[Harp-L] Waiting For The Bus (Apologies and Redactions)

[Gregory Smith]

Three posts (in a row) to distinguish my first harp-l foray! Sorry, I'm ''under the gun here. First off, I apologize for spelling James Harman's name wrong (ironic since I love his stage persona, singing, and harp tone and uproariously irreverent YouTube vids and secondly, I must apologize for disparaging the archive's search engine. It works pretty well and certainly was faster than my brute force algorithm (''Oh, I'll just reread everything back to '92''). From sundry posts, I've learned that is, indeed, a 23 year old Billy Gibbons blowing the harp (and doing it justice for sure) and that makes me suspect he's lip blocking. I usually TB, but it's not a style, it's just a technique and I do whatever works. My task, however, is to replicate the solo note for note and dial in that tone. Starting with the assumption of a lip blocking embouchure, allowed me to get pretty close to the sound and also discern the solo's logic or choreography, so to speak. And it's still several days before I ''face the music''. The archives saved me several hours that I'd have wasted approaching the problem from my default, tongue blocking mentality.  It took me a long while (well past 23!) to get really accurate, facile bends on the low notes with a tongue block, so I made an assumption based on several generous harp-l contributors and now I'm sitting pretty only a few hours after this all became the big, burning issue of my life. Thank you all for your forbearance. Maybe now I can ''Mellow Down Easy'' and not wear out a good thing!