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Want to play a song that's not a 12 Bar Blues progression on the bandstand in a jam situation?... use your fingers! As you're playing, hold the mic and harp with one hand and with the other use one finger for the I Chord... two fingers for the ii Chord... etc. If you place your hand behind your back the audience will never know. You'll of course need to be familiar with the chord changes (ask your guitarist buddy for those) and will want to practice this before hitting the bandstand (it can be hard at first to make signals and play at the same time).

Now play the same note you played from the last tip... starting as softly as you can... and I mean softly... making it slowly sound from nothing, raising in volume slowly... until it's very loud!

This is two levels of volume and is more desirable than one (which means NO dynamics)

Now do the same in reverse... loud to soft.

Now improvise, making every lick start at one volume and ending at the another. More tomorrow on this.

For those of you using an iPad or iPod and want to watch lesson videos on BluesHarmonica,com, the Puffin Web Browser App By CloudMosa, Inc is a good solution. We're in the process of encoding videos to be iPod and iPad friendly at BluesHarmonica.com, but it's still going to be some time (working on it every night), and this is a good solution until then.

What were mentioned over the last couple of days as blessings also leads to one of our curses... since we don't have to learn about keys, scales, scale degrees and chords in our formative years, when it comes to communicating with musicians we're illiterate. Make sure to watch the Performance Training lessons on BluesHarmonica.com, specifically Groove; Openings, Endings & Breaks; and down the road the lessons on Theory and Accompaniment Playing. It's also a great idea to study books like Alfred's Essentials of Music Theory Complete. continue reading...