I have been at this now for a couple of years. I listen to all the greats, practise and play alot. I find myself going off in my own direction, and play what I feel.
Too all you long time players out there, I would like to know if this is the norm, or should I keep trying to copy others?
Great question...You always want to play what you FEEL. if not, you might as well be in the grave, cold and lifeless...
I'd suggest continuing to study the note lay outs they have used to create their master pieces and anything else that is pertinent about their style that interests you and which you feel will serve to empower your improvisational talents.
Remember it's not about trying to copy others, it's about learning from them to gather inspiration and motivation for enhancing your confidence with which to speak a musical language in your own voice.
So by all means go off in your own direction and play from the deepest depths of feeling that you can muster - and when you hear a song that tickles your fancy - figure out what it is about the tune that makes it great, and that work and time will pay off with adding to your unique musical dreams and aspirations!
Last Edited by on Nov 01, 2012 6:21 PM
Frank and Jinx,great advice.As you play more with other people you will have to rely on your ear training,as you get thrown to the wolves having to solo on songs you are not familiar with.Spend some of your time flexing your own feelings into many different styles of music.Rythm,syncopation,phrasing,melody,when to come in,or layout.
I always listen to the classical players,they laid the foundations,yes I copy,but never get it perfect.My take to your Question is do both.I never wanted to be a copy riff and lick player they are a nickel a dozen.I know I might be misunderstood by some on my last statement,so to clarify.
Go to a jam hear some guys,nice licks,go again different song same licks.Like Toots Thielman said hard to get by that Look Ma stage,and start coming into making some statements up front and center.
Last Edited by on Nov 01, 2012 8:29 PM
It's inspiring to play the blues! To say the least ... BUT I find it boring to watch à blues gig, most of the times... Why? It's usually all the same. Same sound scape, same licks, it's very uniform. Same equilibrism ... When does it get interresting? When I get surprised, when there is an unexpected tone or frasing, when you see the players themselfs get surprised, when there is life, heart and nerv in the music and that comes from your music, not others. Romantic? Of course! Boring? Absolutely not! When a player pays his respect to the greats and does a, say L.Walter tune, it only gets interresting if it's coloured by the player's style. ---------- The tone, the tone ... and the Tone
it's like this. we may both be able to catch fish but each of us has a unique way of casting a particular bait in a specific spot. both of us catch fish. who's "right"? who's "wrong"? answer- we are both right if we are being true to our own selves, using our developing skills, and having a desired result.
for me learning to cover other players' riffs and styles has been a way to learn the mechanics of playing. and i believe there is very little that has not been done. BUT the way i do a certain thing and the way you do it can be worlds apart, both valid and both attractive. both "right". the other reason to learn the greats is, crowd recognition. if you play out you want an audience to hear familiar stuff and keep tapping the foot and buying the beverages.
s-harp, walter may be spinning in his grave if he can hear some of what i do in My Babe for example. it's not wrong but it's different than i ever heard him do.
my adventures in learning have taken me to places i never dreamed. keep learning but combine and recombine and see what you individually can discover. ---------- http://www.reverbnation.com/jawboneandjolene
Thank you all for your insight.It makes me feel better about what Im doing. The last 2 years have been alot fun, and Im still enjoying this harp trip. I will keep banging away at this and will always try to improve.
RG500 Copiyng is just a tool to get familiar with music and instrument. I think it's very important to play your own music at least slightly other than any other musicians. ---------- Excuse my bad English. Click on my photo or my username for my music.
As I keep doing my thing, I often wonder if I should be learning more tunes by copying. But I just never get around to doing that. If I like a tune, I listen to it over and over and then I play it my way. I also make up my own tunes, usually I start by messing around, repeating licks I like. I usually find some words that work and then continue to work it up over time. If you have that Little Walter box set of his Chess recordings and listen to the alt takes you will notice that he was basically an improvisational player. Sure there is a lot to be learned from copying, but the living music was, and is, not set in stone. ----------
Good points, jbone. And the fish don't care if the bait is hooked up to some super exclusive fishing gear either, BUT this is not à gear thread. I would also say that studying and copying the greats is a must, an excellent shortcut to good mechanics and essens. I always go back, listen to them and always learn something new. It''s good discipline. Like practising scales and tone. And like fishing gear makes no difference for fish, some crowds don't notice much when à player puts His heart into the covers. Heck, sometimes they don't even notice there's à hot solo going on. But other crowds are more jazzy, demanding, they want a bit more than standards, they're clapping and passing comments after solos, they're checking out if the guitarist is using his pinky when playing. Then carbon copies won't cut it. ---------- The tone, the tone ... and the Tone
Last Edited by on Nov 02, 2012 6:25 PM
From my journey I have learned to not doubt where my heart takes me. This continues to evolve and now realize it is a lifetime thing. People say stuff like- I do it my way and don't care about what the world thinks - but in reality most care very much about where they stand in the musical ladder statusphere. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
RG500 ..the "couple years" of work you have put in, seems a little brief. Perhaps too early to tell. The most important things... are you having fun?, and does it fit? You are on the right track.
You should definitely copy others. But most of the others you copy shouldn't be blues harmonica players.
Copy sax players. Hank Crawford is a good one.
Copy guitarists. T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. Wes Montgomery.
Copy blues singers.
Copy trumpet players. Freddie Hubbard, Miles.
You might even copy clarinet players like Benny Goodman. Dennis Gruenling spent a LOT of time copying Kenny Davern. When he was in his huge learning phase, he used to talk about Kenny Davern every time he talked about where he was getting ideas from.
So yeah: by all means, spend lots of time copying other players. Just make sure that most of the players you're copying aren't the classic blues harmonica players. There's a time and a place for copying them, but the key thing to remember is, THEY spent a lot of time copying sax players, guitarists, and the like. Little Walter spent a lot of time listening to and copying the sax players of his time. That's how you get an original approach. You learn a lot about how melodies work when you do that, and no matter how closely you copy a player who plays another instrument, you're in no danger of sounding like an imitation.
If you want to be a musician, at some point in time, you have to learn how music "works" and apply this knowledge to your instrument.
Learning your instrument is really just learning where all the notes "live" (on harmonica, it is which hole, which breath direction and also techniques for creating notes not given to you by breathing in and out in a specific hole).
Learning how music works, or learning to speak the language of music can be done in many different ways. Listening to successful professional musicians is a great way to start, as they obviously speak music language fluently and know where all the notes "live" on their instruments.
Listening and repeating what you hear is also a valid way to begin. However, even learning how to listen is a process in itself, in which you start to hear the subtleties and nuances beyond just the notes played - exploring HOW the notes are played.
Many have learned this way - memorizing and repeating other's music.
I've found this to be a longer road to becoming a musician, favoring a study of music as a parallel endeavor to memorizing/repeating.
Understanding the language of music is never as hard as most students make themselves believe. I tell them that from birth, they have been surrounded by music being played correctly - radio, movies, tv shows, soundtracks, elevators and while shopping in publix. It is all being fed into your subconscious.
So, you already are pre-programmed with all the correctness of fluent musicality in your subconscious. All you need is a teacher to show you how to access this knowledge, which is a lot easier than believing you have to learn it all from scratch. ---------- The Iceman
"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you do not live it, it will never come out of your horn." -Charlie Parker
Learn everything you can from every bit of music and every instrument you encounter and follow your owh heart, it will take you where you are supposed to go. It might be far, or it may not.
I believe it was Dave Spector that was out on world tours with Lynwood Slim and other world class acts after playing something like two years. Everyone's learning curve is different. I'm 61 and know less now that I did 30 years ago.
Adam thank you for the introduction to Kenny Davern, taking notes furiously - I love to fall asleep to the beautiful sound of jazz horn playing.
Checking Mr. Davern out on Ytube I came across another MONSTER player who is very approachable to learn from > Bob Wilber...simply exquisite playing!I'm sure Dennis gobbled up loads of inspiration from him too.
I think it's easy for us harpsters to mistakenly forget all the GREAT live jazz that is going on in our city's and communities. My wife and I attended a sorta of ritzy outdoor jazz gathering that was held in the backyard of a big colonial type house and the bands were similar to these ones in the vids - very enjoyable atmosphere of music.
When I was playing on the streets of Harlem in the late 1980s, I was also listening to a lot of live jazz. I'd go to the Jazzmobile concerts at Grant's Tomb and see Art Blakey (with Terrance Blachard and Donald Harrison), Dizzy Gillespie, and lots of other horn players. I'd go to Augie's--which changed its name to Smoke a number of years ago--and see Jessie Davis, who was a phenomenal alto sax player from New Orleans:
I couldn't begin to traffic in jazz harmony, but I'd let my musical imagination take a ride with the horn line, and I'd try to "think" jazz in terms of something like a scatted, vocalized line. Then I'd try to take some of that oblique motion and bring it back into my own blues harmonica improvisations. There's a vibe, a feeling, a drive, a celebration, a bittersweet sense of self-assertion, resignation, and shrugged shoulders leading into spiritual resistance and toughness, that I heard in the jazz sax players--not to mention a massive attention to tone in certain guys--that I could sample into my own playing. It shows up, for example, in this six-minute unaccompanied solo improvisation:
Music school, formal learning in scales and harmony, has its place in music education. But that's not all there is to becoming a musician, nor has it EVER been just about that. Blues harmonica players sometimes enjoy defining themselves against jazz and all that it stands for--as though jazz is the big boss standing over them, mocking their ignorance and lack of sophistication. But that's misguided. I went head to head with several terrific sax players and trumpet players in Harlem clubs and surprised them by getting a better audience reaction, because I made southern sounds that only a harmonica can make. So I never forget about that down-home side of instrument. A jazz player should always be able to bring it back down into the blues. But a blues player should also, I think, be willing to learn from jazz--steal from jazz, capture some flavor from jazz, and you can do this without spending all that time studying jazz scale and jazz harmony I wasn't intimidated by the jazz horn players because in my spare time, I'd been "studying" them, as the vernacular phrase goes. I'd been watching them, listening to them and their kin, in a friendly but predatory way. I knew I was never going to play straight-ahead jazz. But I also knew--in part because I could overblow--that I could take a few steps in their direction, pretend I was a horn player, become part of the horn section. When they played blues, my ears could track a fair bit of what they did, because I was spending my time with the recordings of Hank Crawford, Maceo Parker, Houston Person, Arnett Cobb. So standing next to them live didn't completely intimidate me. I was already standing next to them in my woodshed, circling their horn lines with my own blues harp sounds.
On the other hand, Iceman is exactly right: you need to "learn music." I spent some time butting my head against the non-negotiable facts of scale degrees and harmony, and the little bit of knowledge I gained by doing that has shaped everything I've done since on my horn.
Last Edited by on Nov 05, 2012 4:59 AM
When I see mention of music school, formal learning of scales/harmony and - especially - jazz scale/harmony on these harmonica lists, I feel a subtle stigma attached to these "words", as if this area as defined is stiff, academic, dry, and a real task.
It doesn't have to be.
So much is dependent on the teacher or how this area of musical expertise is approached.
Find a teacher that understands how much fun it is and translates this feeling to the student.
Even Miles Davis, in his cryptic Zen suggestions regarding how music works would reference nursery rhymes and very simple short sentences to convey the feeling inherent in this knowledge, making it fun for the recipients to figure it out for themselves. ---------- The Iceman
