Harmonica Parts

Series Summary

Thought to be invented in the 1820’s, the harmonica (a.k.a. harp, mouth harp, or mouth-organ) crooned its way into our hearts and souls… and has not left since. The small, innocuous harp has passed through the hands of some of the greatest musicians, lawmen, outlaws, and presidents ever to walk the earth, including Bob Dylan, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid—even President Abraham Lincoln is noted to have carried a harmonica around in his pocket. And for good reason. The harmonica is a unique reed instrument with an easily recognizable, soulfully distinct polyphony. Its small size and deceptive simplicity allow most people to pick it up and play a tune effortlessly. Yet, most accomplished harp players know, after years of practice and some blood, sweat and tears, that the harmonica provides as much challenge—and virtuosity—as any piano, violin, or guitar. Just ask John Popper of Blues Traveler.

Don’t be fooled: the harmonica is a force to be reckoned with. In this free music instruction video series, get a proper introduction to playing the mouth harp. Our expert will show you the fundamentals of the diatonic harp (also called a blues harmonica). Learn how to play individual notes and chords, scales, how to play straight and cross harp, how to bend notes, how to do the characteristic cupping technique, how to slur notes, and how to play harmonica in a song. So take a few minutes to really learn how to play the mouth harp, blow by blow.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Eric Williams and I'm here to talk to you about beginning harmonica. Okay, harmonica's this is what they call diatonic harmonicas. There's another type of harmonica called chromatic, it has a side key that gives you the half steps in between. Those are very advanced and a little more difficult to play. These have some challenges as well but they're defiantly easier type harmonica to learn on. They usually have 10 holes and the holes are labeled or numbered 12345678910. What you do is you either blow air through or you draw the air back out and when you do that you're activating brass reeds that are in the side of the box in the harmonica. Whenever you blow air through you get one range of pitches, when you draw the air back through the harmonica you get another whole row of reeds and another row of pitches. So these are two different famous harmonicas. This is the Marine band that a lot of people know and love. This is a Hohner special 20 and I just want to show you the differences. This one has a wooden body that's the old fashioned style. This has plastic, sometimes the plastic has the tendency to be more durable and they're a little bit louder. If you're playing with a rock band or a blues band, a lot of the guys like the special 20 because there's a little bit more volume. This is the more traditional, sometimes it gives you a little darker tone. If you're playing folk songs and campfire songs, this one has more of that old time sound. There's hundreds of other types of harmonicas too, there's no right or wrong. The other thing to know is they do come in different keys which is important. The key will be stamped somewhere on the harp, this is a G and this one over here is an F. One of the more common keys you'll see is the key of C. As we get further into this we'll learn about straight harp versus cross harp, but what you need to know is what key the harp really is in to start with and then there's other things we can go into from that. But those are some of the beginning rudiments of what harmonicas are about."