How to hit your harmonica bends straight on

This week’s lesson gives you a set of exercises to help you hit your harmonica bends straight on the four hole draw. This is a really important skill to learn as a lot of harmonica players only seem to be able to hit the bend after playing a clean note first. This means that they are unable to play melodies which feature bends precisely.

You will need a harmonica in the key of C.

Click here to download lesson resources

Don’t know how to bend?

If you can’t already bend then I recommend you check out my lesson on bending – 8 Tips for how to bend on harmonica

Start off from the clean note

Before we jump to hitting it bent, we are going to start with the clean four hole draw and slowly bending it and releasing it.

Once you can do this comfortably, try to go to the bend and then pause your playing before hitting the bend again.

Now try bending first

Now you can give hitting the bent note straight on a go.

Practice slowly

The most important thing to really make sure you are doing is slowing the whole movement down. This gives you time to really internalise the movement and commit it to muscle memory.

If you rush through then you will not gain the necessary control to be able to hit those bends.

Blues Scale

To test whether you can hit your bend straight on, try playing the blues scale…

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Thank you!

Thank you for taking the time to watch this lesson and I hope it was helpful for you.

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