Sound Of the Month Edition

She’s low-budget. She’s mobile. She’s a perfect companion!

My Harmonica

Yes, that’s my recent fascination. Makes a clear and gentle sound. Can get rough when needed.
Of course I couldn’t resist to record myself and analyze it with my geeky tools. Let’s get the show started.

Plain tune

Harmonica sound - wave shape

Try counting the peaks per cycle – that’s the number of the dominant harmonic.

Harmonica - plain tune spectrogram

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9th harmonic is strongest indeed. You might also notice the overall volume is not ideally constant (even though I tried). I’m not perfect after all :/ One cool thing to learn is that Harmonica plays together with your breath – which is very much like natural human voice. So the best is just to ‘sing’ through it.

Tremolo effect

If you haven’t played harmonica before – tremolo is as easy as you could imagine. Just shake it!

Harmonica - tremolo effect spectrogram

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Note bending

This technique allows slight changes of pitch by adjusting the shape of inside of your mouth. Although it’s fairly intuitive to pick on the idea, mastering the trick requires some practice. Here is one of my attempts:

Harmonica - note bending spectrogram (zoomed on Y axis)

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On lower notes you can actually feel all the vibes on your tongue and throat. Unforgettable! (and that’s how I fell in love ;)

The spirit

Sometimes when finished playing, for a blink of an eye you can still hear Harmonica’s voice. That is her spirit singing.
I managed to record it during my research. It’s really subtle, so in order to hear it clearly I applied a tube-compressor filter:

Harmonica spirit captured at the final stage

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Come get SoME!