Re: ----- I suck, I tell you, I suck. ------

[Mike Curtis <wd6ehr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Another one to watch out for is being invited up, start wailing, and
> discover that you don't have the right harp in your hand. And then you
> discover that there ain't no right harp--The band is not in standard pitch!
> That happened to me one night and yes, it sucked.

hmmm - I have perfect pitch, and have never run into this one personally. 
I suppose it might not be a bad idea to sneak off to the bathroom and
compare your pitch with the bands, and if it's "off", ask them if they'll
tune to you during their break.  If they're loud and you wear earplugs (I
want to save the hearing I have left and make extensive use of the foam
plugs), you can do this from the audience without annoying anyone.  Just
cup your harp VERY tightly and virtually no sound will escape.  The
earplugs intensify the sound you hear internally (actually, they leave it
the same - but with less coming in externally, you hear the internal
sounds via bone conduction and the ear canals, etc. a lot better.)

Now that Stevie Ray Vaughn has popularized it, many guitarists are tuning 
a half step low.  (Of course, the reason why Stevie did it is because he 
used monstrously large strings with very high action, and most of the 
copycats use little skinny strings set as low as possible :-)  This can 
throw things way off for us if we're used to playing "standard E blues" 
and such in second position.

One huge advantage of using a valved hap is that you can always hit 
every note bent to correct for fractional tuning.  It's kind of annoying 
at first, but you get used to it with (a LOT of) practice.  It is 
distracting, though, to say the least :-(

BTW, I've seen courses offered for developing perfect pitch.  As to 
whether this is effective, I really can't say, being born with it, and 
seemingly so many being born without it.  I'd sure like to hear from 
anyone who has tried this.  But I first found out I had prfect pitch when 
I was learning guitar and tuning to an E.  A teacher in school played a 
scale and said "You all know this is a major scale, but not what key it's 
in."  I KNEW it was E, and raised my hand to say so.  At that time, 
perhaps some other key would not have been so readily identifiable to 
me.  So perhaps the _secret" is to memorize one particular note, and 
reference to that???  Maybe someone will try this and let us know if it 
helps???


 -- mike

I don't know everything - I just think I do :-)