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Harmonica Beginner Lesson
Hi everybody, welcome to onlinelessonvideos.com. My name is Sandy Weltman. And today’s lesson is called beginning harmonica level one. And you guessed it's for the beginning harmonica players. If you’ve never played harmonica before, this lesson is for you. Today, I'm going to be teaching you how to do some basic techniques like holding the harmonica, how to breath correctly, how to put your mouth over the harmonica, how to get some single notes and then we’re going to be looking at how the harmonica is laid out a little bit. And then we’re going to be learning how to play a C major scale and some patterns associated with that. And all of those things are going to get you ready to play some simple melodies and get going on the harmonica.
So, if you haven’t read the read-me-first, go ahead and print that out and then print out the harmonica tablature and we will go ahead and get started.
Today, we’re going to be using a 10-hole diatonic harmonica in the key of C. Any make or model will work as long it's a 10-hole diatonic harmonica in the key of C. first thing I'm going to do is teach you how to hold the harmonica. So let’s go ahead and take a look.
So as we take a look at our harmonica, you can see the 10 holes and right above the 10 holes, there are usually 10 numbers that correspond with each of those holes. So with the harmonica facing your mouth, the whole space in your mouth, you want to take your left hand and put your thumb on the bottom of the harmonica like I've got and your index finger on the top. And it's really important to keep your fingers back to the backside of the harmonica far away from the holes because you're going to want to get your lips all the way over the harmonica.
Then you can take your right hand, then take your right thumb and put it on the right front side of the harmonica kind of like a pivot and wrap your right hand around the back of your left hand. And later on, you can find other ways that are comfortable for you to hold the harmonica or just kind of finesse this way a little bit. But this is a good starting method for holding the harmonica.
[Demonstration]
Okay, so the next thing we’re going to look at is called embouchure. It's a very important technique and that means how the harmonica fits into our mouth. It's very important because if you don’t learn the correct embouchure, your playing is going to be real weak and thin sounding and you're going to have a really hard time learning to do some of the other great harmonica techniques like draw bending or blow bending or over blowing. So, let’s go ahead and take a look and see what the correct embouchure should look like.
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