Should old acquaintance be forgot..
The Harp Surgery team would like to wish all our fans a very Happy New Year 2012.
From The Good Doctor, Otis The Mailman (left), Our Monica and The Riverboat Captain, we hope the new year brings you hours of musical fun and some totally top tooting.
It’s been a quiet year down at the Harp Surgery, but we thank you all for continuing to drop by. Fittingly, here’s our final offering of 2011.. Auld Lang Syne Continue reading
Stevie Wonder diatonic harmonica
It was 1974. With a string of hit singles under his belt, Stevie Wonder recorded Boogie On Reggae Woman amidst some more reflective compositions for his new album, Fullfillingness’ First Finale.
The song’s title is slightly misleading. This is no Trench Town rasta vibe. There is a reggae skank for reference, but underneath it’s as fundamentally funk as Superstition and just as ground breaking.
For Harp Surgery fans, what makes the song especially interesting, is its infusion of a bluesy piano line and some highly expressive first-position blues harping. Let’s look more closely..
HARPIN’ BY THE SEA 2012 – WE’RE BACK!
The Brighton & Hove Harmonica Society, with support from the UK National Harmonica League (NHL), is hosting it’s second annual harmonica day to brighten up your mid-winter and celebrate our favourite instrument!
Last year 70 harmonica novices and enthusiasts came along for what proved to be a very special day. If you’ve always wanted to master the basics, or improve what you’ve got, this is your chance! Workshops will be led by Harp Surgery’s very own Good Doctor Richard Taylor, aided and abetted by Harp Consultants Will Greener and James Aldcroft. The 2012 workshop programme will be published very shortly.
In the evening there will be another live show with three harp-friendly bands – final line up to be announced shortly. Continue reading
LILI MARLENE [..with tab]
Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate
Had we been shovelled onto a grimy conveyor belt and pitched alongside millions of innocents into the inferno of the Great War (1914-18), there is a strong chance we would have had a musical companion. An emollient for the mental and physical agonies of front line duty.
Portability, cost and availability predetermined the choice of instrument. And while a variety found their way to the front, it was the humble harmonica that became the proprietary antedote to the sting of industrialised warfare. And it’s probably the reason why so many Europeans still relate stories of a family elder who played the mouth organ.
This Remembrance Day is no different to any other – they are equally important. As Santayana famously wrote: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It’s just that this year we have the novelty of an extra number 11. At the eleventh hour (GMT), on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month - of the eleventh year - we remember the fallen.
Four our final article in the Harmonica Microphones series, let’s ditch that cumbersome mic cable. Many players want to go wireless – fun, because you can go out in the audience and play, dance up on the bar, or simply have more freedom to roam around on stage. Here’s how:
A wireless system always consists of two parts. The transmitter stays with you, connects to your microphone and sends the signal out into the air using radio waves. The receiver is located near and connected to your amp. There are many types of wireless systems available to us. As a rule, you usually get what you pay for. But there are some practical considerations. Continue reading
Harpin’ By The Sea presents…
Once again, ahead of his tenure at this year’s Blues Week in Northampton, Joe Filisko will be making a one-night-only appearance on the UK’s South Coast.
Cruisin’ and playin’ the radio
Long, long ago, the Harp Surgery crew grooved to the atmospheric intonations of Radio Luxembourg/Radio My Amigo and Radio Caroline. The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio – US) captures the rock’n'roll spirit of this early pop radio broadcasting.
Now that hyper-space has replaced the high-seas, Harp Surgery has made a bunch of new blues DJ mates across the internet. In this series we’d like to introduce you to a few. So, silence in the studio please..we’re on air. Continue reading
We continue with the Harmonica Microphones series with some thoughts on the knotty problem of microphone feedback: what it is and how to minimise it.
Feedback is that awful loud screeching, humming and/or whistling sound a system makes when a microphone picks up the sound from the amplifier’s speaker and sends it back to the amplifier for further amplification. Every system (in this case a microphone plus amplifier) has a feedback threshold. Turn the volume up loud enough and feedback occurs. Keep the volume below that point and it doesn’t. Unfortunately we often need to have our volume very close to the feedback threshold in order to be loud enough, and so feedback can come and go as conditions change. But some setups are less prone to feedback than others, and some microphones are less prone than others. Continue reading
Check him out now, the funk soul brother
If a sour mash of Alabama 3, Johnny Cash, Son of Dave, hip-hop, dub and fried green tomatoes was used for a whole new ass-kicking brew, the label would read Dave Ferguson’s Lucky No.7 Straight Bourbon Whiskey.
In our interview with The Mountain Of Love, reference was made to a New Blues music pioneered by R.L. Burnside and Little Axe in the 1980′s and 90′s. Here sequencing, sampling, dub and heavy dance beats were bulldozing the conventions of the blues.
Yet amidst the radicalism, two unalienables remained. The pathos of the slide guitar and anguish of the blues harp. Dave Ferguson is the latest settler in this new blues Heimat and an important exponent of the latter. What he does, he does extremely well. He also tackles it single-handedly. We dropped into Cape Town to check out the Lonesome Whistle Blower of New Blues.
Our previous article in the Harmonica Microphones series mentioned impedance. Here we describe not so much what it is, but what it means to harp players wielding microphones.
The microphones we are talking about in this series of articles are referred to as either “high impedance” or “low impedance.” In general, a vintage bullet mic is a high impedance device and a modern vocal mic is a low impedance one. This is not always the case, however. Continue reading
