The Tongue Blocking Vs Pucker embouchure debate has been alive for decades. These are the two main ways of producing a note on an harmonica. With the pucker embouchure, your lips isolate a single hole. With tongue blocking, your mouth is commonly surrounding four holes, with the tongue blocking the three to the left. When your tongue is on the harmonica, you’re playing a single note, just like pucker. But is is often used to let a part of the other holes sound briefly, resulting in a nice percussive effect.
Some traditional blues harmonica swear by Tongue Blocking and think everything that can be played with the pucker embouchure can be played with Tongue Blocking and that as a consequence Tongue Blocking players can do more than Pucker ones.
NextGen diatonic players generally mainly use Pucker and think overblows and overdraws can’t be played with Tongue Blocking.
Some players (in both camps) use both embouchures: Pucker for bends and overbends and Tongue Blocking for effects.
We at Planet Harmonica thought it would be worth actualizing the debate as new techniques and musical goals have appeared in the last 20 years.
Tongue Blocking
Tongue Blocking has been renowned for its great effects: slaps, pulls, flutters. Most legends of the Blues used to use this technique to some extent. These effects rely on the fact the target hole and the holes next to it belong to the same harmony. Typically playing a 4 tongue blocked draw means bringing a part of 2 and 3 draw sounds (the player can isolate the 4 draw but in that case Tongue Block has no interest). This is perfect when playing in G as 2, 3 and 4 draw bring the G chord.
As a result Tongue Blocking is perfectly suited to traditional blues playing as the I, IV and V chords are more or less present in what Blues Harmonica players call 1rst, 2nd and 3rd position playing (and some other ones).
Traditional Tongue Blocking Limitations due to Harmony
But what if the song harmony is more complex and brings different chords? In some cases the holes/notes next to the target note/hole would completely clash. Thus we could think Tongue Blocking is very limited for Jazz/chromatic playing. It is not completely true. Some top players (David Herzhaft, Sébastien Charlier and probably some other ones) have developed a technique allowing to play two notes in Tongue Blocking (say holes 1 and 4 by using the tongue to block 2 and 3) and bend one of the two notes only!
Limitations due to bendability
Does Tongue Blocking allows to bend and overblow/overdraw ? Yes and No.
Bends can be obtained for sure and can have a rather good sound. In our opinion, they can’t sound as good as when played in Pucker (more on that later), but it’s debatable.
And what about overnotes? Overblows in 4, 5 and 6 and 7 overdraw can be obtained. Some players proved it. But it seems that they are far from being as easy to obtain and shape than with the Pucker embouchure. It could change as each decades brings amazing new discoveries to our harmonica world. But as of today, we haven’t seen a player demonstrating very fluent use of overbends in Tongue Blocking, which means Puckering is the only viable embouchure, to date, to play highly chromatic music, or precise melodies using overnotes.