Re: playing without hands

[hippo@xxxxxxxxxx (Hugh Messenger)]

At 10:47 AM 11/4/94 -0800, William Lippe wrote:
>        I've become decent at this, although I haven't tried in it quite
>a while.  I could do mostly descending licks, you have to use the suction
>of your mouth, and your tongue to move it in and out.  I find it works
>_much_ better (or at least easier) with a Special 20.  It's bad for your
>harps in my opinion, they get really wet in and out when they're inside
>your mouth.  You also don't get good tone...
>        ERic

I started doing it by accident.  Driving in London requires at least four
hands, one to shift, one to steer, one to play harp and one to assist other
drivers with useful hand signals.  After dropping one harp out of the
window at 60mph on the North Circular one morning, I took to sticking the
harp in my mouth before making the "shaking a can of orange juice" gesture
at other drivers.

The technique I ended up using was longitudinally curling my tongue (edges
curled upwards) whilst gripping the harp twixt teeth with a "wide mouthed
frog" face.  Although I've never found any practical use for the whole
"look Ma, no hands" thing, it did teach me a lot about using the tongue in
side to side motion and fitting a lot of harp in my face.  This has come in
handy for train licks, octave trills, Cajun style chord rythms and other
fun stuff.  Especially on SBS's.

On Fri, 4 Nov 1994, B.G.deBoer wrote:

> Even when tongue blocking I can only play either the lowest or the highest
>hole of
> the part of the harp that is in my mouth clearly.

Try the "Love Me Do" riff (draw 5, blow 5, draw 4, draw 2, draw 2 etc).
You can do it all just by hitting the lower or upper ends.  It's hell on
the tongue, which has to do lots of side to side jumps, but get it going
and you'll find you can use that technique in regular playing.

   -- hugh