Harmonica Scales

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Eric Williams and I'm here to talk to you about beginning harmonica. The next strata on the harmonica would be if you've learned how to play single notes, would be to try to play an actual scale. It will build your technique and your knowledge of how the reed works and the blow notes and the draw notes, all that stuff. It can be enhanced by playing just a regular scale. Now, on the board here we have a musical alphabet and since I have a harp that is in the key of G I'm going to start us with a G scale, so just bare with me here. We have the musical alphabet starting on G in this case so it's going to G-A-B-C-D-E-F sharp and G. Don't let the F-sharp scare you it's just part of the scale and there's a lot of different reasons why it's an F-sharp, but just trust me we have enough sharp right there. Now if I play a scale properly on a harp there's going to be a series of blowing the air through, drawing the air back on numerous different reed holes here. I think I'm going to start on 4 I'm going to end up on 7 if I'm correct. By the time I do that we're going to have all these notes, it's going to go G-A-B-C-D-E-F sharp and G and it should sound like the major scale that we all know and love. Now let me try it...pretty close. Now I can go the same way back down I can go G-F sharp-E-D-C-B-A-G. See if I get lucky...okay. Now what that would look like on manuscript paper, not that anyone that's going to play harmonica ever wants to learn how to read music, but if you did it would be a great thing. It would look like this G-A-B-C-D-E-F sharp and then a G would be your very top note instead. So all the notes that you play on a harmonica can be notated on manuscript paper and it can be played on a piano or guitar. So it actually is a real music instrument."