This week I decided to go back to the basics of playing the harmonica. While I am getting better at playing single notes and I have the breathing down pretty well, I wanted to learn how to hold the harmonica and relax while playing. I noticed that I am fairly tense when I play and it causes some muscle tiring and soreness (who knew playing the harmonica would give me my workout for the month). I thought it was about time to learn how to properly hold the harmonica. I found a website called idiotsguide.com. It is basically a website of how to do different things and it happens to have some of the very basic harmonica techniques. I practiced playing while properly holding the harmonica rather than haphazardly clutching it for dear life. I also learned how my hand position can help change the sound of how I play. Here are a couple pictures I found online to help me figure out how to hold it. It is going to take a lot of practice to get used to playing like this but I think it will really help me to ensure I don't get laughed off the stage when I am a professional harmonica player. Hopefully I will be able to get some recording of me playing with the proper hand position. This is probably something I should have started doing from the beginning but at least I am getting to it now!