John, Wexford

Hi Kim, I was just relating my experience with a 4-row, low-pitched concertina. You could very well adapt to the instrument over time, particularly with your previous experience of gym work, but if you choose to go down this route, and it doesn't work out, there is not a lot you can do to reduce the weight of your concertina.

I would just caution, a 30 button C/G has 60 reeds. A 50 button concertina would have 100 reeds. That is an awful lot of extra weight to be pushing in and pulling out for a night's playing. I play a somewhat occasional B flat session and I have a 4 row A flat / E flat concertina. I can tell you that you would definitely know that you have been playing a heavier instrument.

Just checkin. You'll have to show a picture or two now!

Are you sure it is an A/E concertina, and not an A?/E? one.

How does one "unlearn and relearn" a tune.

No.

Nice one.

That's lovely.

Though I play a different style to you, here's what I do. I aim to keep the bellows somewhere at the midpoint, neither fully in nor fully out. I always strive towards this "home" position, and you can sneakily use the air-button to incrementally get back to this "base" position, hopefully without unduly affecting the volume. If there comes a point in the tune that you have to play a chord that is all press, then several bars or a phrase or two back, you can start to make preparations to "store up" air, knowing there will be a big draw on that reservoir of air coming up. It applies in the reverse too - if you have a passage which is all draw, you can seek to depress the bellows, letting off air, sneakily again, even though you might be using loads of press notes, to almost fully collapse the bellows, now knowing that you'll have a massive intake of air into the bellows coming up. I hope this makes sense to you, and I presume you are playing an Anglo concertina!

To a large extent, it depends on the type of accordion, which you played, and also the style of music you'd like to play. If you have played a diatonic accordion, you'd have no problem playing a concertina. The concert pitch Anglo Concertinas come mostly in C/G or G/D. (C/G would more suit Irish Traditional Music, and similar folk musics, whereas the G/D would suit you more, if you wished to play in the harmonic style or accompany yourself or others singing.) With the C/G you have 2 keys, in which you can play straight away, however if you wish to play in other keys, e.g. in D, F and / or in A, you'd quickly run into problems due to the lack of C#, B? and G# notes, which typically you would get on the 3rd row. If you played a chromatic accordion, B/C or C/C#, it might initially take a little while to get used to the arrangement of notes. You could check out concertina makers, who have put fingering charts up on their websites.

It could depend on the style of music, for example harmonic vs ornamented, or whether the player is playing single row, whether in C or G, or cross-row. Different makes of concertina might have different notes at the bottom of the right-hand side too. There can even be differences between 30 key instruments and 38+ key instruments. I have a draw G#5, where usually there might be an F#6, and it is a Godsend for playing tunes in A major.

You could contact Frank Edgley, of Edgley Concertinas in Windsor, Ontario, also here on Concertina.net, who might be able to recommend someone to you.

You'll find it here: http://abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/original/coll.txt/0005 Mind you, the tune, as played in the video, is being played in the key of C, whereas the tune, as written on the abcnotation site, is in the key of G.

Can you share a picture of your concertina please.

I wonder is it a G/D instrument, or even an A?/E? concertina.