Cross Harp Playing Tips 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. Okay, so now let's talk about cross harp. Cross harp sometimes confuses a lot of people. What you're doing is cross harp is almost always used on blues, rock type blues, southern rock blues and what you're doing is taking the harp and just doing the key of G with this harp, but you're playing it almost backwards from what it was originally invented or tend to be used. What you're taking is you're doing most of the notes on the draw which is this sound...and what that is called just so you'll know is the 5/7 chord. I say what is a 5/7 chord? Well on a G harp if you blow air through it gives you a G chord which is great. If you draw the air back it gives you a D7, also a 5/7 which in this case is a D7. What that means is if you're in a G scale you count up from the bottom. You go G-A-B-C-D and that brings you up to 5, so that's how you get 5. The 7 is another little number they use to describe the quality of that D chord and it sounds like this...it has that kind of pretty sound because it has that 7 on the top and it's just kind of rich and resining sound. So anyways, cross harp is exploding that pretty sound of the D7 or you can call it the 5/7. Now in order to explode that really good 5/7 sound you have to draw most of the time. So cross harp involves a lot of breathing back in through the harp. Now the other value of cross harp with the blues is you're going to be bending a lot of notes which we'll talk about further. Cross harp means you're drawing notes out and you're playing off of the D7 chord that's being created by the G harp. But the most important thing to remember now is if you're playing a blues with somebody and they're going to be trying to find out what key you're in to go along with you, you can't tell them you're in the key of G anymore, that will wreck the machinery it will not match. Even though you're playing a G harp you're actually playing the key of D. So that is the thing you need to know, that's why they call it cross harp cause you're playing it across the board from where it normally would be playing. Let me demonstrate a little bit of cross harp."