayside,
as "something you just have to somehow develop
on your own, someday, somehow".
Harmonica SuperStart, on the other
hand, has an entire Tone Section devoted to
your
learning good tone.
Remember above where we were comparing "eeee" and "aaahh" sounds
on the harmonica and how they affected our tone?
Here's an example off the track "Dobro Swamp" from Harmonica
SuperStart CD#2 (edited for length) where you learn to use
those changes in tone production to create a effect
that
becomes part of the song:
Dobro Swamp (snip)
There's even one technique revealed to you in Harmonica
SuperStart that gives you
a baseline reference for your tone that you can easily refer
back to at any time, especially for the times when you may be wondering
"Is it just me, or is my harmonica messing up?"
