Organize Your Reeds!

Below is a link to a PDF with a new, improved reed chart for finding repair reeds for Hohner Classic diatonic harmonicas:

Organize Your Reeds!

One of my goals in life is to help close the gap between maintaining harmonicas and maintaining guitars. Everyone who plays guitar knows how to change a string. Most people who play harmonica don’t change reeds, because there are a lot more problems to deal with than changing a string on a guitar.

The booklet above with the reed chart is one step in the direction of closing that gap. Progress is always possible!

I made this chart years ago and have been giving it away to people who join my list as part of a booklet titled “The Marine Band Field Spotters Guide”

It shows all the reeds that are interchangeable on Hohner reed plates in the “hand made” or classic series from lo D to high G.

The PDF above includes a page you can print out and cut to make a guide, so you can look at one column at a time. I found that looking at the chart without some kind of ruler or guide gave me a headache, so I figured I was not the only one who reacted this way.

Leave a comment if you have any feedback, questions or ideas on how to make this guide better.

I hope you have had a chance to reflect on 2012 and think at least a little bit about what you want for 2013. You might as well use the collective momentum of the tradition of New Year resolutions to pick at least one worthy goal.

Last year I wrote an article on a book “The Practicing Mind” by Thomas Sterner. Reading this book has been a turning point for me. I now spend a lot more time doing one thing, with deep focus, at a time. What this means for my music practice is that I have some very well defined, simple goals that I practice regularly, only as long as I can maintain focus. Sometimes it is only a couple of minutes. But those couple of minutes are well spent and add up….

The wisdom in this book gives you a way to live that connects setting goals to enjoying the process of reaching for goals. You create clear simple goals and break them down into steps, and you do the steps one at a time, with complete focus. You slow down and enjoy the process of doing each step mindfully. You slow down, relax and focus, your results speed up and increase in quality. It seems too good to be true, but it works.

Slowing down and doing one thing at a time feels weird. It really goes against the grain of the way I too often work and practice: anxiously and all over the map. But the more I use the slow and focused approach, the more I like it. The other thing is that slow and focused leads to fast and focused, as long as you don’t rush it.

The other great insight in this book is that the goal is just a great way to get in the process and the process is the real reward.

I just ran across a quote by 10-time NCAA Champion Basketball Coach John Wooden. When he retired, he said:

“When people ask me now if I miss coaching UCLA basketball games, the national championships, the attention, the trophies, and everything that goes with them, I tell them this: I miss the practices.”

That quote gives me goose bumps. It tells me that the real rewards are right here, right now, when we practice with all of our heart as well as our minds.

That is why I play the harmonica – it is the most direct route for me to feel this deep connection of focused practice.

In 2013 I intend to be much more organized so I can spend more time in this space of slow, focused practice. It is going to be a good year.

Thanks for reading this!

Whoops! – the tab i wrote for Auld Lang Syne in the last post is wrong. WRONG. What a way to start the New Year. Being humbled.

An alert reader pointed out to me that what I tabbed was actually 12th position. He’s right. He also pointed out that I had one note in the first line that strays from the major pentatonic scale.

Right again (ouch!) so if you turn that blow 5 around in the first line in my tab and play three draw 5s in a row we are back to straight pentatonic scale melody.

There are a few tunes that throw me off because they do not start with the root note of the scale but they sound like they do. Happy Birthday, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Auld Lang Syne are all tunes that have confused me about what key they are actually in. Oh well….

S0 – if you play the tab I have below on a G harp, you are in key of C. Then you can switch to key of G.  Try doing it by ear, playing along with the lady on the accordion. She also starts the song in the middle of the chorus, just to make it more interesting and confusing to follow if you are looking at my now discredited tab.

I’ll get this done right by next year, for sure!

The Big Walter video above is a good example of why you might want to get good at tongue blocking…….

If you struggle with mastering the art of playing the harmonica with tongue blocking, I have good news for you. There is now a tool you can use to make it easy to see what is going on when you try to train your tongue to make those cool, massive tone bombs that can only happen when you slam back and forth between playing a  chord and single notes on a harmonica.

It is called the Filisko Tongue Block Trainer, or TBT, and it looks a bit like the quickie fold up boxes that they have a McDonalds that the Apple McPie modules (or whatever they are called) come in. It is basically a 7 hole hollow harmonica with a mirror. You put the TBT to your mouth and watch your tongue as it closes and opens the little holes in the mouthpiece. It is a strange and fascinating sight.

I had one harmonica student who described her tongue as “this little sea creature inside my mouth”. It is the only muscle you have that is attached on one end and free on the other. Free reeds, free tongue. Poetic justice, I suppose.

Training this “little sea creature” is a lot easier if you can keep an eye on it at least part of the time while you form the first habits, or correct old ones. That is the main idea of the TBT.

I’ll be posting photos and more info soon.

Happy almost New Year!

Richard