[Harp-L] Positions, Modes and basic musicianship

[Gary Lehmann]

My answer would be that playing the diatonic in a chromatic fashion is much
more complicated, and many of the virtues of the harmonica can be explored
without extended techniques.
But knowing your instrument is a fairly basic concept, and I run across a
lot of folks who just don't know what notes they are playing.
That, to me, is a much bigger issue. Positional thinking doesn't bother me.
For someone to not know where do is, or that fa and la are left out on the
bottom, but sol is duplicated on draw 2 and blow 3, really does disturb me.
If you know how a standard tuned harmonica is tuned, and you know what key
it is in, you can figure out where all the Ab notes are.
As far as overblows, for me, that's what the button is for--except for 6
OB, blue third in the second octave is a must have for cross harp blues
harmonica. I guess you could valve the 7 blow, to get  the draw bend on 7,
but the timbre of the OB suits the blues attitude.
Much is being debated here, nice to exchange points of view y'all.
On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 4:50 AM The Iceman via Harp-L <harp-l at xxxxx>
wrote:

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> Why don't most players learn the harmonica as any other instrument, by
> learning to obtain all the notes and learning music?
>
> Well Laurent, that is the $100,000 question! You'll have to ask most
> players for your answer, I guess.
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