The other day I turn on the amp, press record on the camera and start playig the first thing that came to my mind. I wanted to know if I was able to play solo. As you can see I cant. I loose the beat and the canges, but that is OK now I know how much I need to practice.
hahahahaha, I know how much I need to practice too brother!!!
One way to help is getting real good at playing the classic 12 bar boogie bass line in time...Once you can do that in a solo context, you can begin to add "simple motifs" (nothing complex) to give it more structure, try to listen to your ideas in order to maintain logic between phrases and choruses. And try not to cram to many ideas into each chorus or that can easily throw off your timing, tempo, groove when learning to play solo harp :)
I still loose the beat (and my breath), but now I have a better timing (still bad, but better than one year ago)
I will try to update this thread once a year (if that is ok whit the mdoerators) so other begginers can have an idea of how much time and practice you need to become a good player.
I know some people can do it, but to me it seems unrealistic to think that you could 'just play the first thing that came to mind' and expect to produce anything decent that represented your playing and was worth uploading to the net. I know if I did, it would be rubbish. Some people have the gift of being able to spontaneously create music on demand. I suspect those people are quite rare. ---------- Lucky Lester
Taking resposibility for the beat is a lot of extra work for me and I'm more than happy to farm that out. I've had some good fun busking solo but I find it more exhausting than performing with others.
I've goofed around with a few instruments (ie guitar & piano) and tried to sing simultaneously. Invariably my vocals got choppy or my playing got sloppy. I think blending is a talent that is part natural and part discipline. Likely heavy on discipline. Props to all that do it. I am not that guy.
Time, as I've posted many times before, is a HUGE problem for harp players and one of the big reasons why harp players are gonna get dissed and it's something that EVERY harp player needs to work on. I had to work like hell every day to get that straight and then further refine it to knowing how to play right on top of the beat for certain genres as well as ahead for some other genres and for blues and black music in general, behind the beat.
Having that internal clock helps tremendously in being able to put something out right in the moment and when you're on a bandstand, counting out the time for the band to follow you has an importance that can never be overstated.
Lousy time means everything you play is totally grooveless and if there ain;t no groove, nobody is gonna be dancing, clapping their hands, tapping their toes at all. I've heard so many harp players tell me that once the groove kicks in, they can keep up with the time, but far too often, that is so NOT true at all and I can hear pretty quickly whenever any musician on a bandstand is screwing the time up. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
