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    Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician
    Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician
    Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician

    By Eric Pulsifer

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    About this ebook

    It’s hard to take harmonica players seriously. What doesn’t help is that so many harmonica players don’t act as if they want to be taken seriously. We have the reputation as the dumbest musician on the stage, and that’s only if we’re considered musicians at all.

    But with a good working knowledge of how to play, how to follow a song, how to work with the other band members and an idea of what you’re doing up on stage, you can be considered an asset to any band instead of a novelty act. In Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician, Eric Pulsifer touches on the things they don’t teach the growing musician.

    Eric Pulsifer played with many bands and several genres over the last three decades, parlaying his unique sound and his knowledge of music to take center stage. Currently in California, he plays in several groups and remains in high demand.

    This work is for intermediate and advanced players. If you’re not there yet, hang on to this. You’ll be there soon.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEric Pulsifer
    Release dateJun 29, 2015
    ISBN9781311504487
    Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician
    Author

    Eric Pulsifer

    Eric Pulsifer, a recovering journalist with more than a decade in the business and two more decades of screwing off, completed his first book in 2012. He liked it so much that even a line of road pylons couldn't stop him now.While he works in several genres, his fiction leans more toward mystery/thrillers with a caffeinated mix of realism, imagination, and a bit of a dark edge.His novels Damage Control and Desert Vendetta have likable characters, realistic settings, and the obligatory dead body or three.His newest work, The Beta Testers, takes an even darker apocalyptic turn in a high-tech setting.None of his fiction can be called autobiographical, but he taps his experiences as a professional musician (1986--), family caregiver (2014--) and taxi driver (1997-2007) to add color to his stories.His nonfiction work touches on the creative side and survival as a writer and musician. His first novel, B.I.C.* Cartel (*Butt In Chair) also concentrates on this creative theme.A respected musician, he currently plays harmonica with several bands in Southern California, ranging from bluegrass to jazz to gospel. A perennial student of musicianship and theory, he shares his ideas in Playing Harmonica Like A Real Musician.While he lives in the Los Angeles area, he calls Charleston, South Carolina home. When not writing or playing music, he can be found on a hiking trail with his dog or tearing apart another computer and wondering how it all goes back together.

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      Book preview

      Playing Harmonica Like a Real Musician - Eric Pulsifer

      Up front

      Intro

      We harmonica players get a bad rap. We’re barely musicians. We don’t know when to play and when to shut up. We have no clue about the song we’re playing. We just suck and blow.

      Unfortunately, with so many harp players all these statements are true. Most players do nothing to disabuse these notions. If we’re the dumbest musician on the stand, that’s being generous because we’re not supposed to be musicians anyway. So many will play one of the three riffs we know — and call it good, and the audience will love the novelty.

      We harmonica players are the butt of a lot of musicians’ jokes:

      * * *

      Q: How Many Harmonica Players Does it take to change a light bulb?

      A: Don’t worry about the changes man, Just blow!

      * * *

      Q: How many Harp Players does it take to change a light bulb?

      A: None — they just steal somebody else’s light.

      * * *

      Q: How do you know there’s a harp player at your front door?

      A: He doesn’t know when to come in and he can’t find the key.

      (Ba-da peesh!)

      * * *

      Even among the big-name musicians, one will pull out a harmonica and play one of those three riffs and put it away. I’m thinking of John Lennon (Love Me Do) or Rod Stewart (My Boy Lollipop) here. No practice necessary. Sometimes in clubs you’ll hear the guitarist or vocalist play a little harp just because he can.

      This puts man-made limits on the instrument and reduces it to little more than a toy, like the kazoo or slide whistle.

      But to hear someone who knows what he’s doing — playing like a real musician — that’s astonishing. There are a few players who have raised the harmonica up to the class of a real instrument. Right off the top of my head I can name Howard Levy, Lee Oskar, Charlie McCoy and Rod Piazza. Even though Blues Traveler’s John Popper is not one of my favorites, I still have to hand it to him. He shows it’s more than a toy.

      Try to find a harmonica player who knows phrasing, knows how to play behind a vocalist, knows theory, knows how to read music. I’m three-fourths there; count me out on the latter. I could never figure out what those circles and lines on a piece of sheet music mean either.

      With most of us it’s what key, count backwards by four, then start sucking and blowing.

      Too many of us who are totally lost if the guitarist doesn’t announce the song’s key. Then it’s either a) not play, or b) make a guess and hope it sounds good. Of course any harp player would rather die by thousand cuts than not play. It’s in our genes.

      But in truth most harp players wouldn’t notice the difference if it sounds good or not.

      The purpose of this book here is to educate the harp player on some of the finer points of music. I’m gonna assume you know the basics — how to count backward by fours, how to bend a note, how to hold a mic. You might even know enough great riffs to put you ahead of the average player.

      Some of the teachings will go deep, covering not so much on technique but on mindset. By now you should probably have some technique down anyway.

      The idea is to put the harmonica where it belongs, as a viable part of a band instead of as a sideshow.

      * * *

      Okay. One more for the road:

      Q: What do you call a groupie who hangs around and annoys musicians?

      A: A harmonica player.

      What this is/isn’t

      This book will not teach you how to play harmonica. There are plenty of other resources for that, and some will be listed in the bibliography.

      So if you’re an absolute newbie — well, I don’t want to say you wasted your money buying this book, but you’re not quite ready for it. Hang on to it, though. Once you get the basics of playing, all the stuff in here will start to make more sense.

      The more advanced a player you are, the more valuable this book will become. If you spent good money on this, consider it an investment in your musical future.

      * * *

      So this isn’t another one of those books about how to play harmonica. Then what on earth is this anyway?

      It is about playing harp, but only peripherally.

      This is really about playing music in any context, with any instrument. It’s about getting out of the woodshed and into the spotlight. It’s about developing your music further with each turn on the stage.

      It’s aimed at the intermediate to expert musician, really. It certainly fits with the person who hasn’t played live or in the studio before, and also with the person who has 20, 30 or even 40 years under his belt.

      It’s geared toward all instrumentalists, but vocalists might find something useful there too. All these ideas are based on playing harmonica because that’s my frame of reference, but everything will translate well to whatever it is you’re into.

      This little book makes the assumption that you know a little about playing your instrument. Maybe even mastered it. That part doesn’t really matter. It goes less into the how — although there’s plenty of that here — and more into the why.

      Why does a person play the chords he plays? How does he know when to fade into the background and when to really cut it loose? How does he know how far he can go when

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