{"id":65,"date":"2011-03-05T02:31:47","date_gmt":"2011-03-05T02:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimsharmonica.posterous.com\/lesson-1"},"modified":"2017-03-10T14:22:04","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T22:22:04","slug":"lesson-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/lesson-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, back to basics. Yesterday I received JP Allen’s “Complete Play at Home Video Harmonica Lessons for Beginners and Non-Musicians”. It’s a set of 11 DVDs and CDs. Check it out at\u00a0Harmonica.com<\/a>. I’ve really been looking forward to getting started.<\/div>\n

Anyway, one of the first lessons is to play along with a guitar practicing a simple phrase of draws and blows. I played along with JP on the DVD, but then I wanted to see if I could play the guitar as well. So, I found a free app for the iPad called “Classical Guitar<\/a>“. Here’s what it looks like:<\/div>\n

\"Classical-guitar-app\"<\/div>\n

You can strum and switch chords. Cool. I connected the headphone jack of the iPad to the Audio Input of my MacBook and recorded a guitar track in Garageband. I don’t play guitar. I had to learn a basic strum pattern and chord sequence, but that was easy to do by watching a few YouTube videos on how to play the guitar.<\/div>\n

I then recorded the harmonica on a separate track in Garageband. Along the way I learned how to pan each track so the guitar is a bit on the left and the harmonica is a bit on the right. I also learned how to set effects for each track (a little reverb). I then saved the mix as an mp3 file to iTunes.<\/div>\nhttps:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/audio\/harp1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

Note<\/b>: Garageband lets you change tempo. So, you can record at say 60 bpm and then speed it up to 120 bpm. I didn’t do that with this recording, but it’s handy to know that it works with audio recordings without changing the pitch.<\/div>\n

I also found a good site for free lead sheets called “Wikifonia.or<\/a>g”. They have all kinds of music available as PDF files. The music has melody and chord changes as well as lyrics. This will be great for playing duets once I get good enough on the harmonica.<\/div>\n

Jim<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, back to basics. Yesterday I received JP Allen’s “Complete Play at Home Video Harmonica Lessons for Beginners and Non-Musicians”. It’s a set of 11 DVDs and CDs. Check it out at Harmonica.com. I’ve really been looking forward to getting starte…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-65","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-harmonica","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3xTIN-13","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1690,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/1690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimblodget.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}