Re: [Harp-L] Re: The 'Flexible Gospel'...now Melodic lines vs. Tone

[IcemanLE@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 4/20/2005 12:43:18 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
mfugazzi67@xxxxxxxxx writes:
I spend a lot of time on content and less time on
tone. 
It's all about what gets your juices flowing.

Is it what you say, or how you say it?

Fat tone has emotional punch. With the right gripmicampattitude, one note 
will move an audience to its feet. You don't have to be linearly/intellectually 
creative to excite the audience. It's the easiest way to reach the general 
listening public.

However, if you personally want to go to a different level, leaning more 
toward the challenging intellectual excitement and away from the basic emotional 
response, musical line is the way to go. It takes more head space, study, 
understanding, etc, but has a different (deeper?) satisfaction in performance when 
done successfully. 

It's the difference between the half-drunk bar patron slapping you on the 
back telling you what a bad ass sound you have and the sober upscale couple who 
respectfully approach you to tell you how they were moved by your performance.

The best is to combine the two a la Carlos Del Junco or Paul DeLay - great 
tone grabbing the emotion .and melodic ideas that pleasantly surprise the 
intellect. (Drunk upscale couple slapping you on the back telling you how they were 
truly moved by your performance).

My teaching/workshops/clinics/lectures are evolving towards the quickest and 
most efficient way to create big tone and understanding groove with the most 
minimal amount of effort. This is done through concepts that are brand new and 
are proving to be incredibly successful.

Once this is understood and absorbed (and, believe me, it takes a lot less 
time than one may think), I build upon solid linear ideas to project a new 
confidence in the student's playing. A small portion is based on transcribing other 
harmonica masters' ideas, but a large portion is based on teaching the 
student to access the knowledge already contained within themselves.

If you have the ideas already, being shown where they are and how to retrieve 
them is a lot faster/easier than the idea of learning something from scratch.

What was once "The Church of the Sacred Hut-tah Hut-tah" has evolved into "Do 
Less, Get More".

The Iceman