Hi Tracey

If you want to learn more about playing by ear, you need to discard the tab as soon as you can. Think of the simplest tunes you know (three blind mice?) and play them without your cribsheet. It doesn't matter how slow or how many mistakes you make.

When you can do this well enough, go back to Oh Suzannah and such and play them without the cribsheet. Then start to just play, sort of making up tunes as you go along. You'll sound find that your mouth and hands know where the notes are without your brain interfering too much.

Always keep your harmonica handy. You can play it anytime you have a spare minute or two.

Blues is a bit different. Most players play what they call 'cross harp', which is playing a harmonica in a different key to the key of the song. So if you have a guitar player playing in E (which they often do, being the easiest guitar key for blues) you'll need a harmonica in A. This makes the most important notes into 'suck' notes, which are the easiest to bend.

Now bending notes is something that's hard to explain without someone having a glass mouth - you need to see what's going on in there! But try a suck note on say hole 4, keep sucking and then imagine it's not a harmonica but a lemon! You purse you lips more and tighten the inside of your mouth and the note starts to bend slightly down. When you can connect what you are doing with your mouth with what your ears are hearing, your playing the blues!

I wish you the best of luck, I've had a lot of fut playing harmonica - it's a very underrated instrument.

And Noreen - they're also called gob-iron and tin sandwich.

Les