[Harp-L] Overblows

[Richard Hunter]

I meet very few professional harmonica players nowadays who don't use
overnotes (nice word).  They're too useful to ignore.

I don't meet many professional harmonica players who use overnotes to play
a single diatonic instrument in 12 keys, for the simple reason that it's a
lot easier to use overnotes within the context of traditional 1st/2nd/3rd
etc. than it is to take a C harmonica into the key of F#.  For any but the
most practiced overnote masters, it's also a hell of a lot more musical.

Howard Levy is an acknowledged master of the technique, and if you read the
notes on his website, he does NOT generally play everything on a single
harmonica.  He switches harps when he changes keys.  Why?  because it's
easier and more musical.

When I interviewed Toots Thielemans for "Jazz Harp," he said that there was
a lot of "look Ma, no hands!" stuff in the harmonica world.  Playing in 12
keys on a diatonic is a nice trick, but what does it do for you that using
a few overnotes in 1st/2nd/3rd or (gasp!) playing the music a on a
chromatic harp doesn't do more easily and more musically (for most
people)?  That's not even taking into account that there is NO known (or at
this point imaginable)  technique for playing harmonies in 12 keys on a
single diatonic (or a single chromatic, for that matter).  If you want a
wider range of chords on the instrument, non-standard tunings like natural
Minor/Dorian Minor/Melody Maker, etc. work a whole lot better than
overnotes (granted, not a high bar, given that overnotes don't work at all
for anything but single notes).  If you want to play realtime counterpoint,
which is one of the things I routinely do on diatonic harmonicas and
something that chromatic players were doing before I came on the scene,
overnotes are useless.

Summary: overnotes are a valuable but limited technique, and they're far
from the answer to every musical problem that a harmonica player faces.
Every pro should know how to perform them, but I wouldn't advise every pro
to aspire to play everything on a single diatonic instrument in a single
key, the outstanding contributions of Levy/Peyrelavade/etc. notwithstanding.

Regards, Richard Hunter
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Author, "Jazz Harp" (Oak Publications, NYC)
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