WinslowYerxa
1011 posts
Jan 07, 2016
2:31 PM
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Here are a couple of recent recordings I made in fourth position on chromatic.
Fourth positions defaults to the A natural minor scale, though you can alter it to any scale you want. The minor pentatonic is a subset of the natural minor, and with one slide-in note, Eb, you can alter it to a six-note blues scale.
Fourth position does not give you a home chord. The notes of an A minor chord are A-C-E. The draw notes, however, are A, B (s semitone below C), D, F (a semitone above E). So you have to give up playing a big home chord. But this position offers plenty of other goodies.
The first tune, Blue Rant, is a 12-bar blues in A minor patterned on “The Thrill is Gone.” I spend much of the tune playing the A blues scale, though I use the D Dorian scale as well. The last 4, instead of going E7 - D minor - A minor, goes F major 7 - E minor - A minor.
I use a lot of corner switching on this one. With G and A in the left corner and D and C in the right corner, I can play a lot of different combinations of these four notes, though I also use various tongue blocked chords during the D minor chord.
Note that at the tag near the end, I do a fast octave flick from D up to the highest D. The highest D on the chromatic is a slide-in note (it replaces the slide-in C so as to extend the range an extra semitone). This flick allowed me to at least play a “broken” octave and sounds like something you’d hear a tango player do.
Blue Rant
The second tune, “Under the Marine Layer,” is something I composed after the 2015 SPAH convention, armed with a 2-octave CME XKey keyboard I’d acquired there - I used it to lay down the non-harmonica parts. Again, it’s in A minor. It has a repeating descending chromatic line of A - G# - G- F#. While I lean on the A natural minor scale, I also use chromatic notes to fit in with this line.
Under the Marine Layer
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Winslow
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Last Edited by WinslowYerxa on Jan 13, 2016 10:29 AM
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