Vibrato
Good evening everybody,
Is there a lesson about how to do and practise a vibrato on bluesharmonica.com or do you have any references how I can get one for that country sound?
(English may contain mistakes)
Thankfully, Northface
Your English is just fine. What country are you in? It's a known fact that us folks in the United States aren't generally as good at second languages as a lot of folks in non-English-speaking countries are with English.
Thank you very much for your fast answer????????
Do you have any other tips and tricks how to make the harp sound more country?
By the way, I'm from Germany
Thankfully, Northface
Thank you very much for your fast answer????????
Do you have any other tips and tricks how to make the harp sound more country?
By the way, I'm from Germany
Thankfully, Northface
Northface:
I don't know if in connection with the use of harmonica in American Country & Western music you're asking about techniques, or the musical themes, scales, etc., used in the genre. Country and blues share a lot of the same origins (e.g., it's hard to characterize the iconic Jimmie Rodgers of the early 20th Century as either one or the other, tho' he's generally recognized as a father of country music), there are some differences.
One place to start would be to watch David's interviews with country players such as Mike Caldwell, Buddy Greene, Jelly Roll Johnson, TJ Klay, and of course Charlie McCoy. Each spends some time talking about his individual technique, and about the specialized harmonica tunings that work for him in different situations. And do a lot of listening to their recordings, as well as to the harmonica playing of Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson's longtime harmonica player.
And while it may be a separate study from actually learning and practicing harmonica, there is a lot of interesting history out there about how in the first half of the 20th Century blues became identified as an African-American musical form, and country as primarily white or European-American. E.g., starting in the 1920s, and continuing until the late 1940s, record companies catagorized anything recorded by an African-American artist as "race music," and by a European-American artist as "hillbilly music," even though in many cases it was the same song.
As you're already learning, the basis for David's lessons and teaching on this site is blues. But the techniques he teaches can also be used for jazz, pop, country, western, traditional, and even classical.
Harmonica in country music goes back as far as it does in blues, at least on recordings. In some of the early recordings, it's hard to distinguish whether the music should be classified as blues or as country
Some early players to listen to - mst can be found on YouTube:
Henry Whitter (his Rain Crow Bill is the earliest recorded use of second position)
Jimmie Riddle (In addition to his own recods in the 1960s and television appearances o Hee Haw in the 1970s, he recorded with Roy Acuff and with the Swift Jewel Cowboys in the 1940s)
De Ford Bailey (whie he is usually classified as blues, he was one of the earliest stars of Country music via his broadcasts on the Grand Ole Opry in the 1920s and '30s through the early 1940s)
Lonnie Glosson and Wayne Raney (while they had their own separate careers, they also teamed up, and both backed the Delmore Brothers on their late 1940s "hillbilly boogie" records)
Onie Wheeler He succeeded Jimmie Riddle as harmonica player in Roy Acuff's band, but also recoded several singles as a sort of Rockabilly country artist in the early 1950s.
There are others, but these are important ones to hear.
On the subject of vibrato: I count anything that can put an undulation in a musical tone as vibrato. The distoncition between trmolo and vcibrato that David and others make has no historical basis. When you look at the three ways a harmonica player can undulate a tone, it comes down to three things:
- variations in volume (what David calls tremolo)
- variations in pitchs (what David and others insist is the only true vibrato)
- variations in tone color
A harmonica player can use the following control centers:
- The diaphragm (foundational beathing muscles) to vary volume
- the throat to vary both volume and pitch
- tongue to vary both pitch and tone color
- hands cupped around the harmonica, opening and closing to vary both tone color and volume
I suspect that you may be thinking of the sounds made by hand cuppling as the type of undulation you're seeking to emulate.
Thank you two for that long list of songs, harmonica players and interviews, definitely am going to listen to those
Thank you very much????????
Winslow:
What a great set of "talking points." Helpful for any player of any ability, genre, etc.
Having played cello starting in 4th grade (and through college), "vibrato" was always in my mind subtle quick pitch changes, as the finger on the fretless fingerboard quickly varied pitch by shaking/rotating, i.e., rapidly shortening or lengthening slightly the vibrational length of the string. (Something that great guitarists like B.B. King perfected even where frets limited potential ability.) And of course, on guitar the Paul Bigsby vibrato arm system changed string tension, again changing pitch.
Which was a tad confusing when what Bigsby described as "vibrato," Leo Fender described as "tremolo" with the "tremolo arm" on my 1966 Fender Mustang guitar (which I sure wish I still had - maybe it's the one Liz Phair has been playing!), which did essentially the same thing. Maybe Fender wanted to avoid some sort of trademark conflict with Bigsby.
And of course to add to the confusion, my first amp was a tweed Fender Vibrolux, with adjustments for speed and intensity of "vibrato," which was in fact tremolo, i.e., changes in volume of the signal. But in the same time period, Fender sold the Tremolux amp. Which had the same tremolo circuit as the Vibrolux, but went so far as to lable the two input sockets for that channel as "Vibrato."
And while harmonica hand-cupping affects both volume and tone, it's more like a guitar wah-wah pedal. And that pedal is based on a mid-range booster circuit first used by the Thomas Organ Company, and developed for guitar by Vox. And rather than volume or pitch, wah-wah affects relative volume of part of the frequency spectrum, e.g., boosting the mid-range in relation to bass and treble.
The really cool thing is that the way harmonica reeds act in conjunction with what the player does inside his or her mouth and related areas of the head and body can result in some amazing combinations of pitch, volume and tone effects. Add to that things like "coughing" and vocalizing (a la Sonny Terry), and one is amazed that our Creator has designed the human body to come equipmed with musical circuits for harmonica that if one wanted to duplicate them with pedals and amp effects, it could cost tens of thousand of dollars, even assuming it could all be done.
And re the recorded history of country and blues harmonica, Joe Filisko and you are definirtely the Deans of the school. I hope Northface can take advantage of all of the amazing stuff that Joe and you can introduce to him.
By the way those questiontags were thumbs up :)
Here: https://www.bluesharmonica.com/lessons/tremolo_and_vibrato
Good stuff to learn for tonal variation. And includes discussion of the difference between the two (which are sometimes reversed in discussion. E.g., the "vibrato" circuit on Fender amps is actually a tremolo effect.
And not just for country. It's an important tonal technigue for blues, pop, jazz, folk, and just about every other style of music you can name.