You’re looking for, say F# - try a few note, ah! there it is. If you play a chromatic harp in any but the root key, then a chromatic tuner is helpful while you’re practising. This really is an instrument you have to play by ear. Tabs would drive you mad - how would you know which hole you were blowing (or sucking?) And harmonicas have different note layouts: After a while I started weaning myself off tab and working from the staves and trying to pick stuff up by ear.Īnyway, good luck. It takes a little while at first, but it’s not hard - and I see you already play some instruments, so should be OK. If you have a chromatic harmonica, that should do the job nicely, but I can’t offer any advice there.īack to the matter of tabs - what I ended up doing is working out the tabs for myself on music from places like The Session. As I’m sure you would expect, keys of D or G are most useful. This is not an ideal instrument for ITM as it stands, but a small tweak to make it into the so-called Paddy Richter tuning helps massively). What sort of harmonica do you have? Most people traditionally use a tremolo harmonica for this sort of music, but most of the tuition material you will find is for the 10 hole diatonic (blues) harp, which is what I play. (The other link is to Steve Shaw’s site, which is also an excellent resource in general.)
I haven’t found a decent source of free harp tab, though the book Brendan Power sells is good tuition (assuming you can play a little already) and advice, with a few tunes tabbed out (though many of the tunes assume you are using a "paddy richter" harp), and the Glenn Weisser book is also pretty good (though it occasionally depends on some oddness like a 12 hole blues harp). I’ve been learning harmonica for a little over a year and traditional music for a few months less than that.