Today I have a couple of links for you that need a bit of explaining.

I have talked before about how the same things that make me a better harmonica player also make me a better human being.

Yesterday I got this link to a talk by a guy with the last name Amen. It is about brain health. I found it entertaining, disturbing, inspiring, and long (it is about 90 minutes long). You can listen to it if you are doing the dishes or something like that. I listened to it once and then watched it once yesterday with one of my daughters and my wife.

I remember hearing years ago that when Kim Wilson comes to a town, one of the first things he does is find out where there is a good gym so he can work out. David Barrett is now a 3rd degree black belt and he told me that being a musician helped him to do this and being a black belt made him a better musician. Joe Filisko goes to a gym at least 3 times a week even though he does not like to do it, because he likes the results, and it gives him stamina for being on the road and playing music.

I could go on and on about the great musicians I have met who swear by exercise and other health regimens as part of their way of being ready for the muse and able to keep hitting higher levels of creativity. Taj Mahal is another one. He brought his own weights on tour one time when I opened up for him. He noticed I was drinking ginseng and said to me “if more of those old blues guys drank that stuff instead of alcohol, they would still be around today”.

Anyhow, you have been warned – this video can be scary and in your face. It is also very funny in some places….

The video:

http://www.highperformanceacademy.com/amen

A checklist on brain health:

https://tbitac.norc.org/download/amen_checklist.pdf

BTW, this is not any sort of affiliate marketing. I ain’t makin a dime off of this, I just feel the urge to pass this along.

Till soon,

I’ll be plying twice in the charming town of Millheim this weekend.Located in Amish country, the traffic includes horse drawn buggies.

The first gig is a solo gig on Friday Nov. 25th 7:30 – 8:30 at the Green Drake, a Gallery and Arts center created from a former hardware store. More info is at: http://greendrakeart.com/

The Jive Bombers Elk Creek Cafe, Millheim, PA
Jerry Zolten and Richard Sleigh and a strong possibility of a great drummer will be playing their favorite American Roots music. For more info on this great venue, please check out the website: http://www.elkcreekcafe.net/
Start Time: 4:00
Date: 2011-11-27

I have gotten a variety of responses to the rhythm exercise idea, ranging from “I don’t need this.” to “Wow! this is realy cool!”.

I also got enough questions about exactly what to do that I will describe it again as clearly as I can.

You sit and cross your arms near your wrists so you can tap your right knee with your left hand, and your left knee with your right hand.

You tap both knees at exactly the same time, and tap both of your feet at the same time you are tapping your hands. Both feet and both hands coming down at the same time. It does not matter if you are tapping your heels or your toes, as long s you keep the beat.

This will help you rapidly absorb a rhythm or help a student that is having a hard time with keeping a beat. I have done this as part of my own practice for time signatures like 5/4 that I don’t use a lot, and it gets me in the groove fast.

I started doing this with students that claimed that they could not keep a beat, and many of them were amazed at how much of a difference it made in less than 5 minutes.

Why does this work? The least technical explanation I can give you is this: We have a left side and a right side to our brains and they don’t always work together. There is a bundle of nerves at the base of the brain that regulates “cross talk” between the left and right sides of your brain.

The left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body. When you cross your arms and tap the opposite knees, you are creating signals that promote cross talk, and this makes it easier to get both sides of your brain and body on the same page as far as the beat.

You can also do variations of this discreetly under a table if you are in a meeting (for example)and starting to feel “disconnected”. Just tapping opposite legs with your fingers can promote more whole brain thinking, bringing logic and intuition more together among other things.

We will know that this sort of understanding of the brain is becoming really mainstream when we start hearing country radio tunes with lyrics like this:

“My left brain done left you, don’t want you no more,
But my right brain still loves you, can’t walk out that door

I’m left with a left brain that has left you behind
But darlin, I can’t quit you when I’m in my right mind”

Well, anyhow, even if you think this is all a bunch of nonsense, I hope you find it amusing.

Happy December!

Today I have a very simple exercise that you can try with someone who claims that they can’t keep a beat. Or someone who can’t keep a beat, but they don’t know it. Or someone who is trying to learn a new and tricky rhythm.

I will get into why this works in a later message. My experience with this process is that it works, and that is enough for me.

Here is what you do: Sit facing your friend or student (or just sit if you are doing this by yourself), and you both cross your wrists so that your hands are resting on the opposite knee. Right hand on left knee, left hand on right knee. It also helps to tap both of your feet or toes in time along with your hands.

You then tap your knees to keep time to a recording or a drum track of the song that you are working on. Do this for a few minutes, and then try playing the song again together, tapping your feet.

Try this out and ask yourself if there is a difference in how well you or your friend can keep time.

I have done this a number of times with people who claimed that they could not keep a beat. I maintained eye contact to keep them engaged, and after one session, I noticed a real difference in their ability to kep a groove.

I have also done this by myself when I have worked on a new rhythm to speed up the process of getting the feel of it.

The short explanation is that this speeds up the process of getting both sides of your body and mind on the same page. I’ll break out the fancy language in the next email.

Let me know if this makes any difference to you!

Thanks!

Lay Down My Burden – Grant Dermody and Friends

Grant Dermody is a Seattle based harmonica player, music instructor, vocalist and song writer who has honed his skills over the years playing with acoustic bluesmen John Jackson, Guy Davis, Honeyboy Edwards, John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, Louisiana Red, bluegrass guitar wizard Dan Crary, and a variety of top notch old timey and folk / blues musicians. In recent years he has been touring with Eric Bibb and appears on two of his CDs “Spirit I Am” and “Booker’s Guitar”. He also plays in an acoustic trio with Orville Johnson and John Miller, in a duo with guitarist Frank Fotusky, and in the eclectic acoustic old-time band “The Improbabillies”.

Lay Down My Burden is a recording that is drenched in the blues, and has some hard-core blues on it, but it is not a blues record. If you need a label, you could call it American Roots music. It is the music of immigrants who came to America for a new life, strangers in a strange land, freedom seekers, slaves, indentured servants, the lunatic fringe and the divinely inspired. They all brought musical traditions that collided and created a rich landscape of new musical expressions.

Grant dives deep into this musical landscape through his mastery of the diatonic blues harmonica, and a kind of blues that can seep into an Irish fiddle tune, a modal Appalachian melody, old-timey music, gospel music, and popular music of the last few hundred years.

This song cycle took form during a time in Grant’s life when he lost of both of his parents, his wife Eileen, and a couple of close friends. You might expect dark, melancholy music to come out of a time like this, but instead what you have is music full of the joy that is the essence of the blues.

I heard a two-word phrase in an interview with Coleman Barks that nails this essence of the blues. Coleman translated thousands of poems by the Persian mystic, Rumi. He described the timeless quality that Rumi and his fellow Sufi mystics brought to their work with the phrase “ecstatic grief”. Ecstatic grief sounds at first like an oxymoron, an impossible state, but it describes a wholeness that feels good, excludes nothing, is full of darkness as well as light. To feel the deepest emotions from sorrow to joy at the same time, and to live to tell about it.

As Grant puts it: “You just find yourself reaching down for strength you didn’t know you had. Or if you thought you had it, you didn’t know where it was. A lot of it is just showing up and doing what you have to do. You persevere, you look for joy where you can find it – and that’s the blues.”

There are two songs back to back on this recording that express the extremes of this ecstatic grief that is the blues.

“Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” has the late John Cephas on vocals and guitar, Grant on harmonica. This was John’s last recording and he expresses the almost unbearable heartache and desolation of Skip James with an immediacy that could only come from a lifetime spent living the blues. Grant meets him right where he is with his Marine Band harmonica, following him note for note into this haunting sonic landscape.

There is an extra-long pause after this cut, and I assume it is there on purpose to give you a chance to catch your breath and let what just happened sink in.

What follows is an ecstatic romp called “Rain Crow Bill”, two harmonicas chasing each other through a delirious version of an old-timey / blues harmonica instrumental by Henry Whitter. Fat chord rhythms, fox chase whoops and hollers, and melody lines with the exuberance of first graders pouring out of school for recess. Mark Graham joins Grant on this and somehow they manage to get through it without falling down laughing.

Grant recorded with twenty six of his friends on this project, people with incredible chops in a wide range of musical styles. The combinations range from duets to a full band with drums. Grant got his start working with other musicians at the age of 18 in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fairbanks was at that time a wild renaissance town, a creative outpost of folks building their own houses and going back to the land. They also had a vibrant music scene with a dozen places to hear live music on any given night. Everything from Blues to Bluegrass, Old Timey, Irish, to straight ahead Rock ‘n’ Roll. Grant found a way to play it all on the harmonica, how to back people up, how to learn things on the fly, when and how to take a solo.

There are many highlights on this recording: Grant sings lead vocal on 8 of the 16 songs, including the Reverend Gary Davis tune “I’ll Be Alright” with Eric Bibb on guitar, a lonesome banjo and harmonica version of Dirk Powell’s “Waterbound”, and an a cappella arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More”. Grant also wrote 3 of the tracks including the title cut “Lay Down My Burden” a riff tune that built into a full band arrangement.  Grant’s work as a harmonica sideman with blues greats John Dee Holeman, Louisiana Red and John Cephas is raspy, raw, and right in the pocket. There is also a righteous harmonica duet with harmonica master Joe Filisko, “Twelve Gates To The City”,  a gospel tune with a heavy dose of Sonny Terry style harmonica.

The last track takes us to yet another level. As Grant put it “This started as a record I wanted to do with people I respect musically, and it turned into something cathartic, something healing, something to help Eileen and me during the hardest thing we ever went through. It was becoming a prayer and I thought what better way to end the record than with an actual prayer by my Buddhist teacher, Kilung Jigme Rinpoche.”

Orville Johnson’s dobro and Grant’s harmonica meet this prayer with startling harmony.

This is a fitting end to this musical trip that will grow on you and with you every time you listen to it.

For more information on this CD and others by Grant, go here: http://www.grantdermody.com/cd.html

A while ago, there was a lively debate on Harp L about who were the real geniuses. The general direction that this thread was going in was that some people were geniuses, and others were not, and that this would be a good thing to argue about.

I insist that we all are geniuses, once we dig deep enough. If you dig what I am saying, then you may enjoy the reply that I decided to post as part of the genius thread:

Genius is a verb, too….

The thread about genius has finally made me want to throw in my two cents, as I believe that there are some good questions to ask about the debate. One is What is the point of this discussion? Another is “What are the assumptions we are making here?”

People who do research on accelerated learning and human potential (Donna Cercone, Brian Tracy, Dennis Waitley Win Wenger among others) claim that genius is a way that we use our minds and can be learned.

When we do this “who is a genius” game, It puts us in the position of being passive judges of something that we don’t have and others do. The idea  that we cannot access genius is poisonous and just plain wrong. It is an example of “learned helplessness” – I’m not a genius so why bother trying to be one?

A baby elephant tries over and over to break free of the rope that has it tethered. It gives up eventually after hundreds of futile attempts. The same elephant grows up with enough strength to easily break free of the rope, but never tries because it “knows” that it can’t do it.

We tend to do the same thing with our own potential as musicians (and in many other areas where we are “stuck”). We learn early on that we are not “geniuses” and we accept “reality” instead of relentlessly working at creating genius as our reality.

Instead of debating who is a genius, wouldn’t it be more fun to check out people who spend a lot of  time in the genius mode and ask “what are they doing?” “How can I do that?”

This is what I see going on over and over again at SPAH and other events like it. People come here and start relaxing and unwinding and after a certain amount of sleep deprivation and hanging out with inspiration, start having flashes of their own true genius. Something in the air makes them forget their usual self imposed limitations and they cut loose and play brilliant, alive music. With some it comes in flashes and then they get self conscious and it goes away. With others they get on the good foot and stay there for a while….. Some folks live there most of the time, and they get the label “Genius”. Sometimes.

That is one of the reasons that I love SPAH. I love being around people who are experiencing genius. Especially their own, even if they don’t choose to call it that.

Thats my story, and I’m sticking to it!

Harpe Diem!

I would like to reflect today on how terrible I was for a few years at tuning harmonicas. I have come up with a short list of some of the really dumb things I have done when tuning harmonicas.

There are plenty more mistakes that I don’t have space or time for today, trust me….

Here they are, in no particular order:

#1. Tuning to A 440. The first few times I tuned harmonicas, I used a guitar tuner and just tuned the notes to the tuner. It seemed odd to me that almost all the notes were way sharp, but I trusted the needle on that tuner. After all, it always made my guitar sound great.

I could not believe how horrible the harmonica sounded once it was “in tune”. I can;t remember where I first learned that you tuned harmonicas sharp. I read it somewhere.

#2. Tuning all the notes to 0 on my tuner and expecting smooth chords. I had no idea why the chords sounded smooth on a harmonica that was “out of tune”. This drove me nuts for a couple of years. I just had no idea where to look for information, and the few people who had some idea of what was going on could not put it into words that made any sense to me.

#3. Being wimpy and indecisive while tuning. This is what happened to me after I started to learn about the difference between tuning a harmonica for smooth chords OR melody notes. I would get the chords smooth, and then play some melody notes and want to “tweak them just a little, not enough to mess up the chords”.

Then I would get individual notes sounding right,  go back to playing the chords, and whoops! – a little too rough, gotta make those chords sound smoother. Back and forth, back and forth. I wanted a harmonica that had really smooth chords AND magically changed into a harmonica melody notes that were in tune when I played fiddle tunes.

This lead often to mistake #4:

#4. Tuning the harmonica while pissed off and playing harder and harder and filing and scraping reeds harder and harder, working ten times harder than I needed to end up with a harmonica that was way sharp because I was flattening the reeds from playing too hard.

Sometimes I would break reeds when I got really mad, and then I would get really REALLY mad…..

And then there is #5 – staring at the tuner like a deer hypnotized by headlights. I still do this at times and I don’t really know why – I guess I expect the tuner to suddenly change it’s mind if I just wait another second. The truth is, 95% of the time I can see immediately that the note is sharp or flat. I just don’t trust myself sometimes. At first I did not trust myself at all…..

#6 Yeah I know, I am going over the limit…. Playing a cold harp with hot breath and making the reeds all wet with water piling up on the reeds. This makes for a harmonica with the blow reeds very sharp, because that is where most of the water vapor collects.

The good news is that you can avoid all of these mistakes, at least most of the time.

I will tell you more about how to do that in future posts. Right now I’ll tell you how I deal with #4 – how I keep from getting crazy / mad / too frustrated….

I break the spell by doing neck rolls and dropping my shoulders about every 5 minutes, sometimes even more often. It is hard to go completely insane if I let go of stress and bring my attention  back into my body with these simple moves. I have just made this a habit, and it really makes a difference.

Using a stopwatch and glancing at it also breaks the spell without taking me out of the flow. Tuning becomes a game with a way of keeping score.

Avoid these mistakes, and watch your accuracy and efficiency jump up a few notches…..

One of the wonderful things about playing blues harmonica is learning how to improvise over a 12 bar blues or some other structure that becomes familiar to us. Improvising is related to being creative, and “being creative” becomes a problem for some people, mostly because they do not believe that they are creative. Or that they are sometimes, and other times they are not, and have no control over the process.

So they get all hung up about being creative, being able to improvise, don’t believe they can, and then a funny thing happens. They are unable to see that they are improvising all the time and there is no reason for this to stop just because they have a harmonica in their mouth.

Yesterday I ran across an article on creative writing that gave me a new way to see this process of improvisation, or being creative with music. It has to do with realizing that “creativity” is the wrong word. Once we start using the right words, it is amazing how clear things can be.

The article was written by Eugene Schwartz, a copywriter. Copywriters have to be “creative” on demand. So does a good blues harmonica player.

It is a long article, so I am quoting the most important two paragraphs. Here they are:

“What is creation? Creation is a lousy word. It’s
a lousy word that confuses what you really do to
perform a simple little procedure. Creation
means create something out of nothing. In the
beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. Okay,
only God can do that. We can’t do that: We’re
human. So let’s throw creation out, and let’s
talk about connectivity. What you are trying to
do is connect things together. You’re trying to
practice connectivity. You’re trying to get two
ideas that were separate in your mind and
culture before, and you are trying to put them
together so they are now one thought. You want
something new to come out, but new doesn’t mean
it never existed before, it means never joined
before. New – in every of discipline – means
never joined before.

You’ve got to trick that conscious mind because
that conscious mind isn’t big enough to connect
all these widespread phenomena. So what you do
is you take your conscious mind and you focus it
on making a new cup of coffee! That holds it
there, and then ideas can kind of bleed into the
back of your mind and come into the front of
your mind.”

Eugene then goes on to insist that we can turn ourselves into idea machines by just plain working at it, practicing techniques that anyone can practice. The more you practice, the more ideas you get, the easier the whole process becomes.

The dance of improvisation for me has always been about going from structure, melody, to a surprise version of element of the structure or melody. Back and forth. How this happens, I don’t know. I just know it can and will happen.

When I get someone to believe that they can surprise themselves with new musical ideas while they play, and they learn some way to distract their thinking mind at the right time, they start improvising.

I believe that learning to improvise music, to jam, to be “creative” while playing music is a natural ability that we uncover, and that we all have it.

Getting better at improvising it is a process of learning new ways to trick the conscious mind to get out of the way. Getting into the body through conscious breathing helps a lot. Getting the body grounded in the pulse of the music helps a lot. Physically relaxing helps a lot. A tightly focused conscious mind usually results in tight muscles somewhere. Relax those muscles and some part of your mind opens up at the same time and surprises you with new connections of musical notes, things to say.

And if you don’t believe you are “creative”, maybe the best thing to do for a while is to stop using the word creative, and disconnect it from the idea of improvising. Improvising is making new connections.

I hope these ideas inspire you to approach improvising music in new ways. You may be surprised at what you find.

I hope so!

I happen to live right across the street from a museum that hosts a farmer’s market in their parking lot, so I play there once a month. It is a fun gig and I go home with a pile of fresh produce and gourmet breads, cheese, and other goodies.

I have come up with a battery PA system that is easy to set up and uses one non-obvious trick to make it work.

Here it is: I am using a Crate Limo battery amp as the main unit – I can plug in my guitar and vocal mike and I am ready to go. But I wanted to use an additional amp to spread the sound out over a long narrow space.

I also have an old Mouse battery amp, the kind that was popular for street musicians a couple of decades or so ago.

Connecting the Crate amp to my other battery amp was the problem.

I finally discovered that there was this place to put in a 1/4″ plug on the Crate that was labeled “insert”. The manual indicated that it was for a stereo cord that would connect with an effects box or some other processor.

What I discovered is that if I put a guitar cord with a mono 1/4″ jack into the “insert” receptacle  half way – one click – it became a line out that I could plug into the other amp.

They don’t tell you this in the Crate owners manual, but it works like a cahrm.

With this rig, I can send out enough sound to cover the whole farmers market. As long as the batteries in both amps are charged, I am good to go.

One more thing – If you have an old Mouse amp or a Crate amp, you can get batteries for them at places that sell generic batteries. I found a place nearby called “Battery Warehouse” That had replacement batteries. I just removed the battery and took it in, and they found one that had the same specs.

So you don’t need to get the official name brand replacement battery for your battery amp.

Using Battery amps for small gigs makes them a lot easier and more fun. I got really tired of moving my old PA system and dealing with electrical cords. And I don’t need to be all that loud for the kind of gigs I like to play these days. Just loud enough so I don’t have to hit the guitar hard or sing loud in order to project.

And a good farmers market can make you feel like part of a great community. Highly reccomended!

It Hertz to Have No Cents

I am in the process of reading through about 60 pages of feedback, ideas, and questions on harmonica technology and music- notes copied and pasted from your emails into a word document. Thank you for this overload to my questionnaire!  While I was studying these notes I came across some questions about tuning that reminded me of a note that i made many years ago in my my beat up, dog -eared, highlighted copy of Steve Baker’s Harp Handbook.

The note was this:  “4 cents = 1 Hz”

I Wrote this note down many years ago when this fact was given to me by a well known harmonica expert who shall remain nameless. I wrote this down like it was some sort of gospel that explained one of the mysteries of life. At the time I was grateful for this knowledge, and figured it would come in handy some day. I am not sure how long I believed this piece of information, but last night it surfaced in my mind again along with the understanding that it is total nonsense.

Now I am not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to math, so it does not take long to confuse me when you start using numbers to talk about tuning musical instruments.

So if you find yourself wondering what is up with Hertz and cents, I feel your pain and I want to do something about it right now.

Here is the deal: you can’t translate Herttz into cents the way you can convert inches and feet into meters, or dollars into euros.

It doesn’t work that way.

Hertz are cycles per second, or rate of vibration. The more hertz, the higher the pitch. You measure hertz by counting the number of cycles per second. Hertz are used in tuners to calibrate your tuner (set the standard that you use for tuning).

A 440 refers to one tuning standard. The A note in this standard vibrates at 440 cycles per second. All of the rest of the notes in this system will be tuned in relation to this note. When you increase this reference note to A 442, then all the other notes will go up in relation to this higher rate of cycles per second.

You tune harmonicas sharper to make them sound in tune with other instruments, so you need to know how to calibrate your tuner, and many tuners show the tuning standard as A 440 Hz as a starting point. Hz is the short way to say Hertz.

BTW, Hertz are named after Rudolf Heinrich Hertz (1857 – 94) a German physicist and pioneer in radio communication. He was the first man to broadcast and receive radio waves, and I am personally grateful to him for making it possible for me to listen to Stevie Wonder when I was a kid with an earplug in my ear and a battery radio in my pocket.

Once you calibrate your tuner by raising the A 440 Hz to 442 Hz ( or higher) for all practical purposes you are done with Hertz for the rest of your tuning adventures.

From that point on, you will be looking at a needle or lights that tell you something about cents.

Cents show you how close you are to the note you are tuning to, but not by simply counting the cycles per second.

The easiest way I can think of to understand how cents work is to compare cents to percentages.  Five percent (5%) of $100 is $5. Five percent (5%) of $1000 is $50.

Same percentage, different number of dollars.

The same basic thing happens with cents on a tuner. As you go up the tuner in octaves, you keep doubling the number of cycles per second. If you used Hertz to keep track of how flat or sharp you wanted a note to be, you would need to keep doubling any variation of flatness  or sharpness. as you tuned notes in the next octave up. You would need new numbers for each octave for each note. A 110 Hz, A 220 Hz, A 440 Hz, 880 Hz, etc. And those are the easy numbers to keep track of……

Now is a good time to take a deep breath……

The good news is that you don’t have to do that because your little tuner does two things: it measures the vibrations per second, and then translates the measurements into a percentage (how many cents) sharp or flat your note is, no matter what octave it is in.

Then it shows you this “percentage” with a needle or lights so you don’t even have to count cents if you don’t feel like it.

ONe last thing -the word cents is derived from the word for 100. There are one hundred cents between one musical note and the next half step up. In other words 100 cents equal 100% of the way from one musical note to the next half step note.

That is, if you want all your notes evenly spaced apart, and not everybody does. THAT is another can of worms for another day….)

I sincerely hope that is has been at least a little entertaining. If you already understand this, why didn’t you tell me this 25 years ago?

This kind of thinking only Hertz for a little while until it makes cents. Sorry – just can’t help myself…..