I just feel like some spark is missing from my [Applause] life you sound awful just give up what am I doing I should just quit no never give up you got this you just need a real quick beginner harmonica lesson bro hey I'm Luke with harmonica.com and I'm going to walk you through seven steps to get you from Total newbie to playing your first song I'm going to show you seven fundamental techniques you need to play harmonica and actually sound good and along the way I'll show you how to avoid common beginner mistakes so that you can impress your special someone yeah good luck with that one of the biggest mistakes for a beginner is just not picking the right harmonica look at your harmonica and make sure that it has 10 holes if you've got a chromatic harmonica with a button on the side that's the wrong heart and I'll explain why in a second if you've got a harmonica with more than 10 holes that's probably a Tremolo Harmonica wrong harp and if the label on the harmonica says a letter other than c that's the wrong harp some harmonicas have the key label here and some harmonicas have the key label here the 10-hole dionic harmonica is the easiest and most fun harmonica to learn how to play and we want the key of C because all beginner lessons are on C harmonicas if you're super bummed right now cuz you have the wrong kind or the wrong key harmonica thankfully the harmonica is one of the cheapest instruments on the planet regarding Brands I would recommend something like a Leo osar or a honer Special 20 if you can afford like the $40 to $60 price range these Harps are great for beginners and Pros alike if you're on a tight budget then the best cheap harmonica I found is the eastop 8K it's about 20 bucks if you get a super cheap harmonica like a honer hot metal it's just going to make you want to quit the best instrument in the world one of these would be ideal even if you have the right harmonica it won't do you any good if you don't know how to hold it now that you've got the right harp make sure that hold number one one is on the left and hole number 10 is on the right most harmonicas have numbers up here on the cover plate if your harmonica doesn't have numbers just play one side and the other and the lower pitch should be on the left some people make a big deal about how to hold the harmonica but at this point it really doesn't matter as long as there's plenty of room for your lips some people feel that with two hands on the harmonica you have more control moving it left to right on the other hand plain hunched over like this all the time isn't great posture here's the most common way to hold the harmonica make like a letter C with your hand hand and then just put the harmonica there against the webbing right there kind of snug this is the most important thing I'm going to say about hand position hold it near the back of the harmonica so that there's plenty of room for your lips so holding harmonica with one hand is great for your posture plus it frees up another hand so you can walk the dog or send someone a text message or press like And subscribe to harmonica.com goodness this guy if you do want to use two hands here's how to get into the traditional two-hand grip put the knife edge of your hands together slide your right pinky up one digit now fold the left hand down so you're looking at the C shape and then fold down the right hand on top and notice that the thumb is over here on the right side of the harmonica beside having control another nice thing about the two-handed grip is you can open and close this hand for what's called a hand walk we'll come back to that later but again for right now it's totally cool to just pinch it on the side with one or both hands it really doesn't matter too much what does matter are these three vital fundamentals breathing mouth position and tone and that all starts with body position I think I'm ready to rock hold your horses your body position is all messed up playing with bad body position makes it hard to breathe and when it comes to playing harmonica breathing is everything I'm going to give you two tips you need to be able to breathe through your harmonica like a pro the secret to breath control is deep diaphragmatic breathing the diaphragm is the muscle down here in our lower belly that pulls our lungs down so that they can fill with air most people breathe shallow up here in the chest but if you watch a baby you'll notice when they breathe Breathe In the Belly goes out and when they breathe out the belly goes in tip number one is to stand or sit tall like there's a thread pulling up on the back of your head and to look forward standing or sitting tall is going to create room for our diaphragm to move and keeping our head fac forward will keep our throat relaxed which is going to give us great tone and tip two is to practice deep diaphragmatic Breathing by putting our hand on our lower belly and feeling it go out when we breathe in and feeling it Go in when we breathe out and this is exactly how we want to breathe through our harmonica in in a controlled manner a lot of beginners heave into their harmonica but that kind of excessive force will cause reads to choke so they don't make any sound and over time it'll cause them to go out of tune and even break we want to breathe continuously as if we were blowing on the flame of a candle hard enough to move the flame but not so hard that we blow it out oops okay ready for action hang on man there's just one last thing to learn and then we'll start jamming I promise the last thing you need to know before we rock hard on the harmonica is the Deep relaxed mouth position the key here is we want our lips to look like a duck not like we're going to pet Grandma's cheek I'm going to give you five failsafe tips to ensure that you have the proper mouth position on the harmonica in order to be badass tip one hold the harmonica on the side you can go back to holding it however you want to after this exercise but for this exercise just hold it on the side tip two moisten and relax the lips it's always nice to have a glass of water when you're playing harmonica and you may need to use a little bit of lip balm if you live in a dry climate it's not going to hurt the harmonica just wipe it down with a soft cloth when you're done step three put the harmonica in your mouth and rotate the back of it up towards the ceiling so that the part inside your mouth goes deep into your lower lip step four look into a mirror or selfie mode on your phone and ensure that your top lip is Deep Over the cover plate there you go great now tip five and this is the most important one reach down with your first finger and confirm that your bottom lip is untucked if you have tense lips you won't be able to pull that bottom lip down oh here's an alternate way you can get into the correct mouth position another name for the harmonica is the tin sandwich so we can just take that name literally and bite on it then just pull the harmonica slightly away from your teeth and voila you're in the correct mouth position as long as the moist inner portion of your lips is touching the harmonica you're in great shape and ready to start making music and the best place to start is with simple chords playing chords sounds easy I can do that no maybe not what's next there's basically just two chords on a harmonica blowing anywhere on the harmonica will produce a c chord and drawing anywhere between holes one and four will play a G chord if you want to know more about that theory stuff you can check out my chords for beginners video but our goal right now is just to breathe in and out through the harmonica maintaining our diaphragmatic breathing and our deep relaxed mouth position so we're going to breathe in out through holes one two and three I'm going to breathe on one two and here's one two and three but it doesn't matter don't worry about if you're playing exactly the right holes again we're just focused on breathing in mouth position we're going to breathe in for four counts and then breathe out for four [Music] counts the posture is tall like there's a string pulling up on the back of our heads we've got a nice deep relaxed mouth position everything is relaxed in the throat and the jaw relax nice and easy and as we're breathing in through the harmonica our belly is going out and as we breathe out through the harmonica our belly is going [Music] [Laughter] in now you're ready to take your chords to the next level with my drumsticks trick music is sound and the sound of that sound is tone so in Step six we're going to learn how to shape the tone of the harmonica with the vowel shapes of our mouth and I'm going to introduce you to the harmonica players drumsticks the reason I've shown you everything we've been through so far with posture breathing mouth position is all to facilitate good tone so you're already on the right path now let's explore the artistic options we have available to us to shape tone there kind of the Continuum on the one side is like base rounder warmer fatter duller and then on the other side is treble brighter thinner more shrill ice pick sound and over here the darkest roundest tone on the harmonica is accomplished with the vow shapes uh or uh like book and over here the brighter side tones are the wider vow shapes like e so if I breathe in and say uh or uh versus if I breathe in and say e same thing out uh or uh or E awesome so that's something we can always explore I just wanted to mention it here because I wish I'd known that on my first day of playing harmonica and now we're going to start getting into the exciting stuff the harmonica player drumsticks are T and C now you may have heard me in the past I've said ta and C but I'm saying T and C cuz I like that rounder warmer tone of uh the important thing here is T the tip of the tongue is going against the back of the tong top of the teeth t t you feel that and then C the back of the tongue is going up against the hard pallet of the roof of the mouth C using these articulations we're going to take our breathing and turn it into an actual Groove a train imitation which is the best technique builder for beginners so we're going to start on the inhale we're going to say Tua breathing in and then Tua breathing out now we're not actually going to vocalize we're not going to say Tua but we're going to go like all right let's try it [Music] next we're going to make these chords a bit shorter so we're going to stop them so we'll say Tut cut ready [Music] go [Music] and then from there we can gradually increase our Pace like the train is picking up speed and getting faster and faster now I've practice this a lot so I'm probably going to end up at a pace faster than you can play right now if today is your first day so don't be discouraged about that but I just kind of want to show you how this goes [Laughter] okay you get the idea I'm in there a little bit but just to kind of show you how this goes now what did I do there with the that's the train whistle so that's the other part of this that we want to do and it's a lot of fun and all we're doing is we're just drawing anywhere above holes one and two so there's three and four here's three four and five we want it to sound as Lonesome as possible and a couple ways to do that you might experiment with the articulation DW that kind of gives it a little bit of a Bend and then if you want to going back to what we kind of talked about earlier with hand position at the beginning we have the possibility of doing a hand W I kind of have my hands anchored down here at the Palm coming in and out when it comes to any technique if it sounds good and it feels good it is good so if you can get kind of an airtight chamber in any way on the harmonica to make it darker and then open it up to make it brighter that's kind of what the hand wall is all about everything we've been through so far far in this lesson maintaining proper relaxation breathing posture mouth position it takes a lot of practice that's why I make it a heavy focus in my beginner to boss course where we start with 28 lessons playing chords before we even start worrying about single notes if you're just getting started on harmonica and you're enjoying this lesson then you might want to go check it out I take you through all this stuff nice and slow step by step in a lot more detail in over 40 hours of lessons you can check it out at harmonica.com is that wanker plugging his course self promoting YouTubers I also teach a ton of GrooVe tricks in my course but let me get you started with grooving right here because the most important thing that separates the pros from the hacks is grooving with the band and I'm going to show you two steps to make sure your playing is solidly grooving anytime you listen to music there's a pulse you can Bob your head to and tap your foot to feeling that pulse is step one to grooving with the band if you play without feeling where that is you'll play at weird times and won't sound good if you want to play along with this remember step one you have to feel the pulse each one of these pulses is called a beat so you can play a note that lasts four beats and that's called a whole [Music] note or you could play a note that lasts two beats which is called a half note or just one beat which is called a quarter [Music] note we could also play two notes on each beat on each pulse I could say taka like we were doing on our train and that's called eighth notes [Music] so these are two different ways that you can approach practicing your train Groove you can start slow and get faster and faster or you can put on some steady music and just practice grooving with the [Music] band hey babe that actually doesn't sound half bad you're actually quite sexy when you play the harmonica nice work one thing you'll notice I haven't addressed is playing single notes that's cuz if today's your first day playing harmonica I wouldn't even worry about trying to play single notes you've learned A1 techniques today and it takes time to get these important fundamentals down now to give you a little sneak peek into plain single notes from the deep relaxed mouth position all we're going to do is draw the corners of our mouth closer together and allow our lips to go up and down relaxation is going to be the key there and so that's why really practicing relaxation is so important right from the very beginning a lot of people think their draw two is broken does it sounds like this it's not if it sounds like a dying duck here's the solution drop the jaw in a relaxed manner keep everything very relaxed lower the back of the tongue like it is when you yawn not up like when we were saying C the opposite of that a but if today's your first day playing there's a ton of great cordal songs you can learn like Piano Man by Billy Joel that's a great one doesn't require any single notes or Heart of Gold by Neil Young that's another great one you don't have to play any single notes this instrument can transform your life so don't ever quit if you want to learn more like ly grooves and stuff like that you can check out my five stupidly simple riffs keep on playing the harmonica and having fun never quit