Since its first publication in 1990, The Harp Handbook has frequently been called the "harmonica player's bible." Legendary jazz musician and Grammy Award winner Howard Levy praised it as "excellent, the first proper book on the diatonic harmonica," and the American Harmonica Newsletter called it "a landmark."
The diatonic harmonica is a strange instrument. It was never designed for the sounds that later made it popular, and many of the playing techniques used to produce those sounds were only imperfectly understood, even among experienced players. With this groundbreaking book, Steve Baker sought to demystify the myths surrounding the instrument. The Harp Handbook was the first work to provide detailed insight into the workings of the diatonic harp. It explains in clear and simple terms exactly what happens when you bend notes, shows how dual reed systems actually work, and offers detailed descriptions of key playing techniques and how to master them.
All of this quickly made it the standard work on the instrument. Steve Baker's insights have since been adopted by countless later authors and teachers. The Harp Handbook is not primarily a textbook, but a reference work. It contains chapters on history, tone structure and construction, playing in different positions or keys on an instrument, what actually happens when notes are bent and overblown, the various playing techniques and styles, alternative tunings, and much, much more. It concludes with a large selection of exercises in notation and tablature, which can be heard on the accompanying CD, and remains as relevant today as it was when first published.
