How Does a Harmonica Player Get So Much Soul in Their Instrument?

How does a harmonica player get so much soul in their instrument?

 You can hear it when they play: How does a harmonica, through such a small window, create so much soul?

 That is a great question.  Here's something to think about:

Speaking of soulful things,  have you ever noticed and really watched a bird sing?

Here in the US we have some incredible songbirds called mockingbirds, and mockingbirds can imitate the songs of a lot of different other birds and so they have a wide repertoire of songs that they can do, and they love to sing. 

And when they sing they're not usually very quiet either -  they are pretty loud.

Your "assignment" is to watch a bird singing - a mockingbird, if you can.  If not, then any bird whose song you admire.

Those songbirds are opening their beak to sing: they're not singing with a closed beak

-  their beak is open as far as it will go. 
It will open and close as they sing, and they're getting this big sound from this tiny body:
Mockingbirds weigh less than a pound - how are they doing that?

Well, the thing is is that for any voice there is a little reed -  you could call it a "reed". 

The  mockingbird voicebox is this "reedy" little thing that air is forced through and creates a sound, produces a sound,
but we are talking about an instrument, not a voice, right?

We're not talking about a human voice, we're not talking about a bird song voice, we're talking about an instruments' voice, the harmonica. 

Well, the harmonica has, with the ten hole harmonica, twenty reeds: not just one like a songbird has, but 20. 

And these brass reeds (usually brass reeds), vibrate when air passes over them and that's how the sound is produced. 

But, you may know that there are lots of reed instruments, aren't there?: Clarinet and saxophone etc.

But those instruments, although they're much larger they don't have that soul, that soulful sound that harmonicas have - Why?

Here's the key:

Harmonica, when played correctly uses your body as part of the sound

-  it uses the inside of your mouth, it uses the vocal cavity as a sound box, a sounding board

-  it uses your throat as part of the sound, uses your chest is part of the sound, it uses your diaphragm as part of the  sound,

and a really good harmonica player is using all of their body from their diaphragm (which is right below your rib cage) all the way up through the nasal passages in their head to create that sound.

That's how you get that soulful sound - it becomes a voice because a voice is a reed and a body combined. 

A body and a reed, with air passing over the reed (vocal chords in this case) for you, or for a songbird, creates a voice.

The harmonica is an instruments' voice but it is definitely a voice - you can hear it. 

In fact if you listen to a lot of harmonica players, a lot of harmonica music, you can get to where you can easily tell one harmonica player from another just by listening to their tone, by listening to their "voice",
and that's a mark of a good harmonica player, and also is proof that the harmonica is a voice of its own. 

 

That's how the harmonica can have soul and a voice - and you can do it too.