Week 44 - learning to play the harmonica

In my heady, hasty enthusiasm last year, not only did I decide to learn something new every week, but I thought I'd also spend the year learning the piano - like the former wasn't enough for me.  The learning the piano thing was completely independent of the blog challenge, I just thought of both at the same time. As the year began and the piano lessons got going, I couldn't help conceive the silly little romantic notion that perhaps these two challenges could come together in the most effortless and pertinent of ways.  Could week 52 be the fruits of my labour, a year of piano learning with a lovely recital at the end of it?  In a word.  No. It turns out, I couldn't quite manage both challenges and my beautiful piano has been sitting lonely and unloved for the past six months.  

So much for my musical endeavours in 2016.  But wait, there was something else on my list of things to learn from the very beginning. Where it started I don't know, but I have always wanted to learn to play the harmonica. I'm really not sure why because I associate harmonica-playing with cowboys and yet I have no interest in that world and I've never seen any Western movies where lots have had legendary harmonica scenes.  It must just be from seeing amazing Blues performances, but I just think its cool.  So, I bought myself a Hohner 10-hole Silverstar harmonica in the key of C and found an afternoon masterclass to go to with The Indytute.

I went with my friend Rachel to the class at The Blues Kitchen in Shoreditch and we started chatting to the teacher, Joff Watkins, a super cool, old-school musician, sitting there all chilled in his hat, casually strumming on a guitar.  He plays in various jazz and blues bands and he also teaches a proper twelve-week harmonica course at Morley College.  This class was just 90 minutes so I was a little reticent as to how much I would learn.  We delved straight in but not before a smattering from Joff.

So the most important thing to know about playing the harmonica is controlling your breath.  I'm not 100% sure whether I knew that you play by breathing out and in.  As a child when you first play a harmonica all you do is breath out, probably as hard as possible.  Each of the ten holes produces not one but two notes, one from a breath in and one from a breath out. So, to play well, one must breath from their belly and not their chest otherwise the breath just runs out.

We began by learning "the train", something that most harmonica players know as its fun to learn and you can practise getting faster and faster.  The harmonica can sound like the chugging along of a train, obviously one in the mid-West.  Joff taught us about each breath in and out on certain holes and practising saying the word "ta" when breathing in and "hooka" when breathing out, then ending with a train whistle on the end.  Everyone got the hang of it fairly quickly and sounded pretty good.  I struggled a little with my breath though.

                                   

 We then moved onto learning how to isolate individual notes, which is not easy, as of course, the holes are very close together, plus the best way to play a harmonica is having a lot of it in your mouth at any one time, so it seems very difficult, but you have to learn to purse your lips over the hole you want to play.  We all had a go at playing When The Saints Go Marching In.  Getting only single notes is bloody difficult.  

Next, Joff got on the guitar, played a few chords and got us to just play along by riffing a few notes and finding out what works and what doesn't.  Generally, you can make fairly nice sounds with adjacent notes, sliding up and down the harmonica and repeating notes that sound good.  The golden rule is if it sounds good, repeat it.  But, try to avoid repeatedly sucking and blowing on the same hole.

Finally we did a bit of blues riffing and then went back to practising the train all together.  That was it. So actually, I feel like we did learn quite a bit in the short class, although I do think it could have been two hours.  Nevertheless, Joff was an excellent teacher and it was a really good laugh. It definitely gave me a bit of aspiration to carry on playing.  Luckily for now, its the type of thing I can just sit and learn on my own with the help of youtube and not subject people to the pain.