Re: blow bends in upper register of diatonic

["Winslow Yerxa" <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

- --- In harp-l-archives@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Jason Paul Stolaruk" 
<stolaruk@xxxx> wrote:


However, blow bends in the upper register
remain an entirely different beast that I haven't yet tamed.  (This 
likely has
to do with the fact that I don't play the upper register as much as I 
could).
====

If you wanna get good at this, concentrate on it - find ways to make 
it the only thing you do - you gotta learn it or else you can't play. 
Learn some Jimmy Reed tunes, and find ways to use first-position, top-
octave playing in some of your other tunes.

====
In any case, I could use some hints and tips about how to produce 
blow bends
and how to control them.
First, I heard a player in a club who was bending his blow notes like 
mad, and
I asked him how he was doing it.  "What are you doing with your 
tongue?" I
asked.  He insisted that his bends were coming from his diaphragm.  
This
completely baffled me.  I typically produce bends by cutting off the 
air flow
through my nose and moving the back of my tongue up towards the roof 
of my
mouth (at least that's what I think I'm doing!)  I know how to use my 
diaphragm
to make a nice tremelo effect, but that's all.  (Any comments on 
this?)  As for
me, I have been using almost the same technique (that I use to get a 
draw bend)
to produce blow bends, with some success.  I find that I often have 
to blow
unusually hard to produce a blow bend.  

=====

You should never have to blow hard to produce any type of bend. Bends 
are produced by persuasion. The need to use force means that you're 
not finding the sweet spot and you're resorting to a flamethrower to 
toast your bread - whcih will be burned to a crisp pretty soon.

I think you're on the right track with lower-pitched harps.

You dont; say whether you're puckering or tongue blocking, but 
basically you need to the same thing in either situation.

When you raise the back of your tongue to the roof of your mouth, 
you're creating a gateway that defines a chamber from the tongue hump 
forward in your mouth. You can tune this chamber to the bent note you 
want and this persuades the reed to play that note - if the note is 
in range. A ******tiny******* bit of force is needed to set the bend 
in motion, and a certain amount of firmness to maintain it. But if 
you tune the chamber right, it comes easily and requires little force.

The higher the note, the smaller the chamber. Think of a guitar 
string- the higher you go, the shorter the string, and closer 
together the frets are.

So it goes with your mouth chamber for high bends. You need to create 
a very small chamber, and the right size is very narrow (guitar fret) 
so it's easy to zoom right past it.

If you're puckering, you can make the chamber smaller by sliding the 
tongue hump forward. If you're tongue blocking, you can raise the 
main surface of the tongue toward the roof of the mouth to shrink the 
chamber.

If you hear the note suddely thrum or twang as you change the chamber 
size, you've passed through the sweet spot and out the other side. 
It's a little like driving down the freeway at 100 miles an hour 
trying to toss a letter into a mailbox - you need to slow down in 
order to hit the spot.

I'd suggest that you start with Draw 6, the highest draw bend. Note 
where you are in chamber size. Then move up to Blow 7. This bends 
less than a semitone, but it does bend. If you can get the pitch to 
go down and stay down - it'll sound kind of sour, but never mind 
that. Then work on Blow 8, then Blow 9. Once you have a good command 
of these, you may find that Blow 10 will go down 2 semitones - the 
full range of the bend, but that a 1-semitone bend will be harder to 
isolate and control. This is partly a matter of technique, but may 
also be an issue of reed adjustment. The high-pitched harps have, of 
course, even higher-pitched reeds that require even smaller chamber 
sizes. But the reeds also get much stiffer as the higher harps use a 
shorter reed length

Hope this helps.

Winslow

=====


It's not too difficult to get a blow
bend from hole 9 on a harp that is tuned to a key whose pitches are 
relatively
low (A or G, for example).  But I'm having trouble with hole 10 and 
other
holes, and on some harps (F, for example), I can't make anything 
happen.
Any tips?  THANK YOU!



- --- End forwarded message ---


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