Learning Melodies

Overview | Melodies of the player | Next

This course contains some simple melodies with music notation and notation in the bottom which whole to blow in. Uppward arrow means blow, while downward arrow means draw.

Learing directly by listening

The best way to learn music is if you actually can avoid to read the sheets. Especially for the blues harp where the music reading will depend on which harp you have. The harp is so simple that you should be able to learn a melody just by listening. Start by learnign jsut the first couple of notes, and then build up the melody by adding note by note. It is good to have a player with an A-B-function that can be used to learn melodies.

If you are intereted in a lot of simple melodies that can be played on harmonica you may visit spillefolks.dk

Note that the scandinavian music found you find there,the key is often changing from part to part, so you will be able to play the full melody having 2 or 3 harmonicas handy and changing in between the differnet parts.

You may download the player if you want to use the play slow function and the A/B repeat function on your own mp3 files.

Video Manual to the player (in danish!)

Not all melodies may be played on a diatonic harp.

The harp is for playing simple melodies, as soon as you are having "chromatic notes", that is notes from different scales, you cannot play it on the diatonic blues harp.

Melodies in minor cannot be played

Some times you can actually play a minor melody. For example A-minor can be played on a C-harp. But ofthen mionr melodies are modulated in a way that makes it impossible to play on a harp. There are minor harps on the market, but even then not all meloldies may be played. The mionr harps are typically in harmonic minor, and if the melody is in melodic or "natural" minor, it cant be played.

Oh Sussana harp learning team on the island camp Lyø 2009