How to Play Notes on the Harmonica

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Eric Williams and I'm here to talk to you about beginning harmonica. The next step you need to work on with the harmonica is you need to graduate up from just playing multiple notes at the same time to hopefully playing single notes at a time. Now this requires directing your air stream through only one of these holes at a time and that's a little difficult because most people's mouths are bigger than just one of these holes. So whenever you blow air in or draw air out, it wants to take over at least that much, maybe even the whole harmonica and that's not so good. You need to find a way to direct your air stream into a very small focused area. Now there's numerous ways to do that. You can kind of press your lips in a very small almost like a whistling type formation and hopefully that will direct the air through. There's a more advanced way which is called tongue blocking where you actually let your tongue out and touch the face of the harmonica and block off some of the holes that you don't want to be activating. What that does, let's pretend this is your tongue, it's covering this part of the harmonica and only letting the air say go through this one hole. Rather challenging but it could be done, let me try to demonstrate. Here it is just playing a whole bunch of notes at once, that's easy. Now if you try to use tongue blocking I'm blocking off some of these reeds, the holes with my tongue and trying to let the air go through just one hole. Hey the first try! Okay, you may of heard of whisper of another note beside it and that's understandable. You just have to keep working at it and getting more and more technique built up to where you can nail one note at a time, then you can go higher and lower. Let's try doing one note at a time on a draw which is the air going back in. That was even better and so whenever you learn how to play single notes it sounds more articulate than just going...you can always tell a total beginner from someone who somewhat accomplished by how many times they play single notes. "