The Only Thing That Makes Harmonica Notes Bend
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- Опубліковано 21 бер 2019
- Richard Sleigh ( hotrodharmonicas.com ) makes it obvious that there is only one thing going on inside your mouth that causes harmonica notes to bend. He uses a slide whistle contraption connected to a key of F harmonica that shows what is going on inside your mouth that makes the reeds vibrate at different frequencies. If you teach harmonica, you can use this video to help you explain to your students what makes the notes bend...
Here is another video by Richard that goes into detail on note bending techniques-
How to Bend Notes on the Harmonica:
• How to bend notes on t...
Also - a free course on the fundamentals of playing the diatonic (blues) harmonica:
www.ultimateharmonica.com/p/t...
And a very in depth course on bending notes on the blues harmonica:
www.ultimateharmonica.com/p/t...
Plus articles and more resources at my website:
hotrodharmonicas.com
If I would pay anyone for a harp lesson it would be this guy, he has a true understanding of the instrument, and how wind instruments and reeds work in general, as someone who likes to learn exactly what is happening, this guy is great.
I totally agree with you
I really appreciate the fact that you built these tools to demonstrate this. Thank you very much.
best explanation ever in all UA-cam, thank you!!!! subscribed!!!!
As a scientist I truly appreciate this: finally somebody that does not just says something but demonstrates it with experimentation! Very cool.
Richard provides clarity to one of the hardest things to explain to students for we harmonica instructors. This will be played tonight at both of my classes. Thanks Richard!!!
Amen Henderson!
i am an amature chromatic this is the best explanation on bending i have heard i will save it cheers
Great vid! thanks Richard.👊🏼
I also experimented with 3d printing extensions that unfortunately change the volume before the reeds.
You need to do two things:
1. Control the volume (as you said)
2. Create a narrow bottleneck in the back of your mouth that decouples your lung volume from your mouth volume.
With a tube between your mouth and the harmonica at the right length, you can also create this bottleneck with your lipps, by creating a trumpet playing like lip-slot.
Did you share any of your project on the web anywhere?
Male 82 just bought hohner c big river m/s I'm glad I found you it's my first harmonica
Pretty cool : )
I JUST LOVE THIS MAN, STILL NOT ABLE TO BEND BUT THIS REALLY MOTIVATED ME, NOW I KNOW WHAT IM TRYING TO DO!
This is the most coherent and understandable explanation of learning to play this instrument. You have a new subscriber here, and thank you for your insightful explanation
This is the best explanation of bending I’ve ever heard.
Thank you! I am so glad to see this video after just beginning to learn how to play harmonica
Sir Richard, I think you could explain to me everything I never understood in my entire life; incredibly clear!
You are absolutely right on! I’ve have been trying to bend the lower scale#2 on a diatonic C harmonica and your right it’s a factor of mouth/tongue relationship. I haven’t found the right sound but once I do it’s a matter of doing exercises to strengthen that mouth memory. Basically doing exercises to make playing more automatic.. Great piece, I look forward to your channel.
It’s all based off of Bernoulli’s principle. Any restriction in the air flow, for example shrinking the size of the resonate cavity (your mouth), increases the “velocity” of the air. The pitch is directly related to the velocity of the air. By opening your mouth cavity your’e slowing the velocity of the air thus, lowering the pitch, when you close your mouth cavity you increase the velocity of the air, increasing the pitch. This guy explains it pretty well. We teach this same concept in playing duck and goose calls 😊
To me you've given the most understandable and helpful explanation of how to-thanks!
Breaking down the process of note bending in it's most rudimentary components. EXCELLENT
Excellent but simple to understand explanation for a difficult to achieve part of harmonica playing. Will start trying to bend notes with this concept in mind. Thank you.
Hello Richard, an excellent video on the theory behind bending. As a beginner I’m working on it. I get the bends 1, 2 and 1 on holes 1, 2 and 6 respectively, but struggle to get anything on hole 3. I’ll keep trying, in the meantime please do continue to make the videos. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.
I love this! I still can't bend, but this is very helpful. Thank you!
Hands-down, THE best video on bending I've watched.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I’m currently working on this.
Wow that is GENIUS contraption of the slide whistle harmonica demonstration.You really think deeply about harmonicas and out of the NORM..I love these ideas Richard great video.God continued Blessings on your life and music ministry...
And he thinks deeply about a lot of things and brings it all together so beautifully! Subscribing to his newsletter is a MUST!
thank you so much sir, the best explanation of ever, about harmonica bending notes
Fantastic demonstration! Thank you!
Nice video Richard. Thanks for being clear and concise. I'm subscribing.
Excellent and clear explanation.
thank you so much for sharing your knowledge sir.
And greetings from Brazil!
Very informative! I am recently toying with the idea of playing. This video sheds light on some helpful knowledge. Thanks !
That “Slide Tube” blew me away !!! What a teaching device…!!!…simplifying it… and now all you have to do is make your mouth do it….it’s not voodoo..!!…you don’t have to to go to the crossroads lol…that’s a relief !!!
Brilliant explanation. Thank you very much.
This is by far the best and clearest explanation of bending physics. Awesome gadgets too!
Thanks! It was an interesting process to come up with this gizmo... I'm glad you found it useful... If you want to do a deeper dive into bending, check out the Bending Course - www.ultimateharmonica.com/p/the-bending-course
Hi Richard, i appreciate the way you have explained.
Thank you, this video demystifies the whole concept to me.
Thanks! I got my first bend after seeing your video!
Brilliant explanation
Was very interesting and helpful, thanks
Cool demo Richard!
Awesome thank you Richard!
You sir are a musical scientist. Salute!
Excellent explanation, thank you so much for sharing!
Is that only it? I've been practising to bend the notes and no progress before I found this video for months.
And today, it's getting better and easier to make it. Thank, good man.
What a great lesson you give!
Excellent explanation and props the biggest thing that helped me was the kaaaa sound thank you
Thank you so much, never befor did i understand this concept!
That was educational. Thank you
Thank you for this!
Gracias por your Time and Ideas Greetings desde Chile
That’s the first explanation I have heard that makes sense
Hey Richard, thank you for this interesting insight. I‘m gone give a try. I hope it will be the key to a full scale. Greetings from Hamburg/Germany
That was brilliant, I understand so in the morning I'm going to get it at last...
Wonderful explanation! As someone who whistles a lot, this makes good intuitive sense. Essentially the reed is your lips, and you can change the pitch with your tongue just the same (though the reed is less-flexibly tuned to a single note). Follow-up questions: how do the different types of bends work, then, if they all operate on the same principle? Also, I thought the harmonica was constructed so that the draw and blow reeds would be activated on draw and blow. Physicallyl, how is the air making it to the opposite reed when you bend? How are the air chambers connected?
This is incredible 😮
Thanks for the excellent tutorial. Love you Sir
Thank you sir for your great efforts to demonstrate d method for bending.
just great concepts
Thanks so much!!!! Congrat for your videos!! Saludos desde Mexico City.
Fascinating. Charming. Brilliant.
That was great, made alot of sense, thanks!
Thanks for letting me know!
I understand that some use the back of the throat to create bends of which I cannot do. While lip pursing, I use the tip of my tongue to create draw bends on the low draw notes and the same for when I am blow bending on the high register . While tongue blocking, I use the same technique yet use the side of my tongue for draw bends , yet for high register blow bends I do go back to lip pursing. Thing is, there is more than one way to bend notes. I have used a tuner to check my bends, as well as using my ears and have them quite dialed in. Great video though
Wow, best harp lesson ever!
That reed prop was super cool.
Fantastic! Thanks!
Thank you, very useful explanation
Glad it was helpful!
Excellent! Really helped!!
Great - I am glad you found it useful...
This is a very useful tutorial! I subbed to your channel! Look forward to learning more from you! Greetings from India- Ranjani
Awesome! Thank you!
Thanks a lot for sharing u knowledge related to this great intrument like harmonica.
that plunger really proved the point, great job. but the question i still have is, does changing the size of the mouth cause the opposite reed to vibrate?
Dang I wish I could have all of the UA-cam creators explain this so well
This is the place where science and harmonica meet.
The K technique made it click for me. Thanks!
This guy's a legend
I had already learned what is covered in this video before viewing it, but still want to say that this video does a great job of making these concepts clear with good explanations, and clever useful demos. Good contribution to harmonica players.
I've pondered this for many years and this is an attempt to make it as clear as I possibly can. Thanks for your kind words...
Excellent
Great explanation and really appreciated the info about the effect going TOO far using the slide whistle example! Not I’ll stop trying to push my tongue out the back of my throat 😂
Nicely explained, thanks. Any idea why one hole wouldn't bend? Tried gapping but hole 3 on a Honer in A just won't go.
I wish I could like this video 5 times
Brilliant
No one else has ever put it that way before...
The thing that bends note is the change in velocity of air flow, which is controlled by the player.
excelent !
Genius!
Interesting. So both reeds are playing on a blow and draw?
What little bend I can achieve sounds like I am making a vowel sound, like talk thru the harp, and not really just dropping the pitch.
This guy should be named Richard Slay 🤘✨
OK .. i had to pause the video and laugh awhile when that giant reed suddenly appeared ... now I'm configuring a giant harmonica and realized you need giant slide whistle at each hole to bend notes ... and I'm late for this party, being 5years ago 😁
i TOTALLY AGREE WITH THE GENTLEMAN WHO WROTE HIS COMENTS IN THE SPACE BELOW. HE IS ABSOLUTELY "ON TARGET" WITH HIS OBSERVATION AND CHOICE OF THE TEACHER HE'D PAY FOR HARP LESSONS!!!!!!! I'D ALSO PAY MONEY FOR HIS TEACHING ME THE HARMONICA!!!!
I'm curious about bending and tongue blocking, how do you manage to keep the tongue on the face harmonica while using the tongue to change the size of the inside of your mouth?
I have another video that answers this question and gets into note bending techniques. Here is the link: ua-cam.com/video/AuaT42tPamQ/v-deo.html
The basic answer is that the tongue is a fantastically flexible muscle that can be expanded, contracted, hollowed out, raised to the roof of your mouth or packed down low to the floor of your mouth all while keeping the front of your tongue on the face of the harmonica. You will have to experiment to prove this to yourself, but once you get it, it blows your mind. I spent many years believing that bending notes while tongue blocking was impossible. Then I met Magic Dick and Pierre Beauregard and we talked about this. They proved to me that not only was tongue block bending possible, but could be raised to a high art. As soon as I saw them do it and then tried it myself and suddenly I could do it. So - step one - believe it is possible. Step two - keep telling your tongue to move this way and that, try everything you can till it works for you... Go for it!
Excellent video! I have a couple of questions.
1. When you bend a note, let's say a draw bend, why does the other reed (in this case, the blow reed) also vibrate?
2. If you play a clean draw or blow note without bending, does the other reed vibrate as well or does this happen only when you bend?
3. On low notes (e.g. +1, -1, +2, -2 on an A harmonica), I feel like I do something different to make them sound strong compared to higher notes. I suspect that what I do is I make them bend just a tiny bit. So, anyway, the question is - when you play a low notes such as these, do both reeds vibrate or only one reed?
bought a harmonica last night, watche4d tons of videos but couldnt bend, this is the video i was looikiing for, i was wanting to know *how* the bend is accomplished (in terms of physics) the flute example helped
anyways, I did it. i did A bend, the next morning after buying first harmonica, i cant do it again and im getting frustrateD (but staying relaxed) but I just wanted to say
pffft hahaha i knew i could do it immediately if i try hard enough B)
Would it be possible to make a harmonica with reeds that can bend all notes like a trombone?
This seems simple, yet I don't think it is nearly this simple; for one thing, the blow and draw reeds in each chamber affect whether a bend is even feasible. This changes relative to which key harp is used, and the same pitch note on one harp may be an easy draw bend, the exact same note on a different key, still draw, may be trickier. I feel it is a complex interaction of yes, the mouth acoustics, but also the constriction/"contortion" of the air at the area of the mouth just behind the harmonica that makes for a pressure change. Players like Sonny Boy Williamson made the same bent note sound shallow and tinny, or deep and resonant, depending on constricting or opening the mouth and throat - which by the slide whistle analogy should have forced a pitch change as the mouth acoustics were opened or closed.
Why I bend changing the angualation of airflow and the size of the holes, not increasing or decreasing mouhchamber ?
ok that giant reed got me 😂😂
Damn! I understood right now, how bending works. Thank you! I thought, bending is caused by the air speed change. Stupid me. :) Thanks again!
took me a whole minute to notice the giant harmonica behind him
Great demonstration Richard. But I think you got a detail wrong. I believe that you are cancelling a note, when you bend or play overblow (or use slidewhistle) . I'm thinking on a helmholtz resonator or a muffer on a car's exhaust system.
Hey Richard. Do you think this concept still works and applies to a completely isolated reed? (Only one reed in one channel)
Video: The harmonica reed starts vibrating
Me: insta sub
Superb! 👌🏻 Is it possible to bend in any harmonica? If yes then why do they make special chromatic harmonicas that allow bending?
There are some harmonicas that are almost impossible to bend notes on. Tremelo harmonicas are a good example. Some chromatics are half valved - this means that they don't have valves for all the reeds, and that allows you to bend some of the notes like a blues harp, double reed bends. The standard chromatic harmonica has valves on almost all reeds. This isolates one reed at a time. You can bend a single reed, but it is harder than bending notes in a blues harp with no valves. This topic would take a lot of space to cover completely, but the short answer is the easiest notes to bend on harmonicas are on diatonic harmonicas.
@@richardroysleigh Thanks! Over here (in India) we often use a very basic 24 hole chromatic for beginners. It’s very cheap and has no valves. I’ll try on it. Basis what you’ve said, in theory it may work.
Sleigh Queeen!!! 💅🙌
Spectometer and Bending _ I was asked to provide a video of a spectrometer I used as part of this argument, perhaps as an attempt to discredit me, but I am responding as if the request was more generous. I cannot provide the video as I don't have the equipment, but you can easily see and use the same spectrometer I use for free, and quickly see the same result. Get the free app for your phone called PitchLab Lite (I have Android phone). There are several spectrometer choices in the app, but the one you want has horizontal bars with all the notes in an octave displayed from top to bottom of the screen, and in the absence of you making any noise has a multicolor squiggle of many lines scrolling left to right filling the screen from top to bottom, which is a representation of white noise that you may not actually be able to hear. The pitch of any singing or harmonica sound you make immediately overwhelms the white noise and is represented by a single line showing the pitch, in real time, with no noticeable delay, and with a short period of history due to the scrolling. Some information on tone is also visible as wavering of the line. This is by far the best and easiest app to monitor and train harmonica bending or voice pitch I have ever seen, and I have always thought that if harmonica instructors are not using it for their students, they are handicapping their students, A LOT. It works with complex sounds - even motorcycle screams are rendered as one or two pitches, depending on how many cylinders and whether they have, for example, a 270 degree firing order (which produces a nice I-iV two note chord due to the mathematical offset in firing,) with pitch dependent on rpm. While tone is largely subjective to humans, pitch is not, and the spectrometer records pitch, your ear interprets tone. A C reed blows a C if blown by a little kid to an adult, and mouth volume and any shape differences I can manage make some but very little difference on pitch. While I don't know what causes bending, whatever it is needs to explain why lower pitched harmonicas are so much easier to bend. I have wandered through this problem intellectually for quite a while, and there is some kind of wave interaction/resonance, but if it is your organ pipe/pennywhistle standing wave hypothesis or a resonance with vocal chords or another idea (see below) I can't figure out with certainty. From other people's usual "hypothesis" based on narrowing air passages and my own bending attempts, I suspect it is the dramatic creation of standing waves of the sort so familiar to canoeists when they encounter waves when a river narrows through a rapids. I do not know the math for this phenomena, and therefore do not understand it. My simple attempts to prove it using a spectrometer been promising but a little less conclusive than I like due to the fact the hiss of narrowing air passages during the inhale is weak and seems to be loudest in the throat, and I can't see my phone against my throat, my eyes being where they are and all and this not being a professional investigation with enslaved graduate students to help ,and I have to use mirrors. However, this hiss does seem to have a distinct and changeable frequency embedded in a lot of white noise, indicating that it MIGHT be involved in bending. Lots of experience with standing waves in areas of increasing flow and restricted passage in many situations leave no doubt that the hiss MUST have distinct wavelengths alterable by flow and channel characteristics - all fluids behave like that. Also, interestingly, if I really push it I can on an inhale get a faint single frequency from my vocal chords during an inhale, if the phone is against my throat, indicating some kind of resonance might be involved there. Dang, it's a sad fact that most new hypothesis prove wrong or oversimplifications, I've suffered through that fact my whole life, and I am looking for confirmation and consensus as always before looking for my Nobel. I suggest you take a similar dim view of proof.