The pull-off is a special type of tongue blocking move, where you block all the holes before pulling your tongue of the harp, creating suction that results in a percussive attack when you remove your tongue and sound the inhaled chord.
In Harmonica For Dummies, Second Edition, I show the technique using animated video, and also use it in two licks that I demonstrate in an audio track.
The video demonstration:
And the audio demonstration of using it in a musical context:
There's also a pull-off that I used lip-pursing, where you touch the tip of your tongue to a single hole and pull off aggressively, in a way that slightly bends or lowers the pitch of the note before sounding it. So there's no chord-sound or "dirt" of the type that accompanies TB. Just a "thwap" sound on one note.
Hey Winslow, can you give any clues as to how to generate the Stevie pizzicato technique? Can you do it? Can you teach someone by Skype how to make that sound? TIA
Although the Stevie pizzicato as heard in the clip at about 0:38 is not a tongue blocking technique, it is related to a pulloff as it also utilizes suction.
To do it (or to get as close as I can), I place the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth directly at the base of my upper front teeth as if to make a T sound.
However, if I simply tongue the notes with a T articulation, I won't get that popping, quick-decaying sound that Stevie gets. This takes an extra ingredient.
To get the sound, I don't inhale. Instead, I create suction in my mouth, which pulls part of the front part of the tongue onto the roof of my mouth.
When I pull my tongue away, the note sounds with slight explosion from the built-up suction. The tongue-far-forward brightens the sound, but the fact that I'm not inhaling, just using mouth suction, allows the note to die away quickly, like a plucked violin string. =========== Winslow
After some practise this evening, I realised the way I often experiment with vamping is pretty much what Pull-offs are all about. I'd probably call it a 'hard lift' or something personally, but that's just semantics at the end of the day.
I see it as akin to a regular hand wah-wah compared to one where you put extra tension on your hands just before the release; the effect is similar but with more contrast.
Definitely a useful technique for interesting accent or syncopation.
