Jan van Gastel's Blues Harmonica Site
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| I like blues music, especially older blues:
Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Big Walter Horton, Jerry McCain, Sonny Boy
I and II, Slim Harpo, Lazy Lester, Jimmy Reed, Mississippi Fred
McDowell, Deford Bailey, etc. A couple of years ago I started playing
harmonica. My first harmonica course: John Gindick's harmonica for
the musically hopeless. After practicing with this course I
borrowed Don Baker's video course in the local library: a very
instructive course. The embouchure he taught was pucker. This course
centers mostly on bending. After that I purchased some instruction
books, but that didn't bring me a lot further. A couple of years later
I read about Jerry Portnoy's blues harmonica masterclass. I ordered the
course and a new world opened: tongue blocking. Before I purchased
Portnoy's course I always thought that tongue blocking was an
'inferior' technique, for players who can't pucker. After subscribing
to the Harp-l mailing list, I learned that wasn't the case. I
was absolutely convinced when I purchases Portnoy's masterclass.
I started learning to tongue block. At once I was an absolute beginner
again. But after mastering this technique I could play songs which I
was not able to play before.
Another course I purchased was Steve Baker's interactive blues harp workshop. It's a good course for beginning harpplayers, but an intermediate player will soon be 'grown out' of this course. The course comes on a multimedia CD-rom. I think this is not the right concept for a harmonica course. There's lots of written text on the CD-rom. In my opinion, there are better information files at other places. The best I know of is Mike Will's 'Diatonic Harmonica reference'. The best mix, in my opinion, of instruction material is: subscribing to the Harp-l mailing list for all kinds of actual questions en relevant discussions concerning every aspect of playing the harmonica, the Diatonic Harmonica reference mentioned above for al kinds of information, Don Baker's video course for pucker and bending and Jerry Portnoy's masterclass. With this mixture you can't go wrong. If you only want to purchase one course: go for Portnoy's. Since about the beginning of 2007 something completely new happened to the blues harmonica world: if you want to learn all important 'tricks' real blues players use to create the ultimate blues sound, but don't know how they do it: open your internet browser and surf to Adam Gussow's free You Tube lessons and/or buy some lessons from his Modern Blues harmonica pages. For more information and my opinion about this course and the other courses I mentioned above, go to my reviews of these harp courses. The URL's of the courses are, if not in the text, on my links page. |
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