[Harp-L] playing in a band setting/jamming

["Peter Wright" <peterw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

rainbow jimmy wrote:
"It's hard to find good instruction on playing in a band setting."

I'm really with Jimmy on this.  I'll be coming up on 3 years soon, and I'm
practicing, and enjoying, the harmonica consistently.  Starting out, I
really wanted to play something that sounded like "real" Blues harp.  I
worked hard to get through about 3 of David Barrett's books, and I worked
hard on learning the rudiments; vibrato, bending, octaves, tongue slap, etc.
And in the end, using the tab and backing tracks from one of David's books,
I could play a decent version of "I'm Ready", and it made me feel good.

So I decided, now, I need to work on improvising/jamming.  I kind of skipped
over that in the effort to learn to play a "real" Blues harp song.  So now
I'm working with some jam tracks and trying to put some decent sounding
licks with them.  Man, it's like getting sent back to kindergarten.  I don't
know anything about jamming.  First the jam track says something like
"medium shuffle in E".  Cool, what's a shuffle.  Well I got some help, and
now I understand that, but the variations you can put on a shuffle beat are
sort of endless.  I've done some research on how you can create the beat
with a drum set, combining the ride cymbal, with the snare, and the bass.
So that took some work and I'm starting to hear the separate parts when I
listen to Blues songs, but then I get a jam track that has just a bass
guitar and guitar.  Well, they get the same shuffle beat, but it sounds very
different coming from just the guitars.

And that's just one rhythm pattern, there's swing, and slow Blues, and
others, and all of them can be generated with different combinations of
instruments.  And as a harp player, you're supposed to be familiar with all
this.  Oh, and don't forget, you have to have a whole library of licks
imbedded in your head and know which to play, and how to combine them to
create something worth listening to.

I'm thinking it may be another 3 years before I'm ready for my first jam.  I
think "improvisation" is a complete misnomer.

Junior