I'm not sure if "lip blocking" is an accepted technique or not, but it's what I do. The tilt on my harp is beyond 45 degrees. When I play a single note, the holes on either side are blocked by my lower lip. When I want to play a double stop or chord, my lower lip falls open a bit more. Actually a very subtle change and no pucker shape to it.
Anyway, it was embarrassing to be in a pretty good band, and then when someone asks you to do something by yourself, all you can play is melody lines from popular songs. I had to learn some rhythm harp!
Pretty tough to do for a lip blocker but I keep at it. Since I don't use tongue, I get percussive licks from hand, breath pulses, the "tah" sound and "kah" sound (you can replace the "a" with any vowel).
I've also struggled with rhythm playing when I have no band or backing track. Wished I had worked on it sooner.
I've played this at a couple open mics. Still hear a few rhythm glitches but I think my lip block tone has improved.
I AM trying to learn tongue blocking, so I threw in some. Tongue Blocking is from 1:20 to 2:28. Tongue doesn't touch the harp before 1:20 or after 2:28.
Sounds good to me. I'm not sure what lip block is but I have seen the term before. Playing sounds nice esp the rhythms (something I need to work on) I listened for the tongue block section, it's not quite a smooth as the lip block section, but I wouldn't have known you were switching techniques if you hadn't of mentioned it. Good luck
Sounds good. (Of course, nothing wrong with whipping out some pop melodies either! My problem is I can remember melodies but can't remember the whole structure of the song. I play a verse, people get set to sing along and I don't know if I should be doing another verse or going into the chorus.)
(And I definitely think there should be a distinction between lip pursing vs. lip blocking, at least for descriptivists.)
Cool stuff, harp dude! Have you ever seen that DVD by Madcat called "rhythm harp"? He's a lip player too, and he begged a good technical overview of one way for lip players to do heavy rhythm stuff. I learned a lot from that DVD, although eventually as I developed my own lip based rhythm style, I ended up doing some things my own way (ie. the" lip slap" I've talked about before...) ----------
