RE: [Harp-L] Re: Tongue Blocking the blow bends

["Bill Hines" <billhines4@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think you can learn to do almost everything using one embouchure, if
you torture yourself enough. I started out tongue-blocking too, but
learned pucker easy enough because learning puckering was easier than
learning to do certain un-natural things with tongue-blocking. Jerry
Portnoy spends some time on this issue in his masterclass cd series - he
was a tongue blocker all the way early in his playing, but conceded that
he should learn puckering and lip blocking for certain techniques. He
shows/discusses some good ways to transition between these embouchures
while playing and it's quite effective.

Bill Hines
Hershey, PA

-----Original Message-----
From: harp-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:harp-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Richard Lister
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 2:24 PM
To: bbhcfr@xxxxxxxx
Cc: harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx; mnessmith@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Re: Tongue Blocking the blow bends



Nicolas Fouquet <bbhcfr@xxxxxxxx> wrote
on Mon, 3 Jan 2005 23:08:25 +0100 (CET):
>
> Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Re: Tongue Blocking the blow bends
>
> I have heard from Allen Holmes that Jim Conway from Chicago can get a 
> full chromatic scale while tongue block in same time: tongue block 
> bending and tongue block overbending!!!!!!

Hey Nicolas

I also tongue-block everything. In fact I can hardly get a single-note
out using pucker. That first day I bought a harp I tried both pucker and
tongue-block and the latter came easier, so that's the road I went down.

You can certainly hit all the bends and overbends with tongue-block. Or
at least, a good player can :-)  I'm still struggling with my overdraws,
but it's certainly not my embouchure that's to blame!

Cheers
Ric

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