Spinningwoman

So, next up - the freebies. As someone with a number of 'minority interests', I love the internet! It's hard to even remember the days when your best hope was to find an outdated list of books and stockists in the back of a library book published 50 years earlier on a different continent! So, whatever else you may acquire, you can download Alistair Anderson'sTutor for the English Concertina and Frank Butler's The Concertina. There seem to be two versions of Alistair's book online; one is a photocopy and less clear, where as the other seems to be a proper digital version and much better. Both these books are well worth having, even if they weren't free. Frank's one gives more exercises etc, and Alistair's perhaps more about the expressive style of playing but both would do the job from start to finish. I also downloaded Paul Hardy's Xmas and Basic tunebooks and printed them out, and the Tunebook app on my ipad to read the abc versions. Carols are brilliant for practice as the well known ones are nice simple tunes that we all have ready installed in our brains.

Well, I hope I'm not treading on any toes by actually adding some reviews to this thread! None will be bad, because either they are all useful in different ways or else I can see they will/would be at a different stage in my learning. I've been learning for a couple of months, on my own so far though I am now in touch with the WCCP and will be going to their January meeting. I have itchy book-buying fingers so have accumulated a pile of tutors. That I can even say that is amazing - when I first tried to learn concertina about 20 years ago, I went for the Anglo partly because there seemed to be so few resources for the English. I started with Roger Watson's Handbook for English Concertina, so I'll start by reviewing that one. That was all I could find 20 years ago when I was trying to decide between Anglo and English, and it was all my local music shop had on the shelves this time round, so I bought it again. No doubt the old one is in the loft somewhere - probably with the old Black spot melodeon I never learned to play and either sold or packed so well that now I can't find it<g>. This one fills the bill in that it gives you what you need to know to get started. The pages of chord shapes at the beginning are a bit scary for a beginner because it doesn't explain that you don't need to learn them at the start! It starts you right in on proper music with a C version of Winster Gallop which I like. It doesn't tell you much if anything about using the bellows - I was sawing away like on an Anglo to begin with, and using the bellows to control the length of notes too much. It doesn't have much in the way of music at each level, so you would need to supplement it with other simple music but in these days of internet downloads etc that isn't a problem. I wanted to learn carols for Christmas so downloaded PG Hardy's Christmas tunebook. It's not my favourite, but it was there when I needed it and it does a good job so long as you have other music to broaden your practice. Must work now! More another time....

Hi - I've been learning to play English concertina for a couple of months and have been reading my way through this forum . I did have a go at learning to play Anglo (on a Gremlin) about 20 years ago but always felt I'd made the wrong choice and never got very far with it., eventually swapping it for a fiddle when my daughter wanted to learn. A chance conversation reignited my desire to learn and I've been playing a Scarlatti 30 key which I bought on impulse from Amazon, reckoning that if I ended up sticking to it I would get something better and if I didn't I wouldn't have lost much. So now there is an exciting little square box waiting under the Christmas tree containing a little Wheatstone which I am looking forward to playing with. The Scarlatti did have a couple of sticking keys to start with, but they were quite easy to fix, and I've enjoyed playing it and learnt a lot.