Shane Sager interview

Shane Sager joins me on episode 144.

Shane is from Boston. In his early teens, a hand injury forced him to give up drumming, so he turned to the harmonica and never looked back. At Berklee College of Music he studied drums, as harmonica wasn’t offered, but left after two years to focus fully on the harmonica, studying with top teachers — especially Mike Turk, who helped him shape his chromatic playing.

In his early twenties Shane performed with Sting, later joining his touring band in 2019 and going on to travel the world with him for six years.

He now continues to perform and record with various acts and has a couple of albums of his own coming out soon. An avid writer, he publishes on Substack and released his first harmonica book, Beyond Breath, in 2025, with two more in the pipeline.

Links:

Shane’s Substack: https://shanesager.substack.com/ 

Shane's book 'Beyond Breath': https://tinyurl.com/5heaf9tw

North Carolina Harp Fest: https://www.ncharmonica.com/

Videos:

Shane’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0_bbSLOzrEFkvFCWiPvWahu0O_PQpoOx&si=XPeZ_DtDCvHdjf1n

Shape of My Heart with Sting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jPFdg4CNss&list=PL0_bbSLOzrEFkvFCWiPvWahu0O_PQpoOx

Playing with Sting at Carnegie Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AW8uIFxeAk&list=PL0_bbSLOzrEFkvFCWiPvWahu0O_PQpoOx

Playing with Sting at Time’s Square: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se1HT8F2c2k

Sting and Stevie Wonder playing ‘Fragile’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPjj8edvjgM

Shane playing at SPAH 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhIDlz5TeA

Bill Barrett playing Sunny Side of the Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_EW85IYO3w

Liam Ward interview with Shane: https://www.learntheharmonica.com/post/sting-harmonica-player-shane-sager-interview

Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
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Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com

Chapters

• 1:30 Shane is from Boston and still living there now at age 31 with lots going on musically there
• 1:59 Always dreamed of going to the Berkless College of Music and fulfilled that dream
• 2:34 First instrument was drums, which Shane studied at Berklee as harmonica was not permitted
• 2:46 Was into music from a young age and had a wide range of musical taste with input from family
• 3:14 Started playing harmonica age 14 after breaking hand badly and having to give up the drums
• 3:36 A teacher (Mr Rose) at school was into blues and put Shane onto the harmonica
• 4:17 Blues music was first time Shane became aware of the structure of the music
• 4:55 Playing the drums first influenced Shane to play the harmonica rhythmically
• 5:15 The impact of the first instrument that people play
• 5:44 Drums was fun to practise, something which Shane tries to bring into his harmonica teaching
• 6:25 Shane’s early learnings of the harmonica was from YouTube, with Adam Gussow and Ronnie Shellist
• 6:51 Getting a face-to-face teacher was critical in Shane’s harmonica development, with Mike Turk his first teacher
• 8:18 Also had lessons with Annie Raines, with Annie and Mike Turk both based in Boston
• 8:39 Shane started playing diatonic age 14 and chromatic age 16, with Mike turning him on to the chromatic
• 8:44 James Cotton was a big influence and that led Shane to seek Annie Raines out as a teacher
• 9:25 The contrast of learning blues harmonica with Annie Raines and jazz chromatic with Mike Turk
• 9:50 Shane has worked hard to bridge the gap between the diatonic and chromatic harmonicas, with people saying he plays the “chromatic very diatonically”
• 10:16 Chromatic playing heavily influenced by Stevie Wonder, and also Mike Turk’s bluesy use of the chromatic (not in third position)
• 10:47 Influence of James Cotton and Paul Delay on Shane’s diatonic playing
• 11:26 Shane conducted an academic thesis on James Cotton when he was in high school, studying his style deeply
• 12:10 Paul DeLay is Shane’s favourite diatonic blues player with his unique and unpredictable style
• 13:48 Decided to curtail his Berklee studies to pursue his harmonica career, which was in more demand than his drumming
• 14:42 Asked if he could study harmonica at Berklee and they refused, saying the harmonica was ‘not a real instrument’
• 15:40 Also had lessons with Rob Paparozzi
• 15:46 Started life as a pro harmonica player around age 20, playing with different artists, teaching and appearing at festivals
• 16:51 Attended numerous harmonica workshops at this time, which were an important part of his learning
• 17:18 Spent some time living in Los Angeles and Austin
• 18:14 Shane first played with Sting in 2015 at a charity gig using Berklee students with other performances following before becoming a member of his touring band in 2019
• 19:12 Sting is one of the mainstream artists who likes to use harmonica in his music
• 19:34 Was asked to play with Sting again in 2016, this time at the iconic Carnegie Hall
• 20:13 In 2018 played a new year’s eve Time’s Square gig with Sting with a TV audience of 30 million, playing Brand New Day
• 20:43 In 2019 was asked to be a part of Sting’s touring band, which lasted until 2025
• 21:06 What is felt like to be part of Sting’s band and the massive amount of preparation Shane undertook before starting the tour
• 21:52 Shane’s role in the band was the the top line instrument dancing around Sting’s voice
• 22:40 Sting has used various harmonica players as guest appearances, including Brendan Power, William Galison, Larry Adler and Toots Thielemans
• 23:02 Shane was the first harmonica player to hold a full time role in Sting’s band
• 23:26 Sting has been a fan of harmonica since he heard Paul Butterfield’s East West album
• 23:47 Shane learnt several saxophone parts from Sting’s songs on harmonica
• 24:15 Had to work hard to adapt the harmonica to the songs where it didn’t naturally fit, such as Russians
• 25:03 Toured ten months out of the year with Sting, which didn’t leave Shane a lot of time to prepare songs to perform
• 25:23 How parts the harmonica parts were assigned in the band
• 26:10 Sting would let Shane know if the part he was playing wasn’t what he wanted
• 27:03 The Carnegie Hall gig was a duo with Sting, when Shane was only 21 or 22 years old, was an overwhelming moment for Shane
• 27:54 Was in Sting’s touring band for six years, playing 500 shows in 50 countries
• 28:23 Sting is currently working on a trio gig, but Shane would welcome playing with Sting in the future, but after six years he is grateful for the time he had
• 29:16 Delinquent Dedication is an article Shane wrote about his time on the road
• 29:47 Still does one-off shows with Sting as part of the ‘Sting-alumni’
• 30:16 Made a good living touring with Sting
• 30:43 Playing with Sting has also given Shane a great reputation as a harmonica player and how he’s built on that
• 31:06 Appeared on some soul albums (not released as yet) playing chromatic, including PJ Morton and Gene Noble
• 31:37 Shane is also doing a lot of teaching, which is something he’s always wanted to do
• 32:06 Teaching at the North Carolina Harp Fest in October 2025
• 32:59 Feels there is a gap in teaching the chromatic in a more accessible way in order to attract more diatonic players to it
• 33:31 Still teaches diatonic and still loves to play diatonic
• 34:12 Approach to chromatic is using pentatonic scales to sound bluesy with a gritty Stevie Wonder sound
• 34:45 Doesn’t teach a Toots Thielemans approach to playing chromatic as that can intimidate students and emphasises making learning the chromatic fun
• 36:06 Mike Turk and Bill Barrett were big influences on Shane’s chromatic playing
• 36:47 Draws inspiration from outside the harmonica from players who aren’t blues or jazz players, especially microtonal (such as slide guitar)
• 37:56 Shane is a keen writer, has a Substack site of his articles and released a harmonica related book this year: Beyond Breath
• 38:55 Took a suitcase full of books on his tour with Sting
• 39:34 When returned from touring with Sting started his Substack which many people know more about than Shane’s Sting gig
• 40:18 Publisher approached Shane about writing a book after seeing his Substack articles
• 40:49 Beyond Breath is more of a holistic approach to playing the harmonica rather than an instructional book
• 41:15 Shane is working on his second book at the moment
• 41:25 Shane advocates a rounded life and drawing inspiration from many sources and feeding that into your harmonica playing
• 41:54 Recommends a book called Daily Rituals by Mason Curry
• 42:51 Thinks of improvising music as a written paragraph
• 43:30 Believes that consistency is much more important than motivation in regular music practise
• 44:30 Shane believes that just five minutes a day can turn you in a good harmonica player, and that everyone has time if you have realistic goals
• 46:21 Ten minute question
• 48:50 Hohner endorser: plays mainly Golden Melody diatonic, which was his first harmonica. Usually has these tuned to compromise tuning
• 49:24 Also plays Marine Bands Special 20s
• 49:48 Hohner 280C is chromatic of choice, which Boaz Kim set-up to make the reeds more bendable
• 51:07 Amps: When played with Sting mainly played through the PA using a little reverb
• 51:15 Mainly uses a Greg Huemann Ultimate 58 mic
• 51:35 For amplified blues harmonica uses a Memphis Mini amp using a Greg Huemann Ultimate 57 mic
• 52:01 Uses a Lone Wolf Harp Break pedal for a blues sound
• 52:11 Some of diatonics provided by Blue Moon, as well as Kinya Pollard (who has just released the overblow booster)
• 52:48 Has used overblows for sometime, and admires the modern players who use overblows so effectively
• 53:45 Advantage of being both a diatonic overblow player and a chromatic player
• 54:36 Shane is working on releasing his own album, an instrumental of old soul music
• 55:47 Also developing another album at this time: jazz with amplified harmonica
• 56:04 And working on two more books: one of which is 365 days of practise for a harmonica player
• 57:05 Has playing a little drums again recently and is giving a workshop at the North Carolina Harp Fest on how to play rhythm on the harmonica
• 57:39 Does still play some drums but prioritises playing harmonica over drums

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Shane Sager joins me on episode one hundred and forty four. Shane is from Boston. In his early teens a hand injury forced him to give up drumming so he turned to the harmonica and never looked back. At Berkeley College of Music he studied drums as harmonica wasn't offered, but left after two years to focus fully on the harmonica, studying with top teachers, especially Mike Turk, who helped him shape his chromatic playing. In his early twenties, Shane performed with Sting, later joining his touring band in 2019 and going on to travel the world with him for six years. He now continues to perform and record with various acts and has a couple of albums of his own coming out soon. An avid writer he publishes on Substack and released his first harmonica book, Beyond Breath, in 2025, with two more in the pipeline. This podcast is sponsored by Zidalharmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.zidal1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidalharmonicas. Hello, Shane Sager, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Neil. Appreciate it. Pleasure and great to speak to you, Shane. So you're speaking to us, I think, from Boston, where you grew up? Yep, Boston, born and raised.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35

My parents are originally from a town outside of uh Boston called Malden. They came into downtown when my sister and I were born. And yeah, I'm 31 now. So I've uh this has just been home for as long as I can remember.

SPEAKER_03: 1:48

Yep, it's a good place. So quite close to New York. So, and of course, a good music scene, the the the Berkeley uh School of Music, right? Which you which you went to as well. So uh lots going on around there musically.

SPEAKER_02: 1:59

Yeah, Berkeley was uh it was funny because when I was in high school, I would take the train uh every day, and the train always went by Berkeley. And I've been playing music since I was since I was nine, and I always had this, even from a very young age, I was like, I'm probably gonna end up going to Berkeley. Um and when I was applying to colleges, I was yeah, I applied to a couple, I would apply to Manhattan School Music in Belmont and a couple other places in in the States. But Berkeley was always the one that I was infatuated with, and uh and I ended up getting in, which was which was really cool.

SPEAKER_03: 2:30

You got in uh as a drummer, didn't you? So we'll get on to Berkeley short uh shortly, but yeah, you started as a drummer as your uh your first instrument, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:37

Yeah, so I started uh I started playing drums uh at the age of nine uh because I saw the movie School of Rock. I was also at that time, I was I I was into music from a very young age. None of my family are musicians, but they were all very musical people, so they all had they had good taste. My sister was big into Motown and things like that, so I was listening to that stuff when I was seven or eight. And then my uncles brought me a lot of like heavy metal and you know, Sabbath and Megadeth and people like that. So it was cool as a drummer to like when I started playing, I had this wide berth of things that I really wanted was curious about exploring. And then I got into playing harmonica when I was about 14. And reason for it is that I busted my hand really badly playing soccer, and I was playing in jazz band at the time and I had to fill the credit, and I only had one hand to work with. And the beauty of the diatonic harmonica is that it just needs one hand. And so I started on that uh when I was that age, and you know, as kind of a stroke of luck, I had a teacher at my high school who was very into blues music and gave me a huge stack of you know, Big Walter Horton and James Cotton and Little Walter, of course, um, Sunny Boy. So I already knew all the the blues guys right from the get-go. So that was a huge advantage that I already had. And this was Mr. Rose, we got to thank for your harmonica playing. Oh man, Mr. Yeah, Landon Rose, man. He's um and we had a lot of great musicians in the band too, but none of them would have would have actually been as good as they were without his encouragement and his uh patience because we were all a bunch of hyperactive ADD kids for sure. But he was another example, man. He taught us, you know, it's interesting when I was first learning about music as a drummer, you don't really learn, you learn a little bit, I guess, in the way of arrangements and uh chord progressions and things like that. But blues was the first music that I came across, and I was aware of the fact that there was a structure to it, that there was a 12-bar, eight-bar structure. And that was fascinating to me as a drummer, is I just thought people I didn't know how songs were were created or how forms were created. But when I started playing the harmonica, that was my first entrance into actually learning how to play melodically, harmonically. Um so as a drummer, it was just a it was like it was like going in the moon. It was a very different feeling.

SPEAKER_03: 4:55

Yeah. I mean I thought to, you know, lots of people who started out on different instruments. You know, a few drummers, quite a few people who play piano, obviously guitar and on other instruments. And you know, it's always interesting how that initial instrument influenced you and you'd have thought obviously uh being drums, it would it would influence you rhythmically. Uh, you know, you're playing on harmonica, yeah. Do you think that that has done that?

SPEAKER_02: 5:15

Yeah, for sure. I I think that it was you know, uh people's first instrument is always a wild card because sometimes it's an instrument that's forced on the kid from their parents. So the classic example is people who are told to, you know, learn piano when they're six and then they do it for a year and then they never want to do it again. And drums was an interesting first first instrument. I think it's the second best first instrument. I think piano is first and then drums are second, and usually they go hand in hand. But drums was interesting because it was fun to practice, and that was the biggest thing that I took from my time drumming, is that music doesn't have to be this kind of slog. It can be a fun, wondrous experience. And when I started playing harmonica, it was difficult at the beginning, but I still had that I was conditioned to it being fun, to like this is supposed to be fun, it's not supposed to be superior, like academic or trying to fit some kind of mold. It was just, I'm just doing it because it's fun. There's something my dad said to me a long time ago is that like whatever you do in life, just make sure that it's fun. And drums was just that. It was the it was the spark.

SPEAKER_03: 6:23

You then started learning like probably quite a lot of people, your generation from YouTube, right? And there's lots of YouTube teachers and Ronnie Sherlius. I know you spent some time with an Adam Gusso's YouTube channel. And so you you started learning that way initially with harmonica, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 6:37

Yeah, so when I first came to harmonica was when YouTube was was just starting to get populated with things like Adam Gusso and and Ronnie Shellis and Jason uh Ricci. And all of those were great. The thing that really uh made me stick with the harmonica is that when I was learning drums, uh I had a long stretch of time where I didn't have a teacher, and that was kind of a detriment to me, is that I've I've it was too much lenient to the self-reliance of it. And I still to this day preach about the importance of having a teacher. No, when I was uh when I was first learning, the man who taught me how to play the harmonica was uh Mike Turk. Mike Turk was a huge, huge influence on me. And as most like 15 or 16-year-old kids think, like, you know, you think you're you know, God's gift to the world, you think you're the greatest harmonica player ever. And Mike just immediately cut me down to size, and it was exactly what I needed. So that when I met people, I went Ronnie went on to be a great friend of mine, and Jason went on to be a great friend of mine. When I met those guys, I was able to absorb more of what they were trying to teach me from a less ego-driven place. And I think that was very valuable. Those in-person sessions that I had with Mike were irreplaceable in terms of becoming a harmonica player, both chromatic and diatonic.

SPEAKER_03: 7:57

Yeah, very great player. Well, I've had him on the podcast, so yeah, he's a very knowledgeable guy, yeah, so a great teacher, I'm sure. So both him and Annie Raines, I think they uh were based in Boston, yeah, so you saw those face-to-face because they were they were nearby as well, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 8:25

Yeah, harmonica mom and harmonica dad. Um yeah, they were both uh Annie. It was interesting too because Mike is, as you know, Mike is much more jazz-driven than he is, than he is blues driven. And I was I started playing harmonica diatonic when I was 14. I started playing chromatic when I was 16. And from the get-go, the things that I was interested in was I just wanted to sound like James Cotton, and that Chicago the Blues Today album was one of the most important albums of my life. And that was what kind of led me to Annie, is I had heard her name around the Boston music scene for a long time and started taking lessons with Annie, and it was all about just like I had never tongue-blocked before. I had never all of that stuff was very alien to me. And it was interesting to get that side of the coin with learning how to play blues harmonica and also trying to learn how to play Autumn Leaves or something like that from Mike. So the two of them going hand in hand was a very interesting time of my life. And to this day, balancing those two sides has always been difficult, but I think also very rewarding as a as a player.

SPEAKER_03: 9:50

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of talk around the differences and the similarities between the diatonic and chromatic. And I mean you're playing jazz and blues there, so you know, the stylistically not too far apart, but yeah, obviously the the instruments themselves are quite different, yeah, to play.

SPEAKER_02: 10:05

Yeah, and I think that my style as it has evolved over the years has been trying to bridge the two. I've been told by people that I play chromatic very diatonically, and don't always know how to take that. But I think I I think I understand what they mean is that I I bring a lot more of that those double stops and those those kind of accentuated bends into my chromatic playing, which is a direct result of my Stevie Wonder influence, which is paramount. But yeah, I think that the the blues stuff has been and and Mike is like this too. Like when Mike first started recording albums uh on the chromatic, he was doing all the amplified chromatic stuff, and and it was much more bluesy than things that I had heard before, and that definitely had a profound impact too.

SPEAKER_03: 10:47

And so you mentioned a couple of instances there over to James Cotton. I know you like Paul Delay. So I've got a nice clip of you. Um you're playing uh Mojo working. I can definitely hear some pole delay. You play that high, that high nine blow he lets put in there, and then you go into some big hand barrotto, James Cotton. So he could I could hear both those players in that solo, so that was interesting when I was checking out your uh your recordings, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 11:24

Yeah, Cotton was one of those guys. It's funny. So when I was in high school, I uh was a part of a program, it was an academic program that was part of my uh it was called the Creative Arts Diploma Program. So when you graduate high school, you usually get one diploma. This was a second diploma that was just in uh any creative art that you were you had to supply a certain amount of hours every week towards whatever it was. And then when you graduated, you got two diplomas. So I got my second diploma in instrumental music, specifically in harmonica, and I did my, for lack of a better term, thesis in my senior year on James Cotton. So I dove very, very, very deep into into all of his recording, and that playing style, yes, has definitely had a very big impact on my um on my diatonic playing. And you know, as for Paul Delay, man, he's he is my go-to favorite harmonica player of all time. I just think the ability to to move between genres, between chromatic and and diatonic, to be able to be so unpredictable, um, and so melodic, and so play into like Jason talked about this a little bit, playing to the strengths and the weaknesses of the instrument. A lot of times people will just play to the strength, and what I always found was very interesting about Paul, like from a technical perspective, and I think I talked to Liam Ward a little bit about this, was he exited each note in such a unique, almost funny way, which is really endearing and and you know it's kind of endemic to to Paul as a musician and as a as a performer, but I had just never heard anything like it. It was like listening to like alien music. And yeah, to this day, he's a big uh he's a big influence. And a lot of the guys that I like nowadays, modern players, are come from the same thing, very influenced by by Paul Delay.

SPEAKER_03: 13:16

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think he's a lot of players' favorite players, and uh, like you say, completely unique in his approach. Yeah, so um definitely interesting hearing what he comes out with. I've done a retrospective on James Cotton and Paul Dillet, so yeah, people can check that out if they want to hear more about those guys, if they don't know about them already. So yeah, because so going back to Berkeley then, you um you went uh I'd spent I think two years there. Uh you were initially studying drums, yeah, but then you sort of decided you could you wanted to follow harmonica, and then so you you sort of left Berkeley of your own accord, did you uh to sort of pursue your harmonica dreams?

SPEAKER_02: 14:04

Yeah. Um essentially what happened is that I was playing drums and I was also gigging a lot via harmonica. The thing about playing drums at Berkeley is that you fade a little bit into the background because everyone is it's it's so oversaturated with incredible drummers. So I definitely felt a little, a little out of place and I was kind of looking for my my avenue. And what ended up happening is that I had one day I remember like I was playing harmonica and I was like, maybe I should, maybe I should pursue this because I'd had enough people that had hired me for singer-songwriter gigs or blues gigs, or uh I was playing everything. And I talked to my roommate a little bit about it at the time. I was like, what do you think you know the board would say at Berkeley about like if I wanted to just study harmonica? And I remember he said to me, he's like, Well, but they don't have that instrument there. I was like, But like let me try. I remember going to go talk to the people at at Berkeley and uh their their answer, you know, not to sugarcoat it was essentially we don't we don't believe it's a real instrument. And it's a tough thing to hear, especially when you put hours and hours and hours of craft into into trying to do something, and then the institution that claims to be this very progressive institution it won't even hear you out, was a little disheartening. So yeah, um the end of my second year I decided I can pursue what I want to pursue on the harmonica. The information that I want is all online, or I'll go find it for myself from all these teachers. And I was getting a lot of education from Mike and from Annie, Ronnie, and uh another big teacher of mine was Rob Paparosi. So having all of that as my curriculum, I kind of struck out of my own. So this would have been when I was about twenty, and I started playing professionally when I was twenty and just gigging, really touring, just teaching as much as I could. And I started doing that when I was twenty. So it was a five-year stretch there between leaving Berkeley and getting the gig with Sting that I was really kind of nomadic and on my own.

SPEAKER_03: 16:09

Yeah, but at that stage, like you said before you got with Sting, you were uh you were working professionally, you were making a living as a harmonica player?

SPEAKER_02: 16:17

Yeah, I was I was teaching quite a bit. That was also where I first got into teaching. Uh during the pandemic, I I I had more of a systemization to it, but during those five years, uh I toured with a lot of different blues people, Gabe Stillman. Um, a lot of people, and got to go to a lot of festivals. And I was also treating these workshops that they have around uh the United States, things like SPA, things like these like big harmonica gatherings, as my school. So I would get these handouts, I would get any little bit of like, you know, back-of-the-bar advice from any of these these players, and that would become my curriculum. And I I treated it like a like my job. So over those five years, and you know, there was a period of time I wasn't living in Boston, I was living in LA for a long time, I was living in I was living in Austin, uh, I was all over the place. And eventually I, you know, I settled into a nice groove when I was about 24 where I was giggy enough, I was teaching enough, and everything looked like it was gonna be good.

SPEAKER_03: 17:39

Well, of course, you so you mentioned Sting there, of course. We can't talk about you, Shang, without talking about Sting. Sure. You played with Sting, I think, for six years. Uh you say though starting in 2015, wasn't it? So what was the gap, sorry, between leaving Berkeley and and then starting to play with Sting? I know I know there was a bit of a transition, wasn't it, before you started playing with him more full-time?

SPEAKER_02: 18:14

The way that it began was in 2015, Sting was doing a charity gig in Boston for this charity called Lenny Zacom Fund. Lenny Zacomb was a big civil rights guy in the um in the Boston area. So it was a fundraiser. And Sting came to play at the Lenny Fund thing. My parents had been a part of the Lenny Fund forever. Lenny was a really good friend of theirs. And Sting was using an all-Berkeley band. It was it was like an acoustic session, basically. So there was a Cajon player, there was my friend Jabari who was playing upright bass, Sting was playing acoustic guitar, and then for the song selection, they were all pretty harmonica-centric songs. So Fields of Gold was one. I know it's originally done on accordion, um, but you know, for that acoustic setting, the the harmonica worked better. So I was kind of tapped to to do this gig, and I played Fields of Gold, I played Every Breath You Take, and I played Roxanne. Those were the those were the three songs. And what ended up happening from that is, you know, the cool thing about his music, man, is that there is just not a lot of popular artists out there that use harmonica as much as he does. And just getting that opportunity, and I thought that was the the only time I was ever gonna play with him. This was my shining moment in the sun, and I'm I'm gonna make the most of it. Almost exactly a year later, I get a call from their management saying, Hey, uh, he wants you for another gig. And I was like, Cool, where's the gig? Carnegie Hall. And uh I fell over, but um but yeah, so th those five years between uh whatever it was, um I played uh one or two gigs a year, and they would be these one-off, sometimes private, sometimes acoustic uh shows. And then in 2018, going into 2019, I was offered to play a New Year's gig in Times Square, playing the song Brand New Day, which famously has Stevie Wonder playing the harmonica. I had about four weeks to get ready for that, to learn it front to back, and I did, and the televised audience for that gig was 30 million people. So after that, like that's how I always refer to it as that was like my audition gig. Three months later, I was working in uh Pennsylvania, I was working with my friend's blues band, and I got an email from them saying, Hey, he wants you to go on tour. That was right before the summer of 2019, and I toured from the summer of 2019 to the beginning of um 2025.

SPEAKER_03: 21:05

Wow. You must have felt like the uh the luckiest homelaka player on the world getting that gig. I mean, how did that feel? It was like that.

SPEAKER_02: 21:12

It was definitely feeling uh an incredible amount of gratitude and an incredible amount of uh imposter syndrome. Like there's so many other great harmonica players, and I don't claim to be um William Gallison or a Stevie Wonder or someone like that. So it's almost a question of kind of like why me. But you know, my job was to was to be the harmonica player. So I took it on. I had a massive amount of prep that I did for a couple of months leading into the gig. There was a lot of music that I that didn't have harmonica on it that I was required to learn. All of the stuff from the Dream of the Blue Turtles album, all of the police stuff, all of the the brand for Marsalis saxophone stuff, and then that became what I was used for. I was the in the band, there was two guitars, keyboards, two backup vocalists, Sting, and myself. So I was the auxiliary on top of the music right there, fighting with his with his voice top line instrument.

SPEAKER_03: 22:07

Sting is a harmonica fan, so I think he was a fan of Paul Butterfield, yeah. So he he he always loved the sound, and like you say, he had Stevie Wonder play with him, he played with him on Fragile uh as well. Another song he played with him famously. Was that it? Was Sting just a harmonica fan? Is that why he wanted a harmonica player in there?

SPEAKER_02: 22:40

You know, he's he's said it uh before that he's had the odd harmonica player turn up for for a gig, Stevie Wonder being a good example, Brendan Power did the Ten Summoners Tales album with him, so did Larry Adler. I think William Gallison did some, maybe not recordings, but shows with him. Toots did, but again, these are all guest appearances. You know, having a harmonica player in the band had never been something that I thought he would ever do, because granted, it is a very uh it's very prevalent in his music, especially in his solo career, but it's still like, you know, you could get the greatest saxophone player, you could get the greatest violin player. I uh that was always what I asked myself is like why why the harmonica, why does he want a harmonica? Yeah. And I think that it's it does stem to your point from his his genuine love of of the instrument. And yeah, that album, um, East West was a very influential album on him. And um that song uh In My Own Dream uh and the saxophone solo and the David Sanborn solo was very influential on him too. So it's pretty outspoken about Paul Butterfield.

SPEAKER_03: 23:47

So as you say though, you learned songs on harmonica that were saxophone parts a lot. So I mean, so he made a decision to have a harmonica instead of a saxophone, right? Which is again is a pretty incredible decision uh in that sort of pop setting where generally you'd expect, you know, a nice powerful saxophone solo. So again, uh incredible uh decision from him, yeah, from a harmonica point of view.

SPEAKER_02: 24:08

Yeah, and I think that that was the that was the real thing I was struggling with is that the harmonica parts were were hard in their own way. What was harder was was making the harmonica fit in the songs that it it wasn't necessarily a part of. So the orchestral songs, like the one that I always think of is the song Russians. Russians is a very orchestral, like uh Stravinsky almost part that's played usually on a cello. So I was playing a 16-hole chromatic and I was just playing on the lowest possible octave. I thought it sounded really cool, but it was just getting over that hump of like, you know, I know it's a harmonica, I know that I'm mimicking a cello, and I know that this is just playing the part I'm not supposed to put any of my own spin on it. For like Brand New Day and Shape My Heart, I could, but for those songs that I was more like a person in an orchestra, that was challenging. But it also forced me to be very adaptable. Throughout the course of the year, we would tour about 10 months a year. So it's not like you had time to, you know, if he wanted something, you had to have it ready either right then or the next gig. So there was no time to go in a woodshed, or if he assigned you something, you don't sleep, you put your nose to the grindstone and you work.

SPEAKER_03: 25:23

So on that, did he assign you parts to play, or did you play like the parts of other instruments or come up with your own thing or a mixture of all the above?

SPEAKER_02: 25:30

Or I always operated under the it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. And I think as a blues player, that's something that I've come to internalize. Uh and you know, something I tell my students is you should essentially play from a very passionate place and then critique it afterwards. So there were songs, and and as a musician, like there are certain things that you don't want to overplay, and especially as a vocalist, you he's the last toes that you want to step on. But there were songs that he had very specific melodies in mind that he wanted me to play. So for those instances, I would listen exactly to what he said. But if it was a song that didn't have anything and I wanted to try a little something, he would let you know if if that didn't work or if it did work. And that was really refreshing because you know, some band leaders that I've worked with in the past have been kind of oblivious to that kind of thing. But the cool thing about Sting is how observant he is. That was the one of the biggest things I took away from my time with him is that it's kind of like what they talk about with old school uh boxers fighting like newer kids, is that the old school boxers are able to see these, you know, kind of young guns and they're able to see everything without allowing their emotions to get in the way. Like you're just seeing it from a purely uh objective point of view. And that was the cool thing about Sting is that he is a musician first. He's also was a high school English teacher, and it definitely he can definitely give that vibe, but he's a musician and he knows he knows what he wants, and if you play something that's not in line with his direction, then you will be told otherwise.

SPEAKER_03: 27:03

On the gig you did with him at Carnegie Hall in 2016, that was just a duo between you and him, wasn't it? Yeah. Or at least partly.

SPEAKER_02: 27:09

Yeah, that was uh he was playing an acoustic. He had just written a song for a documentary that was about Jim Foley, who was a journalist who was beheaded by ISIS. The song was called The Empty Chair, and it's a very deep, very emotionally overwhelming song, let alone in that circumstance of just being in an acoustic guitar and a harmonica on the stage at Carnegie Hall. And I was 21 or 22, something like that, when I got that gig. You know, playing in Times Square is one thing, and 30 million people, it sounds very flashy, but as a musician, getting to play at Carnegie Hall was overwhelming. Like I remember I finished that gig and then I like went back stage and I just like cried.

SPEAKER_03: 27:50

It was just such a powerful moment. A highlight, yeah. But I mean you stood with him for six years, yeah. You like did like 500 shows with him in 50 countries. I mean, incredible, right? Yeah. Are you still with him or because you were part of his touring band? Yeah, that's what that's what happened in 2019, and that lasted till well, till issue. I mean, is it still ongoing? Are you hoping for another call or where is it left at the moment?

SPEAKER_02: 28:34

Yeah, right now he's doing a a trio gig. Uh he's doing himself, Dominic, who's been his his longtime guitar player, and um Chris, uh this guy Chris, who used to play with Mumfred and Sons, is playing um drums. He's a great drummer. So he's kind of gone back a little bit to more the the rock and roll like police roots. One of the things that he was very outspoken about is that, and I think one of the things that gives him such longevity is how willing he is to change things up. You know, would it be great to have another call and another crack at a tour? It would be great. But um, I also feel like, you know, six years and 500 shows, like I had I had my time um with him. And, you know, I wrote an article from my Substack a long time ago that was called uh Delinquent Dedication. It was essentially about life on the road. And life on the road has been overly romanticized in the public opinion. Granted, it is it is an incredible way to live, it's an incredible way to earn a living as a musician, but it is it's hard. Ten months a year away from your family is still 10 months a year away from your family. You know, would touring again be be cool? Yeah, but I also feel like there's other things I want to do with my life, and I'm very grateful to have had the time to tour with him. I still do one off shows with him. Um, I did a couple months back, I did one off show in Vegas. Uh, I'm gonna play on a one off show in Boston in a couple weeks uh that they're doing. So you kind of enter. Into we call it Sting alumni. So you you basically like you graduate from touring with him and then you're just part of the universe of the Sting alumni. So like Brian from Marsalis would be in there, and Tandy Kirkland would be in there, and kind all kinds of people. So it's nice to be an alumni.

SPEAKER_03: 30:16

So I mean, you know, without getting personal, I mean, you make a lot of money touring with Sting. Is that like you know one of the best paid gigs you can get?

SPEAKER_02: 30:23

Or you know, I'm not a very materialistic person. I never have been, but I can't deny the comfortability that that you know financial security does give you. You know, as a harmonica player, those kind of things are are hard to come by, and that was something I'm very grateful for is to have had that those six years of feeling very comfortable like that.

SPEAKER_03: 30:43

Well, I mean, absolutely. I mean it's great, yeah. And it also gave you uh, you know, a great name and reputation, right? And not only as a harmonica player, but as a musician, I'm sure it's it's opened many doors for you, has it? You're getting other things on the bay on the back of that?

SPEAKER_02: 30:56

Yeah, I've uh done I've done a couple albums actually. Uh I've done, you know, I love I still love to play blues, but there's certain things on the chromatic that I'm very interested in nowadays. I started working with a lot of neo-soul artists. Um I did an album coming out um with a woman named Nanena. She's kind of like a Lauren Hill-esque uh woman. There's a lot of chromatic harmonica stuff on that. There's a guy named uh PJ Morton that I've done a lot of work with. Uh my friend Gene Noble has a new album, he was one of the singers of Stings Stings Band. He has a new album coming out that I'm on. So there's a lot of other styles of music that I'm very interested in beyond just jazz and blues. And then I'm teaching a lot too. Yeah, I love Paul Delay and I love Stevie Wonder, but the people who really inspired me a lot uh are Mike and Annie and Ronnie and people like that. And I I always saw myself as a uh wanting to be a teacher. Like I always I knew that I was headed in that direction from a young age. My mom is a teacher, and that was something that I that I always wanted to do. And increasingly nowadays I've taken a lot more joy from from doing that. So, you know, this coming week I'm heading down to uh to North Carolina to the North Carolina Harmonica Festival with Todd Parrott and with a bunch of other great players. Uh Tom and Lecky is gonna be there, Hank Shreve, Jamie Garner. Uh it's it's a pretty stacked bill this year. Um, Michael Peliquin. I love those kind of things, and I love the combination of being able to teach and then play, not having to kind of choose between the two.

SPEAKER_00: 32:39

Hey everybody, you're listening to Neil Warren's harmonica happy hour podcast, sponsored by Tom Halchek and Blue Moon Harmonicas out of Clearwater, Florida, the best in custom harmonicas, custom harmonica parts, and more. Check them out, www.blue moonharmonicas.com.

SPEAKER_03: 32:58

I mean talking about your teaching and also playing with Sting. So with Sting, you mostly played the chromatic, yeah. So uh you're not so much diatonic, right? So almost like 95% chromatic, yeah. So you really push yourself in the chromatic. You think that's a, you know, is that where your interest lies in teaching? I think I read that, you know, are you seeing there's a bit of a gap in the market there? There's not enough chromatic uh teachers out there, right?

SPEAKER_02: 33:20

I think there's there's not enough teachers who will teach the chromatic in a way that is more accessible to diatonic students. That that's the best way that I can put it. So most, you know, I I do still teach diatonic uh and I love diatonic. And outside of the stuff that I was doing with Sting, I was still playing a lot of diatonic. But for teaching, most of my students find me because they hear my diatonic playing and then they also listen to my chromatic playing, and they hear the carryover of a lot of these bluesy things that I do in the diatonic to the chromatic. And I think that's like what I said before. That's what draws people to my sound. When I was at Spa this last um August, that was a lot of people came up to me and said, you know, I've never heard the chromatic played that bendy and that it's very like heavily major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, very stevie-like, but a little bit more gritty. And that's the style of chromatic that I would like to teach. As much as I love jazz and and and the Toots style of playing and Larry Adler, and those guys are, you know, immortal giants. But for me, and what I've found with a lot of diatonic students is that the more of that Toots style of chromatic that you throw at them, it can kind of turn uh some people off because it seems like it seems like the mountain is a little bit too high. So when I start working with my students, I try to just minimize the mountain as much as possible. And going back to what I said about the drums and like the practice needs to be fun. That's a big thing with chromatic, too, is sometimes it can feel a little bit like you're just drilling scales or you're drilling arpeggios or you're drilling tongue switching or whatever it is that you're doing on the chromatic. My theory about diatonic players is just making it more accessible to them in ways, ways and language that they understand better.

SPEAKER_03: 35:36

Yeah, that's a great point. And obviously, Mike Turk was your teacher, he released one of his early albums is he played a lot a lot of uh amplified chromatic, didn't he? Where it was very hard-driven and uh, you know, it's almost like a diatonic style, as you're saying, the way he approached it. Yeah. And so uh as you say, you know, the chromatic can be very clean, you know, there's lots of kind of l light jazz and classical music played on it, which is great, but it doesn't have that same drive and sort of punch that uh Diatonics got right. So yeah, that's what you're trying to get, that sort of sound more out of the chromatic, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 36:06

Yeah, and and that that album that you're talking about, uh blues and around, um, that that Mike Turk did, that was a very influential album. Uh uh, you know, other huge influences that uh I probably shouldn't have mentioned before is Bill Barrett. Just his style of playing that that bending and that amplification of the chromatic was well, I saw a video of him doing Sunny Side of the Street that I thought was the coolest thing ever. And he was playing like amplified chromatic. It was like if little Walter was playing a chromatic to Sunny Side of the Street. That's where my interest lies. And especially the musicians who and the instrumentalists that inspire me outside of harmonica are not necessarily jazz cats and they're not necessarily just strict blues guys, but they're people who operate and ha very much phrase like a vocal instrument. So, like, number one influence that I have nowadays for my um for my chromatic playing is Derek Trucks. I find that his style of phrasing with the microtonal bending is very applicable to a lot of the things that I do on the chromatic. So a lot of this soulful phrasing that I that I try to concoct comes from listening to a lot of these microtonal heavy players. You know, there's other slide players too, Charlie Patton and Book of White and people like that that I'm that I'm drawn to. And, you know, different realms of music too. I love Indian music, I love Arabic music, and anything that's microtonal, I think, has a has a profound impact on me too.

SPEAKER_03: 37:42

So so as well as uh as well as your harmonica playing, you're a very balanced guy, uh Shane. You like to uh obviously read. You touched on your reading and writing already, you like to exercise so that you run the uh Boston Marathon uh in the recent years uh and teaching. So you and uh so writing's very important. You you've written uh numerous articles for Spa magazine. You also have an active substack where you release articles. I've been reading some of those articles, lots of inspirational uh words there, and the ways to approach the harmonica and and life, right? And and uh merging the two. And also you've released earlier this year a book called Beyond Breath, which is uh which was released at the end of March, and you you kindly sent me a copy so I could read it. So uh very readable, you know. I got through it in a in a you know sort of two or three days, which is great. I did read it quite intensely, but uh, you know, it was great, you know, really enjoyed it and definitely recommend people to read it. And it's your kind of philosophy on life and applying it to the harmonica, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 38:34

You know, it's funny, man, because my uh I'd mentioned this before that my mom was uh an English teacher, so reading has always been uh a big thing in my life, and writing too. When I was younger, uh my sister and I and my parents traveled a lot, and my dad always forced us really uh to keep journals. So writing, and that was from when I was as young as six. So uh I've been writing my whole life. What's interesting is because I'm a self-admitted college dropout, I was still very interested in getting an education. So when I was on the road with Sting, uh, I would take two suitcases with me, one of which was just clothes and harmonicas, and the other one was books. You know, when you're at a venue for six hours a day, you have three choices. You can either go to sleep, you can be on your phone, or you can do something productive. So I would read all kinds of things, fiction, like all kind of classic literature, poems, and a lot of nonfiction too, a lot of spirituality-related things, a lot of stuff. So when I came back from being on the road for six years, I had all this stuff that I wanted to talk about, um, but I didn't have an outlet for it. And then a friend of mine, uh, my friend Chris, showed me Substack, and I started publishing articles there, not thinking anyone was going to read them, but just because I felt like I had something that I wanted to say, specifically as a harmonica player. I just started posting these Substacks to Modern Blues Harmonica, and then I have now over 600 subscribers, which is crazy to think about after only really doing it for like a year and a half. It's been a really interesting experience. And, you know, when I was at Spa earlier this year, more people knew me, weirdly, from my Substack than they did know me from my Sting gig. In 2024, when I got off my tour, uh I sent out my first Substack, and I think I did like four or five of them. And then this company called Manuscripts Press approached me about writing this book because they read some of my Substacks and they liked them. So they said, like, we want you to do a book where you talk about harmonica, kind of harmonica, like a harmonica how-to book. And man, there's so many people who could write better harmonica how-to books, like you know, harmonica for dummies is a Bible for people in Winslow and all those people. So I wanted to write the book that was more this is what I wish I had had on the first day that I picked up the harmonica. It's not play two draw to two draw double bend to one one blow kind of thing. It's no, these are the guys you should listen to. This is how you should go about setting up how you practice. And it it's all those those esoteric things that you need as a harmonica player and as a musician. So that was why I wrote the book. I'm actually working on my next book right now, probably still about a year and a half away from publishing it. But um, yeah, so it's not exactly a follow-up, it's a little bit different.

SPEAKER_03: 41:25

But you know, the the book and the approach is you know very much shows your approach to you know to life and playing the harmonica and the fact that the the two are closely coupled, right? Yeah, as I mentioned earlier on, despite the the fun that you obviously want to inject, which is important in your music, you also take your practicing very seriously. And, you know, that sort of dedication, and you know, like you say, you're wanting to read books, do the right things. You know, it's all very important about how you've approached and you know become the great harmonica player you have, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 41:51

Yeah, I it's all balance. I mean, I take a lot of inspiration from writers in terms of my music. There's a great book by Mason Curry called Daily Rituals, which I recommend everyone read. It's essentially just a collection of daily habits that all these really influential artists and musicians and poets had. And what really struck me about uh all of them is that their quote-unquote diet for their creativity was not just limited to if you're a musician, you listen to music, or if you're, you know, a writer, you just read books. It's it's a wide range of things that enter into your subconscious. And for me, the books have just always been that thing. I I get so much inspiration and so much so many different uh ideas for my music. I get more from what I read than I do from the things that I listen to. And that's you know, that's unique to me, and not everyone's like that, but that's just how my my brain works is like someone asked me the other day how I think about improvisation, how I think about phrasing. You know, I'm a very visual guy, and the thing that I see is not streams of notes on a staff, it's actually a paragraph. Like I look for like the variance in the sentence structure, I look for like, you know, short sentence, long sentence, one word. Like that's how I think about it is your ear likes to hear, kind of like we were talking about with Paul Delay, surprise. It wants to, it wants to be tricked into hearing more. That's when I read a book, like that's what I'm thinking about.

SPEAKER_03: 43:22

So obviously you mentioned you're enjoying doing teaching, so you're teaching um both uh in-person and online, yeah. So that's quite an important thing for you. And and you've uh an interesting thing from from your writings and your substack that I that I picked up on is that, well, it's I think the maybe the article's called motivation is an excuse for procrastination, and it's about how you need to be consistent and disciplined in your approach, and that's the way to get better by sort of practicing regularly every day rather than sort of, you know, getting carried away by eight hours a day for two weeks and then giving up type approach.

SPEAKER_02: 43:53

Yeah, I think that the easiest way to to burn out on this thing is to is to practice way too much way too quickly. It's like if you were really hungry and you went to a buffet and you stuffed your face for like two for like 20 minutes and then you're just like, oh, I feel sick, like I never want to eat again, and then you the next day like you just don't eat anything, and then you feel super ravenously hungry, and that it's just it's not balanced. And balance is a very it means different things to everyone. The way that I think about balance is realistic systems that you can implement into your life to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish. And the beauty of harmonica and the beauty of learning an instrument is that you can actually, if you just spent five minutes a day of concentrated effort on let's say, like you're playing diatonic harmonica, and let's say you really want to learn how to play a major pentatonic scale. If you spent five minutes a day just learning that scale and learning how to work around it and learning how to improvise with it, two things will happen. One, you'll actually become a much better harmonica player than if you hadn't had had no direction in that practice session. And the second thing is that you have ammunition now in order to improvise. So so often I hear from people, you know, I don't want to learn music theory because it I feel like it affects my soul, quote unquote soul. I don't want to learn these things because it it I feel like it's not good. That's what I mean when I say that it's a it's a procrastination um ploy. Because the easiest way to tell someone that you that you're not curious is by telling them that you don't have time. Everyone's got time. We all have 24 hours in a day, we all work in the same parameters of most of us are gonna live until we're 80 something. So if that math evens out, that's like 4,000 weeks of your life. And when you start to break all of this stuff down into the really micro, even just something as small as like five minutes, those five minutes cumulatively add up to being like a great player. It's not the people who say, I'm gonna practice for hours and hours and hours that become great. It's the people who have realistic goals. The more realistic your goal is, almost always, the more well-rounded of a player you're going to be. And that's something you know, with my students, that's something that I that I'm very clear on is when you come to me, don't come to me telling me how good you are.

SPEAKER_03: 46:18

Tell me what what you are interested in learning. It sounds like you partly already answered my uh my usual question of uh if you had 10 minutes of practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing? So uh any further answers to that?

SPEAKER_02: 46:30

Yeah. So I would say that for if you're a diatonic player, if I had 10 minutes, I would spend two minutes on just metronome chording, kind of like Cho Felisco kind of style. I think that rhythm is the most important thing when it comes to playing music in general, but I think with the diatonic harmonica, rhythm is the most important thing. Getting in rhythm with your breath, getting in rhythm with the draw notes and the blow notes and where you're getting that breath so you don't run out of air, and also playing in time. So the beauty of the of the diatonic harmonica is of course the chords and and how big that can sound. So I would spend two minutes on that. Uh the following two minutes, I would get a good old piano or a good old polyphonic instrument, and I would get those bends in tune. So many people think that they're bending in tune and they are not bending in tune. You know, another good reference point if you don't want to do a piano or a or another instrument is get a chromatic and learn what the notes are in your diatonic and and check the pitch against against that. You can even do it with another diatonic. But get those bends in tune. It makes everyone's life easier. Perhaps more so than anything for those next two minutes. So what am I at? Six minutes now? If you're interested in learning about chord structure or scales or things like that, I would spend two minutes on that. It doesn't even have to be um playing it. This this is something I took from Ronnie that I thought was really interesting is maybe scales isn't the right word. Learn the geography of the instrument. Learn the like know that two draw is the same thing as six blow, or know that you know one draw is the same as four draw. Like really figure out where the corresponding notes are, figure out how the scales work. And then the last two minutes, I would just jam. I would have fun, I would try to be as non-judgmental as possible. I would try to take what I learned in the first eight minutes and try to apply it in a jam context. Then I would put the harmonic away and I wouldn't touch it for the rest of the day.

SPEAKER_03: 48:53

So I think you play uh what you like, the special twenties and golden melodies for your diatonics, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 48:58

Yeah, so I predominantly am a golden melody player. Uh golden melody was my first harp. And it doesn't really have to do with the equal temperament tuning. It has to do with more so with how it feels in my hand. A lot of my golden melodies nowadays all tune to compromise because the equal temperament can sometimes be a little, especially if you want to play more bluesy stuff, cannot be uh it sounds a little a little strange, like the chords don't sound as full. So I play predominantly golden melodies. You know, I still have like old marine bands that I love uh that I've had forever. And but yeah, the special 20, just in terms of the comfortability, I think, of playing a special 20, and for whatever reason, I I think I might be alone on this. I feel like I can get overblows better on a special 20 than I can on a marine band. Maybe that was just because the the harmonica I learned how to overblow on was a special 20. But yeah, so those are for my Diatonic. And then for the chromatic, uh, it's funny. When I first got endorsed by Honer, the first harmonica that they sent me was the new uh, at that time, the new 64X, the black one. And I hated that harmonica. I I couldn't get any bends out of it. I thought it was too loud and leaky. Uh, I just didn't like it. But the chromatic that I've played forever is the 280C. That's been my baby since day one. I love the feel of it. I love the springiness of the of the reads. I love that I can move around on it really easily, whether I'm in a pucker or I'm or I'm tongue-blocking and doing those big kind of William Clark octaves. I love that the responsiveness of the slide. Sometimes it does get a little wonky and I need to I need to do a little bit of work on it. But most of the time, man, the quality of each note I just find to be really enjoyable to play. And it's it's a little bendable as well, yeah? Very. I can get unbelievable bends. And I have a my friend Boaz, uh Boaz Kim, uh I sent my chromatics to him a couple years ago, and he did some read work on them and made them very bendable. So that helps a lot too. Um, and Boaz is a great player, great, great human being. I got to hang with him a little bit at the spa. And then in terms of amplification, um when I was on tour with Sting, I was playing predominantly through the PA with like slinging a little bit of reverb. And what I would play through is my uh my ultimate 58 from um from Greg. I love the feel of uh like a 58 is kind of a chromatic player's best friend. For what I was trying to get, the tone that I was trying to get out of playing the Stevie Wonder stuff and the Larry Adler stuff, the 58 just just fit really, really well. And then for amplified blues harmonica stuff, I played through a Memphis Mini. My friend Rick Davis made me like it's the only amp I've ever owned. And play through Ultimate 57. For playing blues, I'm predominantly a stick mic guy. Uh my hands cramp up a lot when I play a bullet. Not that I'm against playing a bullet, but for like a three-hour gig, it's just it's it's not as comfortable as playing a 57. So I play that, and then I have a pedal that I got from uh Lone Wolf, uh, actually uh at Spa, the heartbreak pedal, and uh gives me a nice little uh nice little breakup. I like that a lot.

SPEAKER_03: 52:11

Oh you're dietonists, I think you use some from Blue Moon, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Tom set some up for you, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 52:16

Yeah, Tom has been uh Tom has been a buddy of mine for almost 10 years now, and uh he makes the best harmonicas, man. I have uh I've most of my harmonicas are from Tom now. I got a couple from um Kenya Polard uh over at Harpsmith. I love those two. Those play really great. Um he just came out with a new one. It's called the Overblow Booster, and I've been messing around with that. My friend Ross Guerin uh was the one who he he gave me one at Spa and he said, Tell me what you think. So I tried it out and I loved it. Yeah, uh so I would say those two guys predominantly. And you do play some overblows before you had the overblow booster, don't you? Oh yeah. I use overblows actually pretty liberally now in my plane. What's interesting is that the first overblow I got wasn't actually the six as it is for most people. The first overblow I got was the four. So even now in my playing today, I predominantly use the four almost as like a passing tone, and you can get that nice little chromatic run. But yeah, I use overblows frequently now. And, you know, as much as I love uh, you know, all the traditional big Walter Horton and things like that, I also love people like Carlos Del Junco, uh Jason has been a massive influence on me, Constantine and Philippe and and all these guys are uh the way that they're able to use the overblows is is really inspiring. And it's something, you know, I do play chromatic, and I don't necessarily have to use the overblows on a on a diatonic, but I've been working at them and and and I'm trying starting to find some really interesting things.

SPEAKER_03: 53:45

Yeah, and obviously in an interesting way, if you're playing the diatonic chromatically as a chromatic player, that's maybe because not many people do that right that well, because they'll just play the diatonic rather than the chromatic, so it might give you an edge there.

SPEAKER_02: 53:57

You know, it's funny because I first heard about overblows when I first got into chromatic. So I was kind of at an impasse. I was like, do I do I stick with the with learning overblows or do I just commit fully to the chromatic? And at that point I was I was pretty I was pretty sold on the uh on the chromatic. And you know, I think overblows are great. I think that if you use them responsively, that they're a great texture to to put into your plane. But I also just want to clarify for people that a blow bend is not the same thing as an overblown. It's something I need to I need to tell my students quite frequently.

SPEAKER_03: 54:31

Yeah, no, so fantastic. So that's just uh final question then, Shane. This I was rushed by. So uh just about your future plans. And uh I think I read that you'd like to uh you know get your own album out. You do do some singing yourself as well. But is that something you're you're planning on doing? Obviously, you mentioned that you've already done some some recordings which are coming out soon with other with other musicians, but uh what about your own album?

SPEAKER_02: 55:02

Yeah, uh I'm actually working on it right. I'm currently been in the studio a lot recently. Um yeah, I'm doing a I'm doing an album right now with a friend of mine, uh my friend Ken, who's a great Hammond B3 player, and we're doing uh kind of a retrospective look at old soul music. I'm talking about like Sam Cook, like Otis Redding, like people like that, and using the chromatic as uh a voice, and he's just gonna be playing Hammond B3. So it's very churchy, it's very uh it's not very rhythmically driven. It's been really cool to be woodshedding a lot of these vocal stylings, and and it's been uh especially getting into those those older singers, uh Wilson Pickett and and people like that. Okay, are you a soul singer on this album then? So this so for this album, it's an instrumental album. So that this is this is just one thing that I'm that I'm working on. I'm currently writing for uh another album that I'm working on, which is more it's kind of like on that blues and around Mike Turk thing. It's more a retrospective idea about jazz from an amplified uh harmonica players perspective. And I'm also working on writing my next book, which is going very well. I have two books that are in the pipeline right now, and one of them is probably going to come out before the next one. I guess I can just tell you really what it's about. Beyond Breath was about more of a kind of uh theoretical, practical thing that you can do like as harmonica players to set up uh your life. This next book that I'm working on is essentially a daily book. So it's 365 days of harmonica practice for a harmonica player. And you can approach it at any level that you want. There's something for everyone. I'm working on that right now. That's uh that it was a tall order. I'm I'm about 150 days in though. And again, going back to this idea of having realistic systems, I think you know, reading a page of this a day, like that's all I ask is just, you know, you might get something out of it, you might not. But to read a page takes two minutes. And the average person is on their phone for four and a half hours a day.

SPEAKER_03: 56:59

So No, well, uh if it's anything like your first book, I'd definitely look forward to reading it. So yeah, let me know when that's out, Shane. That's good. I also read that you were you're playing some drums recently. Are you are you uh uh is this something you're picking up again and maybe going to record yourself playing some drums or yeah, I've thought about it.

SPEAKER_02: 57:14

I um you know it's funny. Uh I'm teaching actually a class in Carolina uh this coming week with uh Hank Shreve um about because we're both drummers originally and we're we're teaching a class on rhythm, like rhythm from drummers' perspective on harmonica playing. Yeah, it has got gotten me back into I my friend came to me the other day and he was like, Can I have can I get a drum lesson? I was like, sure, man. So it's been kind of nostalgic. Uh I did, you know, when I was still when I was in Boston, I was uh during those years when I was away from Berkeley, I was still gigging and doing drum gigs, more like kind of jazz trio kind of stuff. I love that those kind of like playing drums that way. Um so I still do play. It's always the question of do I want to spend time practicing harmonica? Do I want to spend time playing uh playing drums? And most of the time it's gonna be harmonica. So it's something that I'm I'm slowly starting to incorporate back into my life.

SPEAKER_03: 58:09

Well, it's been great to speak to you, Shane, and I think anybody you know who gets selected as a Stings harmonica player has got to be a great harmonica player, and it's not just a case of luck. So listening to your playing, that's certainly true in your case. So well, thanks so much for joining me today, Shane Sager. Of course. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. Once again, thanks to Zidl for sponsoring the podcast. Be sure to check out the great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle eighteen forty seven.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidalharmonicas. What a great guy Shane is, and so thoughtful about his approach to music, writing and his life in general. I heartily recommend Shane's book Beyond Breath, a most enjoyable and thought provoking read, as are his substack articles. The link to find both are on the podcast page. And what a gig to be touring with Sting for six years, and hopefully more to come on that front for Shane. Thanks again for listening. And a special thanks to the people who support the show with a small monthly subscription Jim Epstein, David Lyle, DC Capilla, Warren Smith and Rob Sawyer really helps me with the running costs of the podcasts. If you want to join in this honoured list, you can find the support the show link on the podcast page or make a one-off donation. I'll sign off now with Shane playing with Sting on his iconic police song So Lone.