Recommendations regarding exercises & practise routines.
First and foremost!
With or without your instrument, PRACTISE TIMING!
I cannot make this clear enough.
Without good timing you have nothing, its like building a
house of cards on a windy sand dune, one gust and you're out of the game.
With a well developed sense of timing you can trip up, yet easily step right back in again with the beat. With well developed timing you can fit in with most song styles easily. With well developed timing, you're more likely to be respected as a musician.
For six months make it a habit to tap in time to anything that has a regular beat. The radio, Television, Movie theme song, tap your toe, the CD you're listening too, your metronome, puff air in & out in time, advertisement jingles, walk to a beat, click your fingers to a rythm, Muzak in the lift, irritating dripping of water, a horse walking along the road, tap your finger, the annoying click of the stone stuck in your car's tyre, click your tongue, washing machine through all its cycles... absolutely anything with a regular beat.
Do try different rythms, swing, shuffles, tango, rock & roll, a variety of rythms, keep an ear out for styles of music outside your norm, even just for their rythm or groove and try and work with it in your head, or click your fingers with it. Then when you've got a regular beat to practise with, try working in that rythm into it, or work in a different groove to that beat ... and keeping it going, work on maintaining it for a period of time so your body has a chance to learn from it.
I promise you if you make this a commitment to yourself, musicians will commend you on your timing at the end of it.
The overnight secret that changed me from a struggling beginner to a performing musician was that you can play a bunch of really bum notes throughout a song, but if your timing is impecable... it will still sound great.
I have personally found this is something requiring ongoing maintenance, if your playing lapses, do keep some sort of timing exercise in your routine to maintain a sharp edge.
Breath Control is a very important part of playing harmonica well.
It pretty much comes second to timing because it is so closely linked to it.
But in addition your breath capacity limits how long you can hold a note or how strongly you can play a note.
Your ability to control your breath limits how gently you can play a note,
it controls how quickly you can play a complex pattern of draws & blows in a fast run.
Without good breath control you cannot keep time and play what you want to how you want to.
You must develop your diaphragm control & strength as well as increase your breath capacity so you may become a good harmonica player. Especially if you want to enjoy it!
In "Creative Stuff", "Healthy Harps" is an article on the positive effects of playing harmonica on people with athsma or respitory ailments.
A good start is to make it a part of your morning and nightly routine when you're waking up or settling down lying in bed: to do five minutes relaxed breathing exercises.
I also find panting a good exercise for developing an ability to keep rhythm. Another one is try using your diaphragm to fill up with air through your nose as quickly as possible. Then let air out through your mouth as slowly and as evenly as possible. After doing this a few times, try reversing it so you draw in slowly through your mouth and expel air through your nose as quickly as possible. Be careful not to block your ears doing this.
In the contents go to "For Starters", "instruction" and have a look at the books recommended.
The Harmonica Educator series is focused on a thorough education for the harmonica
as well as a full instruction method on learning to read music incluing many practise routines,
advanced techniques and full range of ensembles.
It is a thorough, serious contemporary approach to learning to read & play music.
Play the Harmonica Well is a very well presented chrom education book,
and easy to follow.
All the books under "instruction" go several steps beyond this website.
I highly recommend looking into them.
Another suggestion is to work out your own routines and tailor them to your requirements. What are you learning at the moment. What are you having trouble with and need to practise. Make up a series of exercises that challenges you, pushes you but set your goals to an atainable level so you are encouraged by the end of each session.
Scour music shops & second hand book stores for woodwind scales & appegio exercise books. You want single note instrument with a similar range to your chromatic. For instance flute has the same range as the standard key of C 12 hole chrom. Other suggestions are violin, oboe, clarinet. I even have such a book for the piano, naturally I haven't got the same range, but the exercises can be amended easily enough, I purchased this one for my 16 hole chromatic practises.
It is better to practise for 10 minutes a day, than for four hours on Sunday afternoon.
Ideally the more time you can practise on a regular basis the better.
There is a lot to learn and especially when you are starting out you can actually overload
your body & mind and actually stop learning if you keep at it doggedly.
If you are tired, fustrated, feel soreness then stop and rest. Take it up later.
Maybe intersperse your day with with short practise runs.
Learning a song is a good way to give yourself an achievable goal. Start easy and work your way up in difficulty as you feel comfortable.
I found keeping your chrom with you at all times is a great way to find time to learn, you can grab a couple of minutes here and there to practise a technique or a run. After a couple of months you'll be amazed how far you come.
When your timing is good, start noodling around scales and make stuff up without knowing what you are exactly doing. :-)
Try putting on a CD you like on and use your air and see if you can work out what key its in by looking for the tonic note, if you're really stuck then fast forward to the end song and find out what the last note that the song effectively resolves on, giving it that complete feeling. That note is the key the tonic note the song is in, but then you'll need to work out the scale as well (see "Music Theory I & II").
Even if you don't know the scale or key on your chromatic with trial and error, finding what notes fit and which don't with enough trys at it you'll start to find a series of notes you can play and sound good with the song. Have fun and play around with it, experiment.
Its quite something to really learn a song and 'make it your own'. This is my response to someone asking how to learn a song note for note:
Break the song down into easy to remember bits. Get each bit right on its own, then string them together... repeat, rinse & cycle.
You'll find there are a lot of sections which are variations on others. Practise regularly... but not to the point of fatigue & wariness, that won't help.
Theres no quick fix, you got to do the hard yards. Keep listening to every note of that song from the albulm until you can hum it note for note. If you're not sure of a bit of it, go back and listen to that bit until you can hear it in your mind.
You should be able to hum the whole thing from beginning to end then it becomes really easy to remember how to play.
When learning to sight read music (playing from music notation) its almost the reverse of learning a song note for note. It is to your advantage to have a huge collection of music sheets of songs you do not know. This forces you to read the score properly and to get your timing as accurate as possible. The only thing that makes this easier is PRACTISE.
When you feel ready, find some people/friends/associates to jam with. Visit music shops and look for adverts, hang around and talk to people about music. Eventually over time you'll start to meet people with similar interests, and if you're straight forward with them and don't cop an attitude, you may find yourself invited for a jam.
When starting out, hold back as its quite different to playing alone. And once you're feeling confident it can be all too tempting to just let rip because its so much fun. If you're not sensitive to letting other people solo, or play all over the singer, you'll become pretty unpopular pretty quickly. Just keep it casual, relax & enjoy. Smile! They'll give you turns & they'll be interested to hear you play.
I found it less intimidating to start off jamming in a duet situation, its easier to communicate and accomadate. You can discuss difficulties in a more relaxed setting, stop & ask what key you're in and so forth. It took me a while before I got the courage to jam with a band, but I think I waited too long, because I realised that I'd missed out on a lot of fun!
Music is a great way to make friends & meet neat people.