New Guy - Rob Laferrière

Greetings! I'm new here!I thought I'd quickly say hello and introduce myself. My name is Rob, and I'm from Russell, Manitoba, Canada.

I've been playing harmonica at one level or another for about 10 years, but started taking things a but more seriously about 6 or so years ago. Over that time I feel that musically I've shifted from being "a guitar player who plays harmonica" to a "harmonica player who sometimes plays guitar". I'm loving the transition. When I moved to this small town almost 8 years ago now, I discovered there weren't any harmonica players in any of the local bands. I stood a better chance of sitting in with them on gigs without a guitar and amp to set up!

My solo project is called "The Woozle Effect," and under that name, I perform loop-pedal-based jams, mostly on harmonica and stringed instruments made out of found-objects like ammo-cans, toasters, and hockey sticks. I call the whole experiment "Recycled Sound". Since the pandemic shut down all of my gigs, I've shifted over to performing weekly on Twitch.tv/WoozleEffect every Saturday night. It's been a blast! It's a totally different, much more relaxed vibe when playing for a live-stream audience. It's very interactive and a lot of fun. The "weird" guitars tend to steal the show on Saturday nights, but the Harmonicas are always there on just about every jam, filling things in and taking obnoxious and self-absorbant solos... but hey, it's a solo act: I can get away with that!

Since I happen to love harmonica maintenance almost as much (or maybe more?) than playing the harmonica, I tend to spend a lot of time at my workbench tinkering with my harmonics. I converted nearly all of my harmonicas over to PowerDraw tuning sometime ago, which is my "default" now. I've done lots of harmonic minor variants, country tuning, and other less common setups. I find it a lot of fun to really dig into WHY and HOW the harmonica works as it does. The physics of the instrument never ceases to amaze me. Since I end up spending so much time down at the workbench by myself, talking to myself, I thought I'd start live-streaming my harmonica maintenance work as well. So now I do that every Monday Night in a Twitch show I call "Open Harp Surgery". It attracts a VERY tiny niche crowd of people on Twitch, which is largely dominated by video gamers, but the ones who do tune tend to show up every week. Oddly enough, very few of my viewers actually play the harmonica, although many play other instruments. Like me, they tend to be more interested in the "how it's made" aspects, and the physics of the instrument and acoustics in general. We dive into a little bit of music theory (which is not my specialty, but can be fun) and mostly talk about gear.

So that's me in a nutshell. I'm a nerd to plays, breaks, fixes, and messes up harmonics. Living the dream!

Cheers,

Rob "Woozle" LaferriereRussell, MB, Canada