I've been practicing tongue flutter for the past few months.
I watched Lee Sankey's videos and they were very helpful. Although I think his tongue switch sounds a lot better than a tongue flutter, I chose to start with tongue flutter because it seemed to me that I had a reasonable chance of getting somewhere with it in a reasonable amount of time.
I suppose that when you practice something a lot, you start to hear it in your head. A couple of times while improvising alone, I tried adding that sound and found that although I'm not quite there yet with the tongue flutter, I can produce a really nice sounding tongue-blocked "octave" warble. Basically, I am getting everything I am aiming for in tongue flutter but with an octave warble - and more! It sounds better than a flutter and I can do it right now; I've still a long way to go to master tongue flutter (let's not even consider how long it will take me to do a proper tongue switch...)
So my question to you all is, can you hear a difference between a tongue switch and an octave warble? I can differentiate between a tongue flutter and the other two, but I like the sound of the other two better anyway...
Hey arzajac, how about some sound or video clips? These are all techniques that are on my list, but have not "gotten to" yet. I've been tongue blocking and tongue switching for a long time now, but getting switches and flutters up to speed has eluded me so far. ----------
The two tongue techniques I can hear differences between are what I think of as the "side to side" vs. the "in and out"
For the "side to side", the tongue is playing a split or octave, then moves rapidly to the next split or octave, then back and forth. Say between 1-4D and 2-5D. I cannot do this because I never heard this correctly until recently. Once I heard it and finally understood, I can't miss it. (just can't do it)
The other, (what I'm calling "in and out") is when you go between the octave/interval and the chord. The tongue is rapidly flicking in and out of the mouth towards the comb of the harmonica. This is what I used to "hear" for both techniques. This is what I worked on and got good at.
The tongue side-to-side confounds me because I'm not learning as doggedly as I used to. Sugar Blue did some amazing chord-single note- tongue switching at HCHII. Again, once I heard it with the explanation it clicked. I haven't even tried that yet. ---------- "12gagedan" on youtube
