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Play Sonny Terry style on Harmonica and dazzle your friends!
Play Sonny Terry’s style of Country Blues on the Harmonica. It’s great fun for beginners and I will guide you through.

What you will learn

Play blues harp like Sonny Terry

Description

If you ever wanted to learn to play the harmonica like Sonny Terry this new course is for you! Please enjoy the course and give it a review.

This course is all about learning to play in the style of Sonny Terry.

Many thanks to Wayne T. Helfrich for kind permission to use his pictures of Sonny Terry.

Each riff is written out for you with standard harmonica tab, onomatopoeic words, and standard western music notation.

You will find an mp3 included which has each riff played by me at full speed, half speed, and medium-speed to help you learn how to play it better.

If you do a couple of riffs a day this course will take a month to complete – or go for bust and do it in a weekend!

We start with learning 19 riffs that I wrote in Sonny’s style as a preparation for you.

When you’ve done those follow through the sections and you may notice the challenge increases a little. Take it slowly and you will progress without too much pain!


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This course is based on a book I wrote with Paul Lennon. I was recently teaching the whole book to a student in South Korea and enjoyed revisiting the original material we wrote and recorded in 2009 so much that I decided to make a Udemy course from it.

The whole book (30 pages) and audio (65 mp3 tracks) is included in this groundbreaking course a page at a time. The whole book and CD is also available if you message me.

A lot of people want to play the blues harp so if that’s you come on in, you’re in the right place.

I will hold your hand all the way through the videos with my ‘infectious and humourous’ (people tell me) style of teaching.  You will feel like I’m right with you in a one-to-one lesson showing exactly you how to do it, and encouraging to become confident and go it alone.

It’s designed to be fun, friendly,  easy for anyone to learn – even non-musical people! It is designed to help you succeed and lead you on to the next in the series.

There are pdfs and mp3 downloads with many lectures so you can read the tablature and play along with the audio music written especially for learning harmonica.

Please be sure to visit the Questions area and Forum to interact with other students. It’s a great way to learn more and helps you apply what the course gives you.

English
language

Content

Excersises to help you get into Sonny Terry’s style without fear or pain.

Easy start, say ‘choo choo choo’ and you’re up and running. Riffs 1 and 2
Work on tone and introducing the onomatopoeic ‘Chaka’
The only way I can describe this is ‘chack-chackachack’
Intriducing Triplets
Learning how to expel air fast
Introducing the ‘Hand Pop’
Exploring the hand pop in syncopated rhythms
More experimenting with the hand pop in different rhythms

Simple Riffs in the Sonny Terry style

Default basic ‘Mean old Frisco’ Sonny Terry
Alternative ways to play the last one
‘Do chicha di chucka’
Adding ‘Chickachacka’
Adding off beat syncopation

Intro Riffs for Sonny Terry songs

Very basic intro riff
Alternative to 29 adding a small easy bend
Adding decorations to the triplet
Introducing the ‘scoop’
Putting a bend into a group of 4 fast notes

Use your ‘A’ harmonica here

Introducing the idea of ‘chickowa-ha’ – expelling air on the ‘ha’
More work on how to expel air fast in your playing
How to play a sequence of bent note, straight note, chord

Pick a bale of cotton

Jump down turnaround
Chorus ‘Oh Lordy’
Pushed notes
Off-beat hand popping
Syncopated rhythms

‘A’ harp needed for this section

Basic groove
Alternate way to play using 2 blow
Starting to prepare for the rigours that are coming up next
5blow to 4draw transition
6 blow to 234 draw
Final riff in this section utilising what we’ve just learnt

Ending Riffs. ‘G’ harmonica needed here – nice and low!

Fast ending with syncopation
As 48 but with additions of singing and a top D
Adding a long slow bend
Single note classic Sonny Terry ending
The most famous outro phrase
Triplets and scooping
Time to sing some more
Fast challenging rhythm with off beat accents
Call and response phrasing
Upbeat and off beat
‘Doodle-oodle’ and ‘Calling my Mama’
Outro

Backing tracks for you to practice what you’ve learnt

4 Backing tracks for you to play along with
Special Bonus from the world famous Peter Madcat Ruth (with his permission)
Chromatic note layout
Extra Learning Resources