The position of the harp and the resonance chamber created by the body are nearly identical.
In reality, you are actually channeling your air to a specific spot using your mouth and throat. A common myth associated with lip pursing is that you are sucking through a straw with your lips. When I play, I use a lot of lip-pursing, BUT my mouth covers the exact same amout of harp as when tongue blocking. Listen to any of Popper's rhythm playing and 90% of it is tongue blocked using either chords, partial chords, or split intervals. use a variety of embouchres to get their sound. When it comes to single note playing, it is near impossible to tell the difference.įWIW, Sugar Blue tongue blocks everything.most players, including Popper, Ricci, etc. In fact, the only real difference is in the chording aspect of playing. Yes Popper is a lip-purser/pucker player, but it is absolutely 100% FALSE that you can't have the quality of tone of tongue blocking-this is especially true when playing single note lines. WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am sorry, but that is just incorrect. His lyric writing is brilliant and he sings with unmatched passion. John Popper's song writing and singing are top tier.especially for being a rock artist. He took the instrument into genres not normally associated with the instrument, created his own style, and plays at a level of skill way beyond what is expected. Love him or hate him, Popper is more original than 99% of harmonica players (how many more middle-aged blues wannabe Little Walters does the world need?). Sugar Blue is much more riff based in his approach to playing fast whereas Popper tends to play in waves of sound, making his style much harder to copy.you can learn his solos note for note, but to phrase like he does when improving is hard!
For those who don't listen to a lot of harp it may be hard to tell the difference between what he is doing and another harp player playing flashy for a few bars, but there is a world of difference. That being said, if you slowed down most of his solos from the time Four came out and later, there would be a wealth of melodic content. It less frantic and fast.more melody driven and unique. His current recordings are varied in his scale choices but often modal so he can use similar patterns still. I've heard him play back guitar and vocal riffs on the spot, so he must have good ears. He has formal music training in other areas and can follow key changes, although, for the most part, his jamming is based on diatonic progressions that let him use one scale. Popper has often mentioned how he thinks in sheets of sound like Charlie Parker did.in fact, Popper has studied jazz formally. Most of his bends are to play the head of a song or for expression, especially those in the upper octave. Unless you've listened to stuff after "Straight on till Morning", most of his playing is in 2nd position using a mixolydian based approach. That being said he doesn't just play one pattern up and down but jumps from sequence to sequence. Popper can play so fast because he uses action patterns on the harmonica that involve both draw and blow notes.so he is always breathing and thinking in clusters of sound rather than individual notes. So I have actually sat down and studied their playing as well as others. When I first started playing harp I picked up the tab book to Four and the tab book to Sugar Blue's, "In Your Eyes". I am harmonica player weighing in here who has a ton of BT CDs along with a ton of Sugar Blues, Little Walter, Jason Ricci, Sonny Boy, Chris Michalek, Clint Hoover.everything from folk to blues to jazz to rock.old school and contemporary.
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