Re: Newbie questions

["Jamie Dolan" <chromatics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>snip<
> Well, on piano I play classical decently and a bit of blues,
> jazz, and whatever. On bass, I play mostly jazz, blues and
> rock. On guitar, it's mostly a sort of finger-style folk.
> On tenor sax and flute, I make noise.

Goodness me! All those instruments :)) I only play chrom and piano (badly!).

>snip<
> I guess I don't really have any particular genre in mind for
> the harmonica. Or even a favorite player's style to try to
> emulate. I'm getting into harp now because I'm going to be
> travelling for quite a while and it seems to me that the
> harmonica would be an ideal instrument to take along. I wonder
> if many other players originally picked it up for portability
> reasons?

Still makes me laugh when I have but a small case under my arm and my friend
has to heave around a tenor sax :))

>snip<
> Yeah, I looked at some of the more radical layouts. They're
> interesting, but I can't imagine not being able to play _any_
> major or minor triads.

I thought this at first, but you'll actually find you don't play a lot of
'chords' as such (well, certainly in the music I play) but more intervals
(thirds and sixths etc).

>snip<
> Good point. I hadn't really thought about transcriptions. Obviously, any
> truly chromatic layout is going to enable you to play the same monophonic
> stuff. But the "fingerings" [what is the harp-specific word I'm looking
for?]
> and phrasings would have to vary along with the layout.

You can always have one harmonica for the transcriptions and another for
everything else?

>snip<
> My interest is in choosing one variation to practice first, so that
> I have one way I know to get through all the common scales.

Ah, I see. Well, as I just wrote somewhere else... don't forget they're
still there if you need them.

All the best

Jamie