Lip Pursing
Any chance Mr Barrett would give some consideration to having a separate site devoted to lip pursuing with occasional requirements of tongue block?? From all my reading and your interviews it seems 90% of people started with lip pursuing and did just fine. No other site has your fantastic structure/lessons and I would hope you would reconsider and add lip pursuing as separate lessons.
Thank you David for your response...I actually feel giving the student a choice would not compromise your teaching. As you said " I feel that a musician can make great music with whichever embouchure they use". I still hope you would put it out there for the student to choose...as I've said I listened to so many of your interviews where it seems most of the musicians started as lip pursers then chose to add TB. Your structure/lessons/videos etc are unparallelled..I just wish you could also offer them to those who wish to primarily lip purse. It seems from the lessons I've looked up online Gindick,Gage,Gussow, etc all teach primarily lip purse with TB offered where needed..Maybe give it a shot and see what the students prefer? I hope I don't sound too offsetting I just hate to lose your lessons where TB seems the only avenue. You wouldn't consider LOA for lip pursers? Have a great new year.
Thank you Bones53. I used to teach that method. I'm not sure if you're familiar with my earlier books from Mel Bay, from the early 1990's through the mid 2000's my books (as well as private lessons and workshops) would teach in that way, so I do have a lot of experience with that approach. In the mid 2000's I started emphasizing learning to tongue block from the beginning (with many years of experimenting mind you... with a LOT of students, not just one or two) and the results were/are very clear to me, along with high-level blues harmonica instructors like Joe Filisko and Dennis Gruenling, that the result is that students progress faster, have less "issues" along the way and sound better. I don't teach this way because it's what I'm used to, it's what I've found to be the most effective. Of course no system works best for everyone, but as a systematized instruction approach I find it works best for most. I really do appreciate your thoughts... I'm not trying to dismiss your opinion, I just need to state that there's been a lot of thought and real-world experience in my approach and I don't plan on changing it.
Would you be interested in a lesson on how, and when, a pucker player should incorporate tongue blocking? I'm happy to put it on the list of new lessons if you feel it will be helpful.
Hello Bones53, thank you for posting your question.
Blues harmonica is a tongue block-centric style of playing, I would be doing the students a disservice if I were to approach the instruction differently. The theme of the interviews when blues harmonica players mention tongue blocking is that they wish they learned it earlier, or better yet started that way. There's nothing wrong with the pucker embouchure, it's just limited in what it can do, and tongue blocking is a necessary embouchure to play this style (assuming of course that you want to play material of, or inspired by, the fathers of blues harmonica... Little Walter, Big Walter, Sonny Boy 1, Sonny Boy 2, George Smith, James Cotton, etc,) and many others. There are no negatives to using tongue blocking as your primary embouchure and many advantages.
For you as a student... if you prefer not to use the tongue block-specific techniques (such as slaps, pulls, flutters, etc.), no problem, just omit those techniques and play a single note, that's an easy fix... the material on the website does not require you use tongue blocking to learn.
If you're speaking of the requirement of tongue blocking for the Levels of Achievement program, this is there simply due to the fact that the study of various tongue blocking techniques is the natural next step of a studying harmonica player. Once you've gone through the training you can of course decide for yourself where to use which embouchure.
Please be clear that I feel that a musician can make great music with whichever embouchure they use, there's just more available to them in a tongue block and if one wishes to play traditional blues harmonica, then as I stated earlier, I would be doing the students a disservice if I were to approach the instruction differently.