Caring for Your Harmonica

Part of the Video Series How to Play the Harmonica

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Play the harmonica like a Blues Brother; learn the proper way to break in and care for your harmonica in this free video harmonica lesson.

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Tags: harmonica, harp, jazz, train
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Video Transcript

Caring for Your Harmonica
This is Jim Luke again and we were asked about care and feeding of the harmonica. When I was young and crazy I would put my harmonicas in tequila and use that. And the reason was because the tequila didn’t have a tendency to swell the wood nearly as bad as putting them in water or beer. However, over the years I’ve found that really the best thing to do is just to break your harmonica in gradually; like playing the shuffle and the train. And the other things we’ve talked about earlier to break your harp in gradually even before you start bending your notes. The whole idea is that if you train and temper the reeds in the harp it will last a lot longer than putting it in beer or other substances. So, the idea then to take your harp just try to keep it unclogged by tapping it when you are done playing once or twice like that and of course getting a nice rag, a dry rag to clean it off with. Get something with a real close weave so you don’t have little threads hanging out of your harmonica. So anyway yeah you can get what they sometimes refer to as a jazz rag, right and use that. Keep your harp clean; other than that there is very little you need to do to care for it. Keep it out of the water. Thanks a lot.

About the Expert

Expert: Jim Luke has been a bandleader, harmonica player and singer for over 30 years. Read More