Steve Schulteis

I used MuseScore: I need to check and see if MuseScore plugins can create and edit lines yet. That wasn't supported the last time I checked, so I haven't made a plugin to make this easier yet. Unfortunately, I've never found an ABC solution that I was satisfied with.

Here's an arrangement I slapped together a while back (notation is Gary Coover tablature). It's a mediocre (i.e. uneducated) attempt to capture the same feeling as the original, but I thought I'd share it anyway. On the plus side, it happens to fit on a 20-button anglo. Becalmed.pdf

Yes, I should have noted the tune, which is "Regent Square". That's the most common tune here in the US, but I think folks in the UK typically use a different one. Good call on turning the concertina around - I'll make a point of doing that in future videos.

This is definitely still a work in progress, but I wanted to share it anyway. Suggestions for improvement are always welcome! Angels_From_The_Realms_Of_Glory.pdf

I'm no abc expert, so this is probably a silly question, but does it work to just paste the actual characters into a utf-8 encoded file? Are you certain that the font being used includes the characters in question?

This is good advice. I recommend Git Kraken, which is free for open source projects. But I'm also one of those command prompt Unix/Linux guys RAc is warning you about, so your mileage may vary. 😉

I'll cast another vote for GitHub. It's pretty much the standard for distributing open source software these days. I can't think of any competing service that I would be more confident in, either for trustworthiness or longevity.

You can buy rolls of Velcro that have the hooks on one side and the loops on the other. Just cut a long enough piece off the roll and wrap it around your concertina (soft side in, of course). https://www.lowes.com/pd/VELCRO-0-75-in-Black-Strap-Fastener/1087893

Oh, a Savart-style fiddle! Don't see those very often. Nice playing! I love the use of the picture frame - it's a fun twist on the composite video idea.

Oh yeah, it can definitely be hard to tell whether the pinkie is just along for the ride sometimes. It doesn't help that the motion is so quick, either. It's great that Adrian could chime in to give a more definitive answer about his own playing. I haven't examined a lot of John Kirkpatrick's playing, so I guess I have to plead ignorance here. He definitely spends a lot of that video using his right pinkie to brace the instrument. I also see him repositioning the first three fingers to reach buttons (a little after 5:50) and at other times using the pinkie (clearest example starting from 7:20), which is kind of interesting. I wish I could also see what his left hand is doing. Overall, my impression of that video is that he uses the pinkie as a brace whenever he can, but it does come free quite a few times, and I can't always tell the exact reason. If you do get the chance to ask him about it in person, I hope you'll come back to this thread to share what you learn.

First, let me say that I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. Also, I think you're asking an interesting question, and I hope my answer doesn't come across as sounding antagonistic (I certainly don't mean it that way). I think if you watch more videos of the players you mentioned, you'll find that many if not all of them do regularly use the pinkie fingers to press buttons. For example, Adrian Brown seems to be using his pinkies a fair bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSO_Uzs6oZQ Similarly, I see Jody Kruskal using his left pinkie plenty in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHA323zUixc I had a one-off skype lesson with Cohen the other day (he was awesome), and for a particular chord fingering he had me use my pinkie finger... ...to press two buttons at once. As another data point, Bertram Levy's "American Fiddle Styles for the Anglo Concertina" includes directions for which fingers to use for every note. From a quick glance, the pinkies see less use than the other fingers, but they do get used, and they appear to see heavier use in the final section of the book, which deals specifically with harmony. Gary Coover's books generally don't prescribe which fingers to use, simply saying it's often obvious and "figure out what works best for you". In any case, it's been my observation that use of the pinkies for playing notes is widely accepted, and in my uneducated opinion you shouldn't hesitate to use them for that purpose if you find that to be the most ergonomic approach. I suspect some of what you're seeing is choice of notes more than choice of fingers. It might be interesting to check if the players you mentioned are using their ring or middle fingers to reach outside buttons, or if they just aren't using those buttons in the performances you're watching. Personally, I find myself making use of my pinkies quite a bit, especially on the left hand. But I'll also use a pinkie to brace the instrument when it's not pressing a button. Bracing with the pinkie isn't an intentional thing for me, and I didn't even realize I was doing it until I watched video of myself.

I'm looking forward to this one, Gary! Thanks for sharing a taste. As an anglo player, this looks great to me. The parenthesized notes are a bit of a jolt, but nothing I can't get used to, I'm sure. I think it's a good solution to allow keeping each voice on its own line, which I like. I also like that the anglo staff shows the notes that I'll actually be playing, but that I can still find the melody in a more "ordinary" register in the other parts of the score. I agree that there isn't really room for the bass clef, but since it's not of much use to me personally, maybe I'm dismissing it too easily. It looks like "A Mighty Fortress" remains in a pretty typical range for singing. I'm curious if you're finding that you have to compromise that a bit with some arrangements in order to fit them on the anglo. Or are you considering that at all? If you don't mind a bit of proof-reading, the tab for the melody note on the second beat of measure 17 should be a draw 7 instead of a draw 3. There are also a some minor disagreements between the staff notation and the anglo tabs about which voice plays certain 8th notes (measures 2, 6, 9, 13). In measure 9 in particular, the treble/tenor staff also disagrees with the tabs. I haven't worked through playing all four voices at once yet, but I'm excited to try!

I've used this with success: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0119NJSN6 I don't recall which size I used, but one of the ones in that pack did the trick. I haven't tried anything else, so I can't say if it's better or worse than other products.

Thanks! Yes, it is a square Herrington.

I decided to have a go at this tune, and I finally recorded myself playing it over the lunch hour today. Here it is on my 30-button anglo:

I'd also love to hear if somebody has a good solution using ABC. I played with this a couple years ago, and it ended in frustration. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think I had issues with horizontal alignment. I recall being pretty dead set on having continuous lines for sequential pull notes though, and if you can live without that, it's probably doable. I can't find any of my ABC files from those experiments, but I think I used annotations, with underscores for the pull/draw lines: http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#annotations http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#symbol_lines

Oh, interesting. I was trying to move the pull/draw line to get it to appear above the lyrics, which only shoves the lyrics further up. But, if I move the lyrics instead, I can move them below the line!

Lyrics work great, with one glaring exception: I can't figure out an easy way to control whether they appear above or below lines, so I can't put the pull/draw line above the button numbers above the staff, and I can't put held notes below non-held notes below the staff. I could turn off automatic positioning, but then I'm back to messing around in the Inspector. Any tips?

That's pretty cool, Vince. I think you got a really nice result, especially considering that you couldn't use lines in your plugin. Would you be willing to share your plugin? Or is it already available and I missed it? I wasn't sure about this at first (as opposed to just hand-editing after the fact), but I think I've convinced myself that there are at least a couple cases where it would be handy. Taking it a step further, a "concertina solver" of sorts would be really cool - punch in the notes and maybe some "hinting" notation and get the computer to plot a button sequence that avoids things like using the same finger for two different buttons in a row or reversing bellows direction in the middle of a phrase. Now that I'm thinking about it, that sounds like a basic pathfinding problem, so it shouldn't be too hard to knock out something simple. Then there's the interesting complication that a given button can be pressed by multiple different fingers and using a finger to press one button may make it too awkward to use another finger to press other buttons. Capturing that accurately would be a bit tricky, but I think it's doable. It sounds like a fun project, if I didn't already have too many irons in the fire!

Thanks, Don! I believe you are correct about Gary's use of held notes. I mention it briefly in the video, but the held note lines are disabled for many of the notes you see, and they won't show up in a printout or exported pdf. They still show in MuseScore though. I suppose you could probably just add staff text for those notes instead, but it seemed like more trouble for me to get the formatting and positioning to match everything else. By using a line element as the starting point for everything it was pretty straightforward to make it all match. My approach still involves enough manual positioning that I have to think I'm missing something, but for now it at least achieves the desired result. I'm afraid I don't have an automatic way to convert from tab to standard notation. A motivated individual could probably write a MuseScore plugin to do that, but of course you'd still have to enter the tab notation by hand, which is admittedly a little awkward the way I'm doing it. I updated the original post to attach the completed MuseScore file, so if anyone wants to they can poke around and see what I did. An extra trick that I didn't show in the video is adding hidden rests to a second voice to allow tabs for harmony that has a different rhythm from the melody.

I finally sat down and figured out a way to add concertina tabs (as Gary Coover uses in his wonderful books) in MuseScore. Maybe this is old hat for the rest of you, but I haven't seen it described before, so I went ahead and made a quick howto video. If anyone knows of a better/easier way to do the same thing, I'm all ears! The TL;DR version is "Add lines from the Palette; edit them in the Inspector". Lockdown_Waltz.mscz

I'd wager that I'm a less accomplished musician than yourself, and I didn't have any trouble starting with "Anglo Concertina in the Harmonic Style". I think I made it about halfway through the tunes in the tutor section before running off after other tunes (I really should go back and finish it - there's a lot of good stuff in there). It did help me get comfortable with some basic chords pretty quickly.

On Android I have used VocalPitchMonitor and Intonia. I've found that they get me close enough when making penny whistles, but that's an instrument whose pitch varies quite a bit with how hard you blow, so the player is able to make up for (or cause) a few cents of inaccuracy. That's actually why I use those tuners - they let me play a scale or tune without looking at the tuner and subconsciously correcting, so I get a more realistic picture of how in tune the instrument itself is. But I couldn't tell you how precise the tuning is in cents.

Info on repairing the buttons is available at https://www.concertina.net/gs_stagirepair.html and https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/13950-bastari-buttons-clean-up/ I've done this repair on a very similar instrument. I used bright yellow fuel line from Amazon, which seemed to work well enough.