Soulful blues seems more about feeling than transcribing marks on paper to sound. But some tunes I really would like to stuff into my mind and sheet music is both intriguing and frustrating. Acquiring a song by looking at the actual harmonica diagram and making a map - a phrase map so to speak is an experiment I have been working on…… Any feedback good, bad, or otherwise is welcome. (Muffled laughter, and outright guffawing is perfectly acceptable.)
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I just convert sheet music to tab. Literally there is 12 different types of ways to play harmonica using sheet music (each key has a different note layout).
It might be worth learning a ‘favorite’ key of harp to play sheet, but in most instances it is easier to play tab or by memory.
Thanks @Dk360! I have never tried to convert sheet music to tabs but I will give it a try…
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My music teacher told me, when reading sheet music to play harmonica, you didn’t need to actually know the particular note on the harp, just the distance between each note as indicated on the sheet music. The same sequence of notes could be played on any key of harmonica and sound correct.
That’s actually a pretty cool idea -however I’d put a huge but here, in that you are correct BUT you must also know how the original sounds - for example, for a while when just starting to learn I couldn’t get “happy birthday” to sound right. Turns out, I needed to move one hole to the left to sound right (something I was only able to diagnose with the help of the members of this forum).