I've always love Madness and the SKA music, so I've decided to give a go to this french ska song, talking about the death of a friend. I came up with playing with 4 harmonicas on the very particular after beat of the SKA
I hope you'll like this one, otherwise tell me why.
Love from down under
---------- Never try to be as good as someone else, succeed to be the best player you can be!
Hi Christelle, I think Australia is suiting you very well. You look very happy and it shows in your playing and your new playing ideas. I thought the song was great. Thank you for giving me some ideas too. ----------
You definitely made my day! And then some!!! As the other folks on this board clearly know :), I'm a HUGE fan of Ska. My humble attempts a playing it on the harp pale in comparison to this though. I know how hard it is to keep those chords chugging in the groove on all those offbeats at Ska tempos, so I can't even begin to imagine how you did it playing FOUR harmonicas!!! Let alone how you had enough breath left to come off the chords and play those solos! This was just a really great example of how well harp can fit into genre's like Ska and Reggae! It's not just all about Blues and Jazz! Thank you for sharing that! ---------- == I S A A C ==
Wikipedia has little tidbit in the harmonica tag about a Chinese harp that uses a sliding mouthpiece to create a whole bunch of different chords with a relatively small harp. Pat Missin mentions it on his site too. Can't seem to find much else outside some Chinese language sites. Until then I guess we have to stack 'em! Great job. :)
Reggae begs for harmonica...in fact, there are a number of popular reggae recordings with harp (jammed with a drummer from Jamaica that was touring the country as a teen with some hugely popular Jamaican band and he gave me a full CD of popular Reggae that featured harmonica, which I sadly lost almost immediately). ---------- Mike Quicksilver Custom Harmonicas Updated 2/24/11
@ Isaacullah: In fact it's "easy" not running out of breath, you simply have to bear in mind that you don't have to take a lot of air and breathing on the beat, using the diaphragmatic breathing like a "spring".
For those who want to try this song, the C and the F are sucked on the first 4 holes, the A is sucked on the first 2 holes only (to respect the minor key change), and the D is blown on the first 4 holes
What very funny here is to play with the typical delay of the SKA, one repetition only and to play the slap back every now and then ---------- Never try to be as good as someone else, succeed to be the best player you can be!
Of coarse I had to pick up 4 harps and try to play along.What a joke that was,but it did give me extra respect for what you are doing. That was great Christelle,especially the last minute. Your finale got me all tingly.
I was master impressed by your fluid switching between the different harmonicas Christelle; you kept the groove going nicely.
For some reason that really reminded of the end credits of a Studio Ghibli film. Not any film in particular, it just had that up-beat feel to it that their credit soundtracks always seem to have. Anyone else get that or is it just me?
