|
beginner forum: for novice and developing blues harp players >
Bendometer App for phones
Bendometer App for phones
Page:
1
New but determined
12 posts
Nov 28, 2015
7:42 PM
|
Jason Ricci in one of his videos mentioned an app called Bendometer for practicing your bends. It's the most expensive App at $14.99 but I got it and then only got frustrated. Well I was practicing from Jon Gindick's book for hopeless musicians and I started doing repeated practice in the way Adam Gusso suggests practicing the two hole draw on a C harp. And I've kind of been all over the place with bends but tonight with the Bendometer I created chaos repeatedly and got the Bendometer to agree with my intentions, kind of ROFLOL, it's sure a good thing there are no dogs in my apartment building, they'ed hurt themselves howling!!!
Last Edited by New but determined on Nov 28, 2015 7:44 PM
|
MindTheGap
801 posts
Nov 30, 2015
1:19 AM
|
I tried that when I first started, I thought it was good.
I reckon the only music practice that sounds harmonious, as heard by someone else, is the piano. It's a lovely thing hearing someone from afar practising pieces, exercises and scales. Evocative like the sound of leather on willow wafting across the village green.
Most other instrument practice sounds horrible eh!? How about early-years trumpet or violin. Cello isn't so bad though, although a person can get fed up with hearing 'The Swan' from carnival of the animals.
But I think the sound of practising harmonica bends probably is a bit wild! Keep on it!
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Nov 30, 2015 1:21 AM
|
SuperBee
3003 posts
Nov 30, 2015
4:10 AM
|
I don't recall too much about draw bending..or maybe I mean the opposite...I remember too much about it because I did it for so long..it seemed to hit a plateau and stay there for years...then in a relatively short period it became much better. I honestly don't know if the exercises I did in the period leading up to the Great Leap Forward made the difference, but it could be reasonably assumed they contributed I think. I've detailed them elsewhere on this forum.
More recently...blow bends. I have a bunch of excuses to explain my tardy approach to the subject, but it boils down to just not practicing with any regularity and purpose. When I decided for the umpteenth time that I was gonna do it, I immediately set up to back out on strength of annoying everyone. But Som-bat was not having it...she said 'do it! I sleep...it makes me sleepy' I said "I don't think this will make you sleepy". She insisted though, so I went for it and true to her word there were no complaints...and unlike draw bends, the blow bends progressed quite quickly...maybe because I'd developed control of the relevant movements already...but the thing is, tolerance from those within earshot is a great thing when one is practicing
|
New but determined
14 posts
Nov 30, 2015
12:15 PM
|
Last night I used this app because I had learned how to do blow bends on holes 7 and 8. But when I checked the app, I was changing the sound yes, but I wasn't hitting another note, just bending it a little within the parameters of the note. So then I practiced draws on 1,2,3 and improved 2 which led me to be able to improve on 3, which was a bit of a mind switch because 3 has become a huge frustration, now it's just a medium one and less frequent. But more than that, it's teaching me what the bend is supposed to sound like.
|
SuperBee
3005 posts
Nov 30, 2015
1:41 PM
|
It takes a while. I believe the reason it takes a while is that it takes most people time to learn to engage the muscles involved, and some of those connections take a little time to get strong. This is where 'little and often' applies. There is no point exercising once fatigue sets in. Improvement occurs during recovery. Some of harp playing is physical. There are exercises designed to improve your awareness and help you train by giving you means of measuring success. There are also physical exercises which build your capacity to do thd thing you are training for. These exercises dont always look quite like the thing.
This is my personal opinion, only based on my experience of operating on a plateau for years and making a breakthrough which led to rapid improvement.
Training to hear and hit pitches accurately is important, but it can be frustrating if you dont have sufficient control of the process to be able to hit pitches accurately in yhe first place. In my view, the first stage of bending training should be to get control of the process. Teach your body what needs to be done to makd thd bend happen. When you can start with an unbent cllean note and then smoothly bend the pitch through a continuum to its lowest point and allow it back up smoothly to the original pitch, without jumps and gaps, then you can work on hitting the particular points of interest within that journey. Because when you can do that, you understand what is involved, you can apply control. Until you can perform that exercise on a pair of reeds, trying to hit particular pitches is fraught with frustration, hit and miss. I did it for years and improved only slightly. I took lessons from pro players, who prescribed exercises i could hardly do, so they didnt help much, until a great player spent time with me going through the exercise of learning the full range of the bend and working through the process of taking control. Once my brain understood the physical process in that intimate and automated way, i was at last able to begin improving my accuracy
|
SuperBee
3008 posts
Nov 30, 2015
6:31 PM
|
I really must add; I haven't taught anyone to play. What I have written above is part of my interpretation of a teaching method my tutor used and which I think benefitted me.
|
MindTheGap
802 posts
Dec 01, 2015
2:08 AM
|
Superbee - can you describe what your bending was like before and after the great leap forward?
And...'Som-bat'?
|
SuperBee
3011 posts
Dec 01, 2015
2:20 PM
|
Sombat is usually a male name in Thailand, but my partner is female...anyway, I'm very appreciative of her tolerance and even apparent appreciation of my noisiness. My preferred workspace is directly outside the bedroom...whenever I fret about making noise she assures me it makes her sleep. Once I asked 'how can you sleep when I'm making that noise'. She said 'it means you are home'.
Ah...my playing...before I could bend, I thought 'pretty well'. I could bend all draw notes but my blow bends were iffy. I wouldn't play a blow bend in a song, except the 10" and I'd be nervous about that.
I really didn't have a 2' I could use with any confidence at the time I spoke with Christelle. 3"' was a note I tried to avoid hitting when going for 3". Accuracy between 3' and 3" was dodgy. I could feel pretty confident of them both in particular songs, but moving between those notes was dodgy, and I played an exercise Christelle gave me to address that. The exercise made me much more aware of the difference but progress was very slow.
I became conscious of the 4' being commonly played very flat, and it bugged me. Still does when I hear it, and I hear it a lot. 2 draw also. Sometimes it's appropriate, but many players do it habitually. I realised I also did it habitually and worked at playing it 'above the floor'. My 6' was problematic. If I got it, it was usually flat and I couldn't seem to ease into it, it was just a sudden thing and flat.
After...i'm no longer daunted by the thought of 'tricky' bends. I'm sure I'm not always on pitch but I'm usually within 15 cents and it's somewhat relative to the rest of the harmonica anyway, or whatever your reference is...but I know my facility with playing bends is much better...and I attribute the change to the work I did with Jimi Lee on playing the full range of the bend in a smooth progression. He spent a lot of time after that, giving me exercises which required me to play 'challenging' pieces which were challenging due to the bent notes...'before' when I played those exercises I didn't get any better. 'After' I did get better.
Think about a physical exercise...say chin ups. If you can't do it at all, and you just dangle from the bar straining and not doing it...you can do that a long time without getting any closer to doing a chin up. If you go away and work on the elements of strength you need to be able to do 1 chin up, and return to the bar, able to do only 1 shaky chin up, you then have something to work with. And you can then make progress.
That's kind of how I see it. If your bending is like mine was...I could do it, I could play in a band and people would call my playing 'amazing'...drunk people usually...but I didn't have the real grip on the technique.
My blow bends...once I decided to do it they developed very quickly. The 10 is my weakness still, but I think I just haven't practiced enough.
Last Edited by SuperBee on Dec 01, 2015 6:00 PM
|
SuperBee
3013 posts
Dec 01, 2015
5:56 PM
|
I posted some recordings of my playing on a thread named 'sharing'
One is a fairly standard second position thing with only a few bends. The one called 'the tub' is a low octave 1st position song which uses the half steps in the 2nd chamber and the 3' and 3" extensively. David Barrett lists this in level 8 of the LOA programme. It uses a G harp. I would not have had a hope of playing this at my previous plateau level, although I did regularly play the other song I posted there (Gary's Blues...which is part of level 4).
The only reason The Tub is more 'advanced' than Gary's Blues is the bends required. These are all tongue blocked bends in both songs.
I'm not making any claim about the quality of my playing other than it has significantly improved in this regard. And that is very satisfying.
I realised that the exercise I described above is not the first step. And it's far from the last. I believe I went into some detail on another thread about bending.
Happily, I have video of all my early lessons with JL, so I expect I can review the process...not something to be undertaken totally lightly though, there is about 10 hours of video and lots of fat among the meat. If I was to put together a programme though, I think I could take a lot from these lesson recordings.
One thing though..,there is no single path...JL said to me that he was tailoring the way he delivered info and exercises to find what would work for me. He claimed to have several different approaches and he would roll them out and see if they worked, if not he would try something else...because students resonate with different approaches depending on what they already know or experienced they have had...brains are uniquely 'wired'...
|
SuperBee
3014 posts
Dec 01, 2015
6:09 PM
|
And...teachers have different ideas,
Iceman for instance, claims he can teach bending with accuracy quite quickly and I believe him. I don't think he teaches in the way I've described, but I'm not sure, because he only hints at his method. I gather it's about tongue placement related to pronunciation of particular sounds, and he may have particularly effective variation on that. It's a popular approach, which Dave Barrett uses and I confess I haven't really tried it. I expect it would work well once you put in enough time to make the connections so that it became automatic.
|
MindTheGap
807 posts
Dec 01, 2015
11:44 PM
|
Superbee thanks. I do understand your 'cross training' concept. I'm going to give that a go.
Re playing bends flat - that is definitely a blues harp thing though isn't it? I'm conscious of playing them differently in an actual melody vs a blues harp phrase.
Your recordings on 'sharing' - they are after the GLF, not before and after?
As you say, different ideas may chime with different people. I don't think the 'remember your tongue placement' would work for me because I have to listen to the pitch and make adjustments. Maybe he means you can get it roughly right that way, I can't see how you could do finely without some playing-listening-adjusting going on.
Analogy with the violin: there are mechanical things you do to get your fingers in basically the right place when shifting about, but you then fine-tune on the fly.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Dec 01, 2015 11:48 PM
|
Harmlessonica
167 posts
Dec 02, 2015
3:37 AM
|
I sometimes use a similar app called Harmonica Tuner, though I'm often playing low tuned harps which this doesn't support. But I'm still in the early stages of bending, and when trying a G or higher, the app is so much more intuitive and encouraging when you get the notes spot on.
I have to say with hindsight that for me all this talk about making certain sounds or vowel mouth shapes was totally counter productive. I saw so many tutorials which advocated anything from "koo-ee" to an impression of Darth Vader. The closest explanation that hit the mark for me was the humped tongue approach I read in the dummies book. But even then, the diagrams give the impression you need to engage the back of the throat and I was trying forever in vain to get anywhere.
I can't remember exactly when I made the breakthrough but what I was doing was exceeding the floor of the bend through trying too hard. Teachers tend to advocate C harmonicas, but when I do manage to bend on a C, my tongue is surprisingly far forward (on hole 4, say). Of course this is how the tongue feels to me, the actual position may be quite different.
The moral of the story is to have an airtight embouchure, start with your tongue close to your teeth, then very slowly pull your tongue (or the hump of your tongue) back, and pay close attention to how the sound alters.
That's my opinion anyway. Even if you do manage to get a bend through vocalisation, you still need to be conscious of what your tongue is doing so you can adjust for different holes or keys.
Good luck to anyone going through the same learning curve - and remember that sometimes you can learn more from failure than you can from success...
----------
Forum Search Direct Link
Last Edited by Harmlessonica on Dec 02, 2015 3:38 AM
|
SuperBee
3074 posts
Dec 14, 2015
2:04 AM
|
oh yeah they are both after...The Tub may maybe sound not so good...i accept its not the greatest, but the point is that its beyond anything i could've attempted before JL put me on the path...the bending required on that song is off the show...to my mind at least...the fact i can even play it as well as i demonstrate is amazing to me...thats the leap...even just the ending lick..and the penultimate chorus...which is the one i mess up by losing the time...playing that is a ball.
on a tangent...you know the tub is 1st position on a G harp...and thats my current craze...1st position i mean...so i studied adam's lesson on james cotton's "How long can a fool go wrong'...and like..its a challenging song sure enough if you dont have top end skills...but because i've worked on the blow bends albeit mindless mimicry...when adam points out that the 9 blow is the 5th...suddenly i made a connection and the notes of the top end began to untangle for me...i'm not saying my mental picture is crystal, but its definitely taking shape...
anyway probably wrong thread for this...
you know...i think of this forum as 'learners' rather than specifically 'beginners' but maybe thats not the right way to think...my point is that 'learning' is definitely my mode, but 'beginning' is not..perhaps i should take this over the way...
|
MindTheGap
868 posts
Dec 14, 2015
2:37 AM
|
This is place is for learners. It's impossible to find one pithy name that distinguishes the discussions.
Patterns of use emerge. For me, as not really a beginner but not experienced either, if I want to chew the cud about my playing or post something I think may be interesting to beginners, I'll post it here. Other things, especially questions to the grown-ups, go in the other place.
Questions about tube swaps: in the other place.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Dec 14, 2015 2:38 AM
|
Post a Message
|
