From: ELDEREL~ol.com Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 17:23:44 EDT Subject: Re: ==Teaching Harmonica++++= << In a message dated 5/18/99 7:07:57 AM Central Daylight Time, jkiti~amilton-went.on.ca writes:
<< One thing my teacher, Carlos delJunco does is tape parts of our lesson so I can go home and listen to the lesson again and hear myself doing the things he was teaching, so I can do them at home again.
He also strongly urged me to get hold of a keyboard to be able to play a note I'm trying to bend so that my ear takes me there.
I was able to bend after just one lesson with him, so these things really worked for me.>>
Yea... I encourage my students to use a keyboard to play along side the bent note.... Its good to train the ear in the use of bending as early as possible. A lot of my students who have already picked it up before starting lessons think: "hey...some cool technique that moves the note.... Somewhere..." But mastering bending is imperative to getting clean and structured melodic lines. When someone bends that 3 down, trying to get the 2nd/A, but instead ... distorts to "donkey land from hell" ... and pretends it sounds good. That's bad ... its makes us all look bad. I think Charlie McCoy's music is the best stuff to practice to master bending ... especially for the beginner, because he normally stays in the melody...it makes it easier to distinguish one note from another. He's a very clean and technically perfect player... I love him. It must be awesome to have that dude as a teacher. If I ever moved to Canada.... Later... Pete
