Welcome Speech from NTU Harmonica Band

First, Welcome you all to join our band, and be a part of the big family. With passionate, I believe you all will enjoy in the band, and learn a lot of things or soft skills that you will not learn in lectures, but important for your future.

I am Kong Fai, the ex-band leader. As you all know, previously we are under Chinese Society, but we hope to expand the cultural background of the band as well as having a better development for the band, so we join CAC. For the past 25 years under Chinese Society, we should have developed to a highly professional band. However, I don’t see any tremendous progress. Fortunately, we have you guys to join our band. As a pioneer in transforming Harmonica Band to another stage, we need to be unity, on the same boat pursuing for the same target. Each one of you is very important!

Maybe the words above may seem too far for you, since most of you are still beginners in Harmonica. But Rome did not built up within a single day. The recipe to strengthen your basic skill (accuracy, tempo) is nothing but to practice with patience! Practice for 15 minutes daily would help a lot!

1. Try to play every single hole in your harmonica very accurate, then feel the distance between the notes you want to jump. If you encounter two far holes to play, just try to find the feeling of moving your lips (how far you need to move), then practice for a few time. Bit by bit, you will improve in blowing the hole accurately.

2. For the tempo, practice with the basic skills scores (Basic Skill 1-8) that we distribute to you. First, play it on a very slow tempo, until you manage to blow everything, only then you speed up your tempo. If there is some difficulties in a certain part that you find hard to go through, practice few more time in that part and try to play all again. Play the song smoothly all the way without stopping is the only way to ensure you have improved.

3. Remember to have a short warm up for your harmonica, and try not wash it under tap water, wipe it will do.

Hope that the above tips help you in learning harmonica.

After you have managed the basic skills, is time to you to form small group (Duet, Trio, Quintet, Quartet). Getting to perform on stage is a way to help you improve. You will find performing very exciting after a certain number of stage frights! You build up your way in presenting in front of public also, which is certainly helpful for your future. Also, you can earn some allowance as an encouragement.

After you have 1-2 performing experience, try some classical piece. Classical piece is a breakthrough for your harmonica standard. Once you manage classical pieces, basically you have strong harmonica foundation already.

To help our band improve, we are planning to form some Trios. These trios will serve to participate in Asia Pacific Harmonica Festival in 2012 in Malaysia. We have two years time to get well prepare, I think that is very possible for us to get some results, if we starts from now. Quintet or Quartet are also our consideration.

With these long-term plan, we should be able to manage and have a good performance in February Annual Concert (Vivace XI) as we progress. We are hoping that we could have an acoustic (without microphones around) concert one day, but that would need at least 60 members to have that effects, which we don’t have the ability now as there are not enough members. So, we should focus on small group on our concert, and hopefully next year we are able to recruit more members. However, you can still ask your friend to join us now, if any. We should stop recruiting by 2-3weeks time and focus on our practice.

Basically that is our band’s direction and a guideline for your harmonica journey. Hope that is useful for you. Thanks!