Learning the Harmonica

Yes­ter­day I tweeted out how I have decided that I want to learn the Har­mon­ica. I tweeted this and asked for feed­back on where or how to learn. Some friends replied with peo­ple to talk to, oth­ers sent me links, oth­ers sent me book sug­ges­tions and to all of you I say thank you for your help.

As I read over the web of Har­mon­ica sites, the com­mon thing I saw was peo­ple say­ing ‘Just play it.’ The har­mon­ica is a glo­ri­ously sim­ple instru­ment, usu­ally 10 holes to blow through, keyed to C. So you just play, learn, refine and play more. It’s not going to serve me very well to just read about how to play the Harmonica.

Some­thing the Inter­net breeds a lot of are ‘key­board jock­eys.’ Peo­ple who write, post, and blog about a topic but who forgo the actual expe­ri­ence instead choos­ing to work in the realm of the­ory based on read­ings and other mate­r­ial they’ve seen. Rather than doing it, they talk about it. Usu­ally a lot.

What does that say? This is some­thing they’re inter­ested in. And that the­ory is safer. So long as it is just the­ory, there’s almost no chance of fail­ure unless your the­ory is patently wrong.

The term ‘key­board jockey’ does not refer to peo­ple who do have real life expe­ri­ence and who are skilled in the area, it refers to the anony­mous masses who gain a fol­low­ing for their writ­ing or discussions.

Can peo­ple learn purely in this way? Sure. Magic the Gath­er­ing has a huge online key­board jockey audi­ence. Peo­ple get paid to dis­cuss decks, game the­ory, play­ers, the game itself, card indi­vid­u­ally, all sorts of stuff. Can a player learn the game and get bet­ter by read­ing these arti­cles? Sure. But the rate of growth is minis­cule as com­pared to actual true 100% com­pet­i­tive and var­ied game play. What you can learn play­ing in one tough tour­na­ment amounts to more knowl­edge and skill than you’ll gain in weeks of read­ing online.

Could I learn the Har­mon­ica just by watch­ing instruc­tional videos and read­ing about it? Pos­si­bly. But noth­ing can train me for the feel of the Har­mon­ica, how to hold my mouth and cup my hands. Learn­ing is a lot of suc­ces­sive fail­ures before I can even play ‘Mary had a lit­tle lamb.’

But when I do play it, you can be sure I’ll tweet about it.