Did anybody here buy Howard Levy's new harmonica book? In it, Howard takes a rhythmic approach and likens harmonica to playing drums. It seems like an interesting idea, because a lot of existing materials seem to emphasize pitches and patterns. There's not a lot of harmonica material that goes into the rhythmic possibilities.
Howard is a masterful and innovative player, no doubt. From my experience with his ArtistWorks harmonica course, though, he suffers in explaining his methods. He's not as good a teacher as someone like David Barrett or Dennis Gruenling.
Did you buy this book? What do you think about it?
This isn't about playing blues specifically, of course, and he does use rhythmic notation (after all it's all about melodic rhythm and a precise way of indicating it is required) along with tab.
He first expressed the idea to me back in 1995 when he reviewd the songbook for the Blues Traveler CD "four" for which I'd done the harmonica tab. He notices that Popper's rhythms often seemed to correspond with drum rudimints known as paradiddles. From there he he developed the idea and voila - nearly 30 years later, this book.
Just got it a few days ago so just starting to get into it. I like the way he explains some of his other rhythm stuff in his videos so looking forward to this quite a bit.
I just received my copy today. Of course I haven’t had time to apply any of it yet but the exercises look interesting and I’m looking forward to getting started on it. It’s definitely a different approach than I’ve ever taken but I don’t see how it couldn’t help but to improve my playing.
As a guitarist and long time Hendrix fan I’ve always enjoyed his rhythmic drum type approach to his playing but never thought to apply it harp until Howard’s book. I’ll report back later after I’ve had time to check it out thoroughly.
