David's Tip of the Day: Travel Inside the Mouth - Point 2

At 0:50 Dr Bahnson states, "the nasal passages are not nearly as important as a resonating cavity as is the oral pharynx (mouth cavity)." The oral cavity... our mouth... is the resonating chamber of our instrument. This is analogous to the body of a guitar being the resonating chamber for the string (mounted on the fret board). Have you ever seen and heard a backpacker guitar? They have full-scale fret boards, but the body of the guitar is very small. This makes the guitar easy to tote around, but the tone is very thin... non-resonant... the larger the body of the guitar (within reason of course), the more resonant it is and the larger the tone.

Looking at the side-view model of the head he's using makes it very easy to see the proportion of the tongue in the mouth. The rest area of the tongue in that model is a good example of the rest area of our tongue in our mouths. If YOU rest your tongue there as a harmonica player, you'll get a very thin, whiny tone. To achieve a full-bodied tone you want to drop the tongue as low as you can comfortably lower it, thus making a much larger tone chamber.

Video Referenced
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTEXSb6duVs&feature=player_embedded

More Information
Page: http://www.bluesharmonica.com/faq
Video: "I want better tone!"