[Harp-L] What first attracted you to harmonica?

Aongus Mac Cana amaccana@xxxxx
Mon Mar 6 06:55:12 EST 2017


What first attracted me to harmonica was that an older brother had invested
in a G Tremolo and discarded it before he had ever learned to play it. I
picked it up and tried to pick out a fairly tricky Irish reel: The Blackbird
note by note, by looking for the next note of the tune without the slightest
knowledge of music or without even learning how to play the scale. I now
sometimes think that what stood to me was that I had never had a music
lesson and consequently never learned to hate music.

I then read somewhere that any serious harmonica player had to play the
chromatic, so I saved my pennies and bought my first Hohner Chromonica. I
also bought T. Reilly's Chromatic Harmonica tutor and learned how to play
the scale. 78 r.p.m. records were still the standard in  those days, so I
was able to buy a few Larry Adler and Ronald Chesney records as well. Like
the Blackbird I tried to copy the masters by picking out the tunes note by
note. In my innocence I thought "All the notes are there. I just have to
find them". I set myself the difficult task of copying Larry Adler's version
of Malaguena and eventually actually produced something that was barely
recognisable as the tune.

My uninformed efforts were not entirely wasted, because unknown to myself my
automatic pilot was finding where the various notes  were without having to
search for them and again unknown to myself I was actually becoming an "ear
player" something I did not become aware of until I reverted to the
harmonica in my late sixties after a fifty year layoff. I was now ready for
some lessons which I received from the two virtuosi Mick Kinsella and Rick
Epping at the Willie Clancy Summer School. Mick Kinsella told us about
Harp-L and I discovered that there was a fabulous resource of mouth organ
players out there that I had  never heard nor even heard  about before.

I don't want to give myself a guilt trip, but I now realise that courtesy of
Harp-L and YouTube I no longer have any excuse for not learning to play the
harmonica better.

Beannachtai

Aongus Mac Cana



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