Looking back

My name is Vir Leynes and I learned to play the harmonica when I was seven years old in the far away islands of the Philippines, in a small town named Iba, in the coastal province of Zambales.   


Introduction to harmonica. A playmate had a one-octave Hohner harmonica and I was so curious while he played a military bugle song.

 He lent me the harmonica and taught me the basic blow and draw notes.  And this sharing of the harmonica started my love for the instrument.  When my father saw I was very interested he bought me the first harmonica that I really liked, a Japanese-made Butterfly, a 21-hole tremolo.  

Early harmonica activity. While in grade school, I organized a group of five or six boys and called ourselves the cumbancheros, each one holding a sort of musical instrument, and I played the lead instrument, the harmonica, and we were often guest in school programs providing some sort of martial and latin music.  During special feast days like All Saints Day, Christmas day or feast days, our group would play from one house to another,  and those inside would spare us a few coins, sometimes,  more than what we expected, and we divide our sort of earnings for the night equally among ourselves.

The group stayed together until I was in high school, and as soon as I entered college in the capital city of Manila I stopped playing harmonica altogether and forgot all about it.  I was fifteen years old then.

I am now sixty-nine years old and retired, and perhaps a little bit late in re-entering the very intriguing world of this amazing instrument, the harmonica.  Very haphazardly, perhaps abetted by sheer eagerness, I bought a Chinese made cheap chromatic harmonica, the Hero. And for the first time in more than fifty years, I again held a harmonica in my hands.

Going chromatic. I did quite an exhaustive research on the internet and learned about chromatic and diatonic harmonicas. Back in my youth, I thought harmonicas could not be made to play songs that are not in the key of C, otherwise the player would be arduously spending more time finding notes than playing.  I was too limited to key of C termolo back then and no one told me (no internet yet to provide answers), that there are such things as chromatic harmonicas that can play all notes. Only lately did I understand about keys as these apply to harmonicas.  What could have been my level of expertise today if in my youth I was already playing a chromatic?

Learning about tabs.  I also learned about tablature, or tabs for short, for both diatonic and chromatic.  I started compiling selected tabbed songs copied from very good sites, stocked them up into my ipad so I can have the convenience of referring to any of the songs with ease while playing.

Diatonic techniques.  I also tried bending notes.  I remember my uncle, who introduced me to the Butterfly, he used to do bends in his tremolo while playing the popular Filipino classic, Sa Kabukiran, and taught me how to do it, with the intent of actually aping the sound of the semitone.  Sometimes, I thought I already had it, but whenever I bend notes in a song, I fail to produce the missing note.  Perhaps a lot more practice would eventually bring this special technique forward.

Taking the harmonica apart.  Having been a mechanics and RC model hobbyist I also looked into the internal structure of the chromatic and diatonic harmonica to fully understand the function of each part and learned to clean and maintain the harmonica.

Present collection.  I now have at my disposal three Hohner Super Chromonica Chromatic 270/48, one Hohner 64 Chromonica 280, a set of 7 Swan 1020 diatonic blues harmonica (keys C,D,E,F,G,A and B), a Swan 1664-2 Chromatic, a 24-hole Hero chromatic, and a 24-hole Hohner Echo Celeste Tremolo.  With these in my arsenal, I hope to revive my interest in harmonica with a lot more vigor and time to spare than ever.