The Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing the Harmonica, 2nd Edition [With CD]

by Randy Weinstein and William Melton

Book Overview

The harmonica is one of the most basic and traditional musical instruments in America. Millions are sold each year, but precious few high-quality, comprehensive instructional books exist on how to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592574653
• ISBN13: 9781592574650
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Alpha Books
• Length: 247 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.6" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

Makes learning from scratch (at least seem) easy...

This is the only Harmonica book I own so I don't have much to compare it with and I am only on chpt. 4 but I am definately liking this book. It introduces you to the world of the harmonica in a way that doesn't make you feel like a COMPLETE idiot, and that its ok to be totally ingnorant about the subject. So far, I feel that all my questions and doubts are being addressed, and even those I hadn't thought of. It is an easy read and even makes me chuckle every so often, not at all tedious. A good buy, worth every cent...so far.

If you really want to learn to play....

I really like this book. I have been playing around with the harmonica for a couple of years but had never taken lessons or tried an instruction book. This book helped me understand the mechanics and improve what I thought I already knew, like bending notes and tongue blocking. But it also does a good job of explaining some of the more advanced aspects of playing the harmonica like playing different positions and chord progressions. The chapter on playing blues was the clearest explanation I've seen on the underlying fundamentals.

The best that's out there

This was one three harmonica instruction books I bought, and clearly the best. for the best part is its organization, which is easy to follow even for a beginner. It has the usual Complete idiot's Guide structure which emphasizes making it easy to read and find things, like a complete index, easy to read forma, and tips and tricks which are hi-lighted. The resource guide at the end is also useful and gives you additional instructional material, harmonica websites and organizations, magazines and places to purchase harmonicas, etc.

Surprisingly good instruction

If you tried Jon Gindick's harmonica technique (he wrote a simple method and bundled it with an inexpensive harmonica in the Klutz books series) you might find you are interested in learning more. There are a lot of books on harmonica method, and they range from too simple to too complicated. This book is surprisingly good. It covers what harmonicas to purchase (and the advice is good, the listing of brands fairly complete.) There is a section on bending notes, an essential technique for getting more notes out of a diatonic harmonica and for creating a bluesy sound. The best chapter, for me, was on the structure of 12-bar blues with an explanation of the "call-and-response" structure. It's easy to understand and essential for structuring your blues riffs to make musical sense. There's also a fine chapter on the etiquette of jamming with harmonica when you join up with a guitarist, singer and other instrumentalists. The harmonica plays support, mostly, but does get to solo. When should you chime in and when do you fade to the background? This chapter tells you how not to make a fool of yourself.The only thing this book doesn't have is a CD with guitar or piano for jamming along with. If you are getting started in harmonica, especially blues harp, you will need some CD's, especially of the greats like Little Walter and Charles Musselwhite, to provide examples. You can't listen enough to get the ideas down. But this book is a really worthy text to go along with your practice.