Hello everybody! By way of introducing my upcoming harmonica course 'Teach to Learn Harmonica' I would like you all to know that I have had an exhilarating experience during the pandemic teaching harmonica and piano online and very much looking forward to sharing the fruits during August. After many months of lockdown, technical challenges are largely solved and, through the course of teaching, I can now troubleshoot for private students and those at Kingsdale Secondary School (in South London where I have taught 2 days per week through term time) pretty much most technical issues that used to get in our way online, so we can focus on enjoyable and stimulating musical activity. These technical tips will be part of the course. Delivering Zoom lectures on a variety of subjects - Larry Adler, Stevie Wonder and Toots Thielemans (and in particular for the University of Kwa Zulu Natal on the iconic 1960s South African musical King Kong, available now on YouTube) - has led me through a revolution in the way I teach both piano and harmonica. Those who have already attended my workshops have had a taste of this. Especially the importance of tailor-made supplementary material for individual interests - pdfs, audio and video. And my beloved Logic Pro X music software for recording, scoring and transcribing just about anything we might want to learn or explore. A key experience has been working with Harmonica UK member Susie Colclough who is blind. Her husband Dave is well known to members of Harmonica UK as an accomplished diatonic blues player, but Susie – who decided in March of this year to learn the chromatic - is taking a different path. At the suggestion of our Chairman, Pete Hewitt, we began working weekly in April. Our challenge was to find ways of learning from scratch that did not involve reading music or seeing videos and we have come a very long way in a short space of time. Lessons are still ongoing and fascinating for us both. So much so that I will be devoting an entire article to Susie and her harmonica journey in the next issue of the magazine. But I will let you know now that there are 3 key elements to our lessons:
TEACH TO LEARN HARMONICA Adam Glasser HarmonicaUK Patron
1/ They are conducted by WhatsApp phone call on speaker phone (which enables me to play music from my computer). 2/ We exchange harmonica recordings via Voice Memos phone to phone. 3/ The proof that you have learnt a specific exercise or piece of music thoroughly is that you can teach it.
