I recently heard the Fabulous Thunderbirds with Kim Wilson on harmonica backing up James Cotton, Tinsley Ellis, Jody Williams and Bob Margolin. Great show!
In a tune called "Kim's Boogie" Kim used a technique called "split tounge". He held a long loud note and played other notes around it as he held the main note. It sounded nice. Is anyone familiar with this technique. If so, please help me understand what's going on with the tounge.
First, you don't split your tongue. It's usually called just a "split" or maybe a "tongue split."
You use your tongue to block out holes on the harmonica, like you do with tongue blocking, but you don't block out the holes in the right and left corners of your mouth. Those are the holes that you play.
You're taking a chord (several holes) and splitting it apart into two widely separated notes.
You hear this all the time in blues, and it's only one of several commonly used tongue blocking techniques. ---------- Winslow
Last Edited by WinslowYerxa on Feb 08, 2013 2:36 PM
Huh, I had a long post on this, but the site seems to have eaten it.
Grr...
Well, Winslow seems to have covered it. I'd add that if you U-Block you can produce one extra weird effect, and have 3 separate notes play, for instance 1,3,5 blows, while silencing 2,4
He is not just doing split chords and octaves. He is doing a lot of tongue slapping. So some of what he is doing is playing a chord and taking his tongue on and off two of the notes while continuing to hold or play one of the notes.
Let your tongue cover holes 1-3 and play inhale hole 4 (out of the right side of your mouth). Long sustained note. See how long you can hold it.
Now, do it again, but pull your tongue off the harmonica and put it back until you can do this keeping the integrity of that 4 hole inhale note.
Finally, pull your tongue off to the rhythm of the Beach Boys' song "Ba Ba Ba, Ba Babara" - and you have the beginning of Kim Wilson's Boogie. ---------- The Iceman
'He held a long loud note and played other notes around it as he held the main note.'
To me it sounds like you are describing a drone technique, where you hold a drone note on one side of the tongue and play melody notes on the other side.
It is probably not what Kim was doing as the technique is not use a lot blues, but I thought I would mention it as it interesting. I can't think of any recorded examples of the drone technique, but I have heard a few players use it to good effect.
