Straight Harp Playing Tips on Harmonica

Video Transcript

On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Eric Williams and I'm here to talk to you about beginning harmonica. Okay, now that we've learned to play scale we're ready to maybe try some songs in what's called straight harp. Straight harp is the more traditional old time songs, campfire songs, cowboy songs, folk songs, they're almost always in what they call straight harp. What that means is you're taking the harmonica and you're playing a song in the same key as what the harp is labeled. This is the G harp so you play a song that's hopefully in the key of G and you use a lot of the same notes of the scale that I just played earlier and what you do is you hopefully play single notes whenever possible and you play the melody of a song in just a nice plain straight forward honest heart felt manner. Let me try to demonstrate, see if you know this song. So, I did that in mainly single notes but there were a couple of places where I harmonized on purpose so it wouldn't just be all single notes all the way through. I tried to put a little bit of flavor on a couple of those. The famous song of Shenandoah. So that's one of the most commonly played on a harmonica. That's a pretty good example of straight harp I hope it helps.

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