[Harp-L] Barrett Soloing Workshop, Harp Learning Materials (long)

[billhines4@xxxxxxxxxxx]

In my quest over the last year, I've looked at a ton of stuff for learning harp (specifically blues harp). It ranges from excellent (Gindick, Portnoy) to "OK" (David Harp, whoever he is), to "great player, but not such a great teacher" (Butterfield), to "just awful, but great for comedy relief and entertainment value" (Jr. Wells Teaches Mississipi Saxophone). 

A while ago there were some comments here (somewhat derogatory) about Dave Barrett's instructional material.  To be honest, I avoided Barrett's stuff at first because the samples I looked at seemed complex, heavy on the theory, and basically "not fun".  His audio samples sounded monotonous and very scholarly, like the prof in the accounting class I dropped after one day in my freshman year (I took scuba instead, so not a total loss). 

After exhasting the Gindick and Portnoy stuff, I felt I was still missing something (a lot actually). I was in no way prepared to get up at a jam session, for example. i knew this. I wasn't even comfortable playing to jam cd's. There were still a lot of questions I had. To be honest, those materials are aimed at giving you a start, not teaching that stuff. They trust you to take their fundamentals and just keep playing until you can fly, they kind of say at the end "now just go do it!". 

So then a book caught my eye at the store (mainly because it had that famous classic picture of Howlin' Wolf on the cover). It was Barrett's Classic Chicago Blues Harmonica book/cd.  I have to say I've been having a ball going through this book/cd. It's deep, challenging, and is totally centered the whole time, from the beginning fundamentals to more complex stuff at the end, to working within the 12-bar blues chord structure. Every lick/riff is shown with the notation of what chord it would fit under. I find that extremely useful in building my lick/riff vocabulary to the point where I can assemble them dynamically for any situation, such as in a jam. The other stuff I could go through pretty quickly. This one is taking a long time, because it's so deep and so good, and that's great. Everything is shown with the musical staff notation, although the standard harp tabbing is there right below it. So like it or not, I'm starting to pay attention to that and even learning how to interpret and read the music a little without trying, just because it's there (tabs give you no sense of timing and phrasing, right?).

So then I saw that the Barrett soloing workshop was coming to my area and I signed up. I was pretty excited waiting for this, hoping it would get me over that final hump. The first day was just fantastic - the 20 players in Barrett's group and 20 in Filisko's group were just about all intermediate to advanced players. The material was so great, as well as the instruction that first day - I always thought soloing was just whatever random stuff that "fits", but it does turn out there's a method to the madness. We were breaking down solos and breaks from the great works - Juke, Juicy Harmonica, and many more. Understanding the patterns and phrasing and what works, what doesn't.  The materials we got were so good and I'll be analyzing them for a while too. Barrett was an excellent instructor, constantly demonstrating and explaining things in small digestable pieces, working toward a larger goal.

Anyway, to sum it up, I was wrong in my first impression of Dave Barrett and his materials. I wanted to set the record straight since I don't remember anyone sticking up for him earlier. I highly recommend this stuff, coming from a beginner/intermediate perspective.  If you want to work, to really learn this, and you can function in a structured environment and be patient to go step by step, I think it's the way to go.

As far as the workshop, from an intermediate-advanced. There were some *great* harp players there as students (i.e. James Day) and I'm sure they got better. Unfortunately for me, my long-awaited weekend turned into a disaster with family and work issues that cut it short for me. I missed the Saturday session from 3pm-5pm, the Saturday night jam session, and all day Sunday.  I'm just sick about all that. But I look forward to completing this Chicago Blues book and moving on to some other ones, he has a ton of them, so granted some may be better than others. I'll have to check around and use the amazon ratings and so forth to find out before spending those hard earned bucks.

Anyway, sorry this is so long, but hopefully it gives folks who consider themselves advanced and are open minded enough to realize they can still learn a thought to go to things like this (I hope to try again someday). And hopefully this post is useful for those undergoing the Quest, and looking for recommendations, because as you all know, there's a LOT of garbage out there.