Tongue blocking vs Puckering

Hello Travis. This is a good, and very common, question.

The short answer…

You want tongue blocking to be your default embouchure… it offers the most options for technique and because the vast majority of the great masters used it (John Lee Williamson, Rice Miller, Little Walter, Walter Horton, George Smith, James Cotton, etc.), as well as the players that followed them (Kim Wilson, Rod Piazza, William Clarke, Rick Estrin, Mark Hummel, Gary Smith, etc.), to play their material, you’ll need to use tongue blocking.

The looong explanation…

When tongue blocking, your mouth is commonly surrounding four holes, with the tongue blocking the three to the left (this is for holes 4 and above, you’ll use less holes to play holes 3 and 2). When your tongue is on the harmonica, you’re playing a single note, just like pucker. With this in mind, the tongue block is the same as the pucker… with both embouchures you’re playing a single note.

The advantage of tongue blocking is in the fact that when your tongue travels off of the harmonica, a chord sounds. This opens up a whole world of sounds that the blues harmonica player utilizes within every lick that they play.

The default way a blues harmonica player presents a note is to start with their tongue off (sounding a chord) and then quickly placing their tongue on the harmonica. This is called a Slap. This quick-sounding chord to single note gives the harmonica a bigger sound. You can also move your tongue in and out quickly (called a Flutter Tongue) and the result is a very cool, organ-like wash of sound on your longer-held notes.

The next most common technique has the tongue traveling off of the harmonica for upbeats (where your foot is off the floor… the opposite of the more predictable downbeat). These Lifts and Pulls (the pull is an articulated version of the lift… you’ll learn this later in your studies) add rhythmic drive to your playing and is a huge part of how blues harmonica players get the amazing swing feel to their playing.

The last most common technique (there are many cool tongue block-specific sounds, but these are the main ones), is the Octave. The octave is where you place your tongue in the middle (commonly blocking two holes), to sound a note to the left (1 blow C on a C Harmonica for example) and a note on the right (4 blow C for example). Playing these two notes together give you a huge sound, commonly used by players to mimic the sound of a horn section.

These main techniques are full in sound (due to the mixture of chords with your single notes) and offer a tremendous variety of sound while playing. Since we play an instrument with limited pitches (the diatonic harmonica does not have all of the pitches available to it that other instruments do), these varieties in sound are hugely important in order to keep our music interesting.

Lastly, all pucker players (if they are skilled players) that you hear talk about puckering in forums, and on YouTube, also use tongue blocking (remember, many techniques are only available in a tongue block). The reason why these players use pucker as their primary embouchure is because they didn’t know about tongue blocking (good lesson material on blues harmonica didn’t start to come out until the mid 90’s) or for some reason discounted it as being strange, and now have to use two different embouchures to get the job done. The main reason why players will commonly use two embouchure instead of just tongue blocking is that they learned how to bend in a pucker. Learning how to bend takes a lot of time, and since they learned how to bend in a pucker, they end up using puckering when they bend and tongue block when they want to use tongue block-exclusive techniques (this commonly means to pucker holes 1 through 3 and tongue block from holes 4 to 10… switching to pucker any time they bend, and then back to tongue block if they’re playing holes 4 and above). I was that player. I took the time to learn how to bend in a tongue block as well (it took a year of diligent daily practice), so now I don’t have to switch embouchures. For you, it’s a no-brainer, just tongue block everything and you don’t have to think about where to switch embouchures or learn how to do the same things in two different embouchures.

Again, I was that player, and at a certain point it just made sense to me to use one embouchure all the time. Tongue blocking can do everything that puckering can do (minus some interesting articulations, since the tongue is free from the face of the harmonica… like the cool Udle-ladle-lalde sounds Junior Wells plays in “Hoodoo Man Blues” for example), so it just made sense to play in a tongue block all of the time (like the vast majority of the masters).

For all of these reasons, I teach my students to tongue block from the beginning, and this will save you time. Student that learn tongue blocking from the beginning commonly have better tone, have more options in sound to them earlier on, and completely skip the issue that occurs around the four-year mark that mentioned before, where you have to learn tongue block techniques, as well as bending, to play what the masters played.