re: [Harp-L] Throat Vibrato - Finally

[Pierre <slavio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Great news!

You may be doing this already, but now (or soon) you should be able to do 
all bends and overblows just by shaping your throat. I do not know if this 
is the state of the art for everything, but I believe it is a required 
component of good tone at least for some notes.

One thing you can try is to lightly touch the back of your bottom teeth as 
you bend. You get a better feeling of where your tongue is and it opens up 
the throat. I believe placing your tongue up around there is helping me get 
the 3d* bend stabilized and in tune. I am still working on nailing that note 
(any tip there would be appreciated?). I have good tone on the note now, I 
just need to be able to hit it in key and hold it everytime.

I find the effect of bending 'only' from throat particularly visible on blow 
bends as it creates less of a tight/squeezed sound on the high notes. Also 
it seems to add colour to these notes. For overblows seems to me they come 
mostly from the throat, but I am not playing those notes in key, so get 
expert advice elsewhere.

Pierre.

3d* = Bb =  3d first bend





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "samblancato" <samblancato@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Harp-L" <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2004 12:15 AM
Subject: [Harp-L] Throat Vibrato - Finally


> Hi Folks,
>
> A month or so ago I posted to this list about my struggle to get a throat
> vibrato and how this was eluding me.  I got several helpful return posts 
> on
> this subject and I want to thank all of you who responded.  Well, I 
> finally
> got it after daily noodling during my lunch breaks, in my truck, sitting 
> in
> front of the TV, and in more formal and deliberate practicing efforts.  I
> can't tell you how satisfying it is to finally get this.  This adds so 
> much
> to my tone.  When I first became sensitive to this aspect of tone and
> realized I couldn't do it I just wasn't satisfied with my playing any 
> more.
> So you can imagine how good it must feel to get it.
>
> There are a couple of things about throat vibrato that I has to learn that 
> I
> really didn't read any place, on anyone's site, or in any posts and I just
> want to touch on it here because these things were key in my learning to 
> get
> this part of my tone.  For one thing, the placement of the tongue was 
> really
> important for me.  A couple of weeks ago I posted a line or two about an
> unusual embouchure I was fooling around with and it was this embouchure 
> that
> opened the door to throat vibrato.  I wrote:
>
> "This embouchure is done by jutting the chin forward slightly and bringing
> the tongue all the way forward so that it's almost touching the holes of 
> the
> harp. The tongue is filling up most of the open space in the mouth."
>
> It turns out that the tongue wasn't really the important part here. As I
> fooled around with this I discovered that this positioning of the tongue
> allowed me to open up the back of my mouth - and my throat- so that the
> choking off of air could be done in the right way to produce that very 
> rich
> vibrato tone.
>
> I'm not going to go on with this description any further because I can see
> that I'm not doing a very good job but I wanted to mention the part about
> the tongue because nobody mentioned it and, as I said, this was key to my
> getting throat vibrato. After reading what I could about tv, the 
> subliminal
> message I got was the I needed to do something to take my tongue out of 
> the
> action for fear of just copping out into a tongue powered bending vibrato.
> But what you do with the tongue *is* really important.
>
> So I hope (but kind of doubt) this description might help other 
> intermediate
> players master throat vibrato.  If I had played around with this 
> embouchure
> 2 years ago I would have gotten tv much, much earlier on.
>
> But it still feels good to finally get it!
>
> Sam Blancato, Pittsburgh
>
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