Has anyone ever jammed on their harp with a band? Maybe it was at someone's house, or a downtown festival, or in a coffeehouse or something?

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that you probably did not play the whole song- maybe just a "riff" or a "hot lick" or short solo.

I think that it would be really cool to get to the point where I would be invited to jam with some other musicians.

-rufus

It is dead easy to jam with a band.

Start with a pet guitarist and get him or her to play a simple, single key chord progression, 12 bar blues is a good start. Its regular, so allows you to practice repetative riffs.

Then blow and suck on the correct key harmonica. Experiment. Play rhythym on one note. One chords. Play melody. play riffs.

Because it is diatonic, you cannot play a wrong note. You can then play the blues scale against the progression, for a bit of a laugh. After five minutes you sound good. Honest.

Playing with more than one other instrument starts getting abit difficult without amplification. Drummers never play quiet. Bass guitarists always want to be lead guitarists and play too noisy. And keyboard players steal your riffs. But it is still fun.

But isn't amplification easy? A mic held to your harp connected to an amp?
I have already tried it with an old karaoke machine and ta-daa! I was amplified.

My "pet guitarist" would be my 16 year old son. I am still working on him about this.

My homebuilt amp is a joke but it works to give an amplified sound. I have an old mic element. The mic itself was damaged so I just took the element out. It's wired with an old mouse cord to a 7 watt amplifier do it yourself kit that I bought that's currently powered by a 9V battery. Again another old mouse cord connects the amplifier to an old 6x9 car speaker. Nothing pretty or high tech but it works.

Trying to duplicate a blues sound you hear in an MP3 file without amplification is very hard. You could be hitting the right notes but it still won't get that good amplified wailing sound.

I've only been practicing for a few months and I've never jammed with anyone, I'd say the key thing to do is to know some simple riffs. A C harp can sound good with these. I like practicing this a lot although it's more of an ending riff than a jamming riff. It sounds better on my C Blues Harp than it does on my C Golden Melody.

Single number = blow
negative number = draw
B = bend

6 -5 (-4B-4) 4 3 (-3B-3) 3

The notes in the brackets means you start with a draw bend and end with a simple draw. The deeper you can get the bend, the better it sounds. Warble the last note with your hand. I also open my hand up as I come out of the draws. Using Bendometer to see my progress, I can pull an A out of the 3 bend but can't reach that A flat yet. I also can't get a clean C sharp from the 4 bend.

Another very simple riff is

4 -5 5 4
Repeating it with a slight modification for a beat gets
4 -5 5 4 4 4 4 -5 5 4 4 4 4 -5 5 4 etc

I also found this the other day and thought it could be very helpfull
[www.pgmusic.com]
It's a program called band in a box. The demo page allows you to listen to 101 different riffs however I can't find any way to save them to my own computer. All the save options are disabled by the web site. I was listening to all the blues piano riffs. Each riff will play 10 times giving you more than enough time to add in your own harp notes. I have my media player set up to loop so it's just continuous anyway.

Thanks, this seems real practical.

-rufus