[Harp-L] What's a scale really mean anyway?

["samblancato" <samblancato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

 

My subject heading for this post is a little tongue-in-cheek but the
question I ultimately get to here is actually serious.  

 

Here's the story:  I'm currently rapping up a 12 lesson harmonica II class
which I taught at Calliope, here in Pittsburgh.  Calliope is a folk music
school that operates out of The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.  They offer
Banjo, Guitar, Fiddle, and stuff like that, including harmonica.  Most of my
class has ended up being an embouchure class, where we worked on tongue
blocking and tongue slaps so that the students could get a percussive, thick
sound and get away from straight pucker and get into blues.  I personally
think tongue blocking takes precedence over bending when learning to play
harmonica but that's another story. One of my students is actually really
more advanced than the other students and got all the Boucher stuff real
quick so I got him started on playing solos from records in addition to the
other exercises.  After that I got him into playing 1st and 3rd position
solos so he could get a feel for those positions.  I played the solos to a
CD and burned him a copy and told him to identify the solo from one of his
records (I made sure to play solos that I knew he had recordings of).  I
wanted him to learn the solos by ear because I also wanted him to get away
from tabs and learn to pick out things by ear and get to know his harp.  He
learned all the solos in about 3 weeks.  

 

Any way he asked me this question and I'm not sure I gave a good answer but
it made me think about my process in all this.  He asked me if when learning
3rd position I learned the entire 3rd position scale first.  I told him that
I didn't and that what worked for me was to find a song that has a great 3rd
position solo and then learn it.  Once I learned sever of these solos I got
confident enough to improvise my own stuff and how to resolve and turn
around, transition and the like.  The one that I gave him to learn was from
Kim Wilson's Looking' for Trouble, You Put the Hurt on Me.  Now, while I
didn't first learn the scale for 3rd position this solo has all the notes
for that position in it or most of them anyway.  For me, just learning a
scale out of context doesn't give me any "grip" on how 3rd position sounds
across a chord progression and how it makes ultimate "musical sense" in a
song.  So I just figured that this would make good musical sense to others
as well and he does seem to get it in that he has started to play around
with other 3rd position songs. But I'm also thinking that maybe the actual,
formal scale has a place here and that I'm leaving out something really
important because of my complete right-brained approach to playing; namely
the theory.  So the questions that come to my mind here are 1, how do you
learn 3rd position blues playing, using scale practice? 2, aren't the solos
just scales in a more customized form? Wouldn't I have to get in to theory
of how a given scale works over a give progression of chords?  

 

Any comments?

 

Sam Blancato, Pittsburgh