The mode 'licks' helps to learn and memorize licks. Typically it plays a random lick from your collection and asks you to play it back, note by note. If successful, the next lick will be asked for.

For harpwise, a 'lick' is a short musical phrase with a sequence of holes and an mp3-recording. It will be transposed as necessary.

Please Note: This mode relies on a collection of licks, that you need to accumulate over time; only a simple starter set will be created at first start; typically it will be kept at: ~/harpwise/licks/richter/licks_{withholes.txt} similar e.g. for chromatic.

When adding licks and you need to adjust start and end of the recording, the mode 'play' might help, to check your results.

You may want to collect licks, that you dig and even pay for some good lick collections until you tens or hundreds of licks, that sound good. Once having that many licks, you may want to categorize them with tags (e.g. for artist or style). Harpwise helps with this by adding some automatic tags (see below); in addition there are some tools to select licks based on their affinity to a given scale or chord.

If you get comfortable with a lick and want to explore it beyond its written wholes, you may find it useful to switch to mode listen, which can be done by typing 'm' without stopping the wise first.

Play licks from your collection; transpose them (i.e. their recordings) to the key of c, if necessary:

harpwise licks c

Similar, but only choose from licks with tags 'fav' and 'has-rec'

harpwise licks c --tags-all fav,has-rec

this employs the automatic tag 'has-rec', which is added to each lick, that has a recording. The opposite is 'no-rec'.

Another automatic tag is 'shifts-four', which is added to each lick, which, when shifted by a major fourth, can still be played on the chosen harmonica. Similar tags are 'shifts-five' and 'shifts-eight'.

So

harpwise licks a -t shifts-four,shifts-five

selects all licks, that can be shifted by four or five notes without loosing any hole; these licks may therefore accompany a blues-progression alone. The keys used to actually shift those licks, are described in the help-screen (type 'h').

Similar, but only choose from licks with tags 'fav' or 'scales'

harpwise licks c --tags-any fav,scales

Show the licks selected by the previous example, employing the mode 'print':

harpwise print licks-list --tags-any fav,scales

To find licks, that are mostly (i.e. all holes or all but one) contained in the chords chord-i, chord-iv or chord-v, use the respective automatic tags, e.g.:

harpwise licks c -t mostly-chord-v

currently there are 5 automatic 'mostly'-tags for scales chord-i, chord-iv, chord-v, blues and mipe.

Select licks (if any), that have been starred by pressing '*' while it is beeing or has been played played:

harpwise licks a -t starred

and use mode print to see details about starred licks. The list of starred licks is kept e.g. in:

~/harpwise/licks/richter/starred.yaml

There are some more options to filter the set of available licks (see below); see also the lick-file created initially on more explanation on the concept of tags.

Here is a more sophisticated example. It helps to memorize licks, but not scales and shows the scales for each hole:

harpwise licks c blues --loop --imm --drop-tags-any scales \
    --add-scales chord-i,chord-iv,chord-v \
    --display chart-scales --comment holes-all

However, if you find yourself using these options for mode licks over and over again (and if you do not want to set them interactively, once the wise is running) you may move them to your config.ini and shorten the above command line to:

harpwise licks blues

Alternatively to using the tag-options described above, you may give licks as arguments on the commandline (especially for a 12-bar blues):

harpwise licks box1-i box1-iv box1-i box1-v box1-iv box1-v box1-i simple-turn

would start with the lick box1-i and switch from one to the next per your request; all other licks that you may have (e.g. wade, st-louis) are ignored.

Note, that the lick box1-i (e.g.) appears more than once in the commandline above, because during a 12-bar blues, this chord appears multiple times.

If you find yourself using such a commandline as given above over and over, you may define them as a lick-progression in your lick-file (see there for explanation); a predefined example could be used like this:

harpwise licks --lick-progression box1

knowing these licks in and out would allow for basic accompaniment of e.g. a 12-bar blues.

This option can fruitfully be combined with a scale-progression:

harpwise licks --scale-prog 12bar --lick-prog box1
  --kb-tr RIGHT=s+RETURN,LEFT=S+L

which employs the key 'RIGHT' to switch both scale-progression and lick-progression at once; whereas 'LEFT' resets them to their initial values.

If you want to explore a single lick, that is not yet in your lick-file (take +1 +2 +3 as a simple example), you may specify it adhoc by giving its holes on the commandline:

harpwise licks +1 +2 +3

later, if satisfied, you may add this lick (and maybe a recording) to your lickfile.