Harmonica Slurring Technique

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Eric Williams and I'm here to talk to you about beginning harmonica. Well one of the most famous things people always do the second they grab a harmonica any time is they do the train sounds. Also let me talk about harmonica versus harp. I like calling it a harp or a blues harp. For some reasons in some circles people don't know what that means. Whenever I say I play the harp, they picture angel wings and the guy doing the thing, maybe they never heard of one of these called the harp it must just be a regional dialect kind of a thing. But if you call it a harmonica I guess that makes sense too, but always like to call it a harp or a blues harp. Whenever you're playing the harmonica or the harp, or the blues harp one of the first thing people always do is the train sounds. So, what you can do is the chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga sound which is usually done with the tongue actually hitting the face of the harmonica and giving it a very staccato articulated sound. Let me try that, now you can do it with blowing air the through or drawing the air back, it doesn't really matter just whatever you like. Let's see what that sounds like. That can be done with the tongue going....it gives you a kind of a neat percussive sound. You can enhance it with a little bit of cupping behind to kind of make it louder or softer if you want to. So that's the first half of the train sound and you can do that and people are real impressed. Then you hit them with the really good stuff which is the train whistle. So that's when you go higher on the reeds and you hit maybe two at the same time. I think I'm used to hitting 5 and 6 sounds like a pretty good guess and what you do is you bend them drastically to sound like the train whistle way off in the distance kind of echoing down the canyon. So if you do that, let me try the whistle part. Yeah, that was good! What you're doing is you're bending the two at the same time and then you releasing them back up to the proper fit. So if you put the two back you get the chugga-chugga-chugga going along and then you hit the train whistle and that's how it works. Let's try it. So, you got the chugga-chugga on the low reeds, you have the train whistle on the higher reeds, it actually was 5 and 6 come to think of it and you do the bend, do the hand cupping behind to get a little extra revere and perhaps a little bit of vibrato and you're doing the train."