🎵 My First 30-Day Challenge: Harmonica

4 min readNov 13, 2022

Finally, I learn how to play the harmonica after months of procrastination

This post is a series that follows my progress in 30-day challenges, which involves practising something new for 30 days. I have decided to learn how to play the harmonica for this challenge. At the end of the post, I showcase my progress so far.

Welcome to TonyTriesStuff,

We here are keen on trying new hobbies to increase our repertoire of skills. Whether you’ve stumbled across this for the first time or are a regular, thanks for taking the time to look through what I have created. Read on to start your journey towards mastering skills you are passionate about.

Today we are doing something a little bit different. Earlier this week I stumbled across Austin Kleon’s 30-day challenge. It is a concept by which repeated actions compound into something great. They explain the 30-day challenge by saying:

Try sitting down in the same place at the same time for the same amount of time every day and see what happens.
-Austin Kleon

This in turn prompted me to try to learn how to play the harmonica and document my own 30-day challenge to see how I progress. Stick around till the end to check out my progress so far!

Progress so far

I picked up the harmonica and searched YouTube for ‘Harmonica lessons’ and clicked on the first video on the list. It was lesson one by a channel called LearnTheHarmonica.com. The presenter, Liam, takes a step-by-step approach to teach us how to play the harmonica. They also have a course available at www.learntheharmonica.com where you can … learn the harmonica.

So far, I have only accessed their free content, but it does seem like they have some useful paid content to learn the harmonica. I plan to try out their paid courses once I feel stagnation in my progression through free resources.

I currently own a diatonic C harmonica which is what the lessons I took were taught. My approach was to learn for ten minutes each day.

Consider subscribing!

TonyTriesStuff - Medium

Read writing from TonyTriesStuff on Medium. I try stuff. Every day, TonyTriesStuff and thousands of other voices read…

tonytriesstuff.medium.com

Day 1

The first lesson focused on breathing through the instrument by learning a rhythm piece called chugging. The key takeaways from the lesson were:

Breath control
Tone

The first bit of advice was on posture. The recommendation was to stand up straight and not attempt to slouch over as you see in the movies. Having good posture allows us to breathe properly and not heave. If you heave into the harmonica, there is a chance that you could break the harmonica. Therefore it is important to breathe normally without tension in the mouth or body.

The first tune they recommended is a vocalisation of ‘ta ka’ that produces a tone similar to what’s in the progress song at the end.

Day 2

Lesson 2 of the series introduced two new concepts:

The use of a metronome
Variations of chugging

In lesson 1, we weren’t concerned with timing, but for lesson 2, Liam recommends using a metronome and playing to a beat. This helps to train our ears. They also encourage being creative and not sticking to what’s being told but rather doing what you feel like doing and having fun. So this involves switching up the ‘ta ka’ for ‘ta ka ta’ or whatever feels good for you.

Day 3

Lesson 3 focuses on playing clean single notes in three different ways:

Lip pursing — purse lips to only play one note at a time
Tongue blocking — use your tongue to block other notes
U blocking — make a u-shape with your tongue to block other notes

I personally found lip pursing to be the most effective. I found playing a single note with the other methods very difficult.

Day 4

After learning for three days, the tune below contains my progress so far:

I hope you enjoyed that; I look forward to comparing this against my progress at the end of the 30-day challenge.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! Your support helps me to keep posting on new topics every week. I’d love to hear from you. Do you plan to take on a 30-day challenge? If so, what would you try to learn? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below or tweet at me with your responses.

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed reading about my 30-day challenge. Do check out Austin Kleon for more inspiring posts on being creative. Hope this inspires you to learn a new skill you have been putting off for a while. Do leave a comment and subscribe if you want to be inspired to learn new skills on a week-ish basis.

Until next time,

Tony

Additional Resources