How to Play Harmonica Blues

Hi, everybody. Welcome to onlinelessonvideos.com. My name is Sandy Weltman. Today’s lesson is called Intro to the Blues and it’s for the beginning harmonica player at level one to two. We’re going to be use a harmonica in the key of C. Some of the things we’ll be learning today are the blues scale and also about harmonica positions, and we’re going to learn a song called the “Harmonica Boogie” So if you haven’t already printed out everything, go ahead and do that and then we’ll go ahead and get started.

Okay. So what we’re going to learn right now is a blues scale which is a very important scale to play blues with on the harmonica. And the blues scale I'm going to teach you I call the “the fake blues scale.” And the reason I'm showing you the fake blues scale is because I have to charge more to teach you the real blues scale. Just kidding.

So anyway, we’re going to learn the fake blues scale because some of the notes that we need for the real blues scale, we’re not able to access yet because those are on what's called bent notes. So, let’s go ahead and take a look at the fake blues scale.

So here’s the fake blues scale. Going up it’s G, B, C, D, F, G. Notice it’s a five note scale, you repeat the G at the other end of it, and that’s going to be two draw, three draw, four blow, four draw, five draw, and then six blow. So let me play it first so you can hear what it sounds like. I'll play it going up and then going down.

Next, I'm going to teach you five one measure blues licks that fit in to any 12 bar blues progression. They sound really great, they don’t have any bends in them and they’re based on that fake blues scale that we did earlier. And if you go ahead and look at each of licks, you’ll notice that they each have 10 notes to them and the first nine notes are subdivided into groups of threes, and that’s because the rhythm on each of these is going to be in what’s called triplets. So, the notes would be counted off as one, two, three, two, two, three, two, two, three, three, two, three, and one. That’s going to be the rhythm of each lick, and as we go along and do it, it will make more sense when you hear me do it.

So I'm going ahead and go through each lick slowly and you can play along with me. And then at the very end, I'm going to play each of the licks against 12 bar blues progression with our rhythm track and that give you an idea of how to use them. Make sure, too, that you play this licks at your pace, in your temp. You might need to stop the video for a while and practice it and then move on and play them along with me and then move on to the next licks. So here we go.

Here’s lick number one. I'll go ahead and play it through a few times so you can hear it then I'll do it at another time slowly, then, we can play four times together with the click track slowly. And now click track four tenths, one, two, three.