[Harp-L] Newbie Help

[Chris Hofstader]

Hi Lamar,

As another relative beginner, I can describe what I find helpful and hope you might benefit from my experience. Although I’ve been messing around with harmonica with books, tapes and the like for a quarter century, it’s only been the last nine months to a year that I’ve been taking it serious enough to make much progress and I’m actually pleased with how much I’ve learned in 2016 compared to the previous 25 years.

The first thing I’d recommend is looking around on YouTube for videos that attempt to teach one to play harmonica. When I say “attempt” I do so because a real lot of harmonica instruction on Youtube is pure crap that teaches little but shows off some person with poor teaching skills playing really well. I subscribe to a few channels where I found the videos to be really useful and ignore most of the rest. You can search YouTube for my two favorites: Tomlin Leckey and Will Wild. Others here can probably recommend their favorites as my personal tastes in an instructor may not reflect the experience of others. 

In my daily income generating life, I work on a lot of small often crowdfunded projects making technology for people with disabilities. We have proven that for as little as $5000 we can produce software of benefit to millions of blind users around the world, the people who write the code (also mostly blind people) are paid a fair wage (it averages around $85 per hour) and the 65 million blind people on Earth can use it gratis and those with programming skills can take our work and extend it, fix it, use it for a completely different purpose or do whatever they like with it. So, if I find a YouTube lesson valuable and the instructor has a Patreon or other way to send a few bucks, I always try to send even a token sum (ten dollars or so) as a token of my appreciation and to hopefully encourage the instructor to continue making more videos from which I might also learn         something interesting. There’s no commitment to send these people anything but I believe in the essential components of “information anarchism” which depends on people like us making voluntary contributions to support those willing to risk their time and some money to bring information to you. Even $5 from enough people can be really helpful to an individual instructor trying to make it on his own. Please, if you can afford a few bucks here and there, try to support the people who bring the blues to you and you to the blues.

Once you’ve sampled a bunch of different YouTube instructors, if you have a little money to spend on your harp playing per month, I’d recommend looking up the ones you like the most and checking out how much they charge on Patreon or elsewhere and then signing up for Skype lessons with one that you both enjoy and can afford. Tomlin Leckey, my instructor, provides a half hour per month on Skype for only $30. Or, depending upon where you live, you might be able to find an instructor in/near your community for face to face lessons.

I can only speak to my own experience but spending a half hour per month on Skype with Tomlin and enjoying a single in person lesson while visiting Edinburgh in October has made an enormous difference in my playing and I’m learning more rapidly than ever before. A “live” instructor, whether in person or over Skype or something like it, can help you make tiny adjustments on the fly while books, tapes and YouTube cannot. Sometimes, something that seems minor can make a huge difference and the interactive nature of working with a live human is the only way I know of being able to catch the little things. Having a human instructor also will help guide you as to which things to learn in what order as, ultimately, your playing will be the aggregate of what you’ve learned previously.  

The final tool that I have found to be essential for my practicing is my iPad. I’m willing to wager that you can find similar apps on Android, Kindle Fire, other mobile platforms and definitely on Windows and Macintosh. I use Apple products because I’m blind and Apple is years ahead of the rest of the mobile computing world in providing access to people with disabilities. You don’t need a fancy high end iPad, I use a first edition iPad Mini with only 16gb of storage, maybe $100 or less on ebay. With the iPad, you can install Garageband at no cost. I don’t use the majority of the GB features as it does a real lot that I’ve no use for but the metronome and chromatic tuner are incredibly helpful. The tuner is useful because it shows you how accurately you are hitting your bends and, for me at least, the metronome keeps me from speeding up while playing the easy parts of something on which I’m working. And, I can record my practices with the metronome included so I can listen to it afterwards to hear what I did well and what I messed up. another fun thing to do with Garageband is to paste in backing tracks that you can play along with and record your part on a separate track for review later.

The final thing that I do to help my playing is something I learned from being a writer. Reading is the food of he writer; listening is the food of the musician. As you progress with your own learning, you’ll be able to hear what the performer is doing and get a feel for what you’re trying to learn to do. It’s unlikely that you or I will ever be able to play virtuoso like a Little Walter, Sonny Terry, James Cotton or other of the real greats but we can learn a lot just from listening and embracing their sounds intellectually. You may never learn to play something “by ear” but there’s a lot to be gained by trying to imitate the greats when just messing around with the instrument.

I’ll close with the caveat I always include about anything of opinion I post here. Most of the other members of this list are way more accomplished players than I am and I speak exclusively to my personal experience and, as the cliche goes, past performance may not guarantee future returns.

Happy Hacking,
cdh