Tip of the week: Stevie Wonder style, Part 2
Last time, I showed how pressing in the slide on the draw notes can give you a blues scale in first position.
But you can use the slide to do more than just get those notes.
How you approach those notes and leave them using the slide is also a juicy part of this style.
You know how to do a tongue slap, where you start a single note as a chord and then slap your tongue down to arrive at the single note?
Well, a slide jab creates a similar effect. It's al done with single notes, though. Instead of going quickly from chord to single note, you go from slide-out single note to slide-in single note.
Let's say you want to play C, and then blue note Eb. C is Blow 5, while Eb is Draw 5 with the slide in. If you go directly from one to the other, well, you hear C and then Eb.
But let's say you didn't quite get the slide in before you started playing the draw note and arrived at the slide-in draw note Eb just a faction of a second after you started inhaling. You'd hear the note D quickly scooping up to Eb.
This is a slide jab, and Stevie does it all the time. You can do it in any key, with any scale, as long as you're approaching a slide-in note.When you're playing the C blues scale, you can do slide jabs on Eb, Gb, Bb, -- and also on C, if you play it as a draw note with the slide in.
Listen to Stevie playing Fingertips, and you'll hear slide jabs all over the place. You'll hear some oether slide techniques, as well, which I'll discuss in the next installment.
Nope. Rumors come up regularly, but I hear no evidence that his harmonicas are different, except that some of them are customized to play better than stock harps. Frank Huang (brother of Cham-Ber Huang) used to do this; who does his work now hasn't been publicly announced. Television and video appearances in recent years showing him mostly playing 16-hole chromatics, sometimes smaller instruments that look to be 14-holers. Sometimes he's playing a regular Hohner Super 64x, other times something mysterious looking and probably custom built. But he always uses a C harmonica in standard Solo tuning.
I have heard that he has his reeds tuned higher than normal to something like A446 instead of the more usual A442 (Hohner states that all their harps are at the standardized pitch of A440, but they almost never are). Stevie's approach, which sounds like a heavy attack with a lot of back pressure, A446 would make sense because that way of playing will push pitch down, so tuning high would help compensate (and Stevie never sounds like he's out of tune).
An often-repeated but false statement is that Stevie likes to play in F#. A survey of his recordings turns up only two such tunes - For Once in My Life, where the tune starts in F, then modulates up to F# as part of the arrangement to sustain energy - which is also when he takes his solo. The other one, dating from about 15 years later, is Chaka Khan's I Feel For You, where the tape as slowed down so that he could play his solo in F, then speeded back up to F# for final editing. (He used the tape slowing down trick also on his own Do I Do, which comes out in B, but which he played in Bb).
====EDIT===
Since writing the above, I've learned from the guy who worked on Stevie's harps for several years, that he owns 16-hole chromatics in Bb, B,C, and Db. So he could have simply used the Db chromatic to play in F position for Chaka Khan's F# song.
Hi Winslow.
I have read that Stevie made some mods to his harmonicas, Do you know about that?