Shenandoah

First a little background. Shenandoah was one of the first songs I learned to play way back when I was 13 or 14 years old. I’m playing it now on the same 10 hole Hohner Chromatic “C” harmonica I had back then. I’m using the tongue blocking technique to play single notes.

I found the sheet music for Shenandoah on the Wikifonia.org website. The cool thing about this site is that you can transpose the music into any key. It was  originally in the key of D with two sharps. I have a “C” harmonica so I transposed the sheet music to the key of C.

Notice the music gives the guitar chords. So, I was able to use the Smart Guitar instrument in Garageband on the iPad to create the guitar accompaniment. I set the the Tempo to 68 beats per minute. I then used my Blue Snowflake USB microphone to record my harmonica in a second track. I did it in real time with no editing. This took a fair amount of practice and several tries. I had to learn to play to a metronome and accompaniment. It takes some getting used to playing in time with feeling and dynamics. I used headphones and monitored both the guitar track and the microphone.