gcoover
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Posts posted by gcoover
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Bluejack, of all the button numbering and tablature systems out there, I think you'll find this book has the easiest system by far. But the arrangements get difficult really quickly and involve all three rows and in some cases almost every button on the instrument.
So don't be disheartened, just stay after it and you'll soon be able to navigate your way around. Motor skills and muscle memory take some time to develop, but once your brain is convinced that's really what you want your fingers to do it will eventually give in and you'll wonder why it was so difficult to begin with!
Gary -
To paraphrase, "I apologise again for the faulty page. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked." The authorities have been alerted to make sure the UK printers are using the correct file. I'm not sure why a pdf wouldn't print, it's a pretty standard file - but I'll be happy to snail mail a hardcopy of the corrected page. If anyone else has a defective copy or any other issue just send me a PM - it's a lot quicker since I don't check cnet every day!
Gary
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Made by the same company that did the amplifier capo in "The Return of Spinal Tap"?
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Maybe playing concertina is the risky behavior they're concerned about!
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Ok, it should be available at all the amazons any minute, just approved the revised version with known issues tweaked and updated. It's pretty cool how they do it - they just temporarily take it offline while a new proof is being reviewed.
Thanks for all the feedback and proofing! It's a lot of dots and a lot of numbers and although I ran through it a million times before hitting that "send" button, a couple of hiccups managed to sneak through. With luck, everything is good to go now.
I'm curious how everyone gets along with the Anglo tablature system. I think it's the easiest one out there by far. I initially tried pretty much all the others out there, many of which were created with a lot of thought and effort, but this one just makes the most sense to my simple brain and makes tunes really easy to learn.
Gary
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Any chance of hearing something with fistfuls of chords? How does it sound for ECM or Morris?
Gary
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Marshall, you need that pulled 2 for the full D chord in the left hand (that F# is only in one direction). I know it puts the melody an octave lower than what you expect for just that one note, but when it's all played together it works just fine (
) - just one of the many concessions that sometimes need to be made when transcribing to the 30-button Anglo. It really needs that full D chord on the left, since on the push you only have a fairly thin 7-4a chord that also puts you at risk of running out of air in that phrase. John Watcham proofed the transcriptions of his tunes, and although he made a few tweaks here and there he made no changes to that 2 pull.There will often be alternate buttons or directions you'd rather play, and that's perfectly ok - the book just shows one way of playing the tunes, not the only way!
Gary
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Thanks for the kind words about the new tutor!
I just found a huge boo-boo on Page 57 - instead of Burchard's Hornpipe in D, what got printed was Burchard's Hornpipe in G, just like the one on Page 58. Fear not, swift measures have been taken, the responsible party duly punished, and all has been set right and restored. Within a few days all newly ordered copies will have the tune in the correct key. Gotta love print-on-demand publishing! If you've got an earlier copy, just send me a PM with your email and I'll send out the correct page.
Gary
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This has got to be the strangest instrument I've ever seen! Anybody have a clue what it is? Apparently built in 1927, and unfortunately not in playing order - assuming anyone would have enough hands in the first place to figure out how to play it.
It's up for sale, and I'm trying to arrange to see it in person, so hopefully I can report back with more info.
I know the Ozarks are known for strange goings-on, but this might beat all!
Gary
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Old Concertina Pals and New Concertina Pals -
Only one more week until the big 9th annual Concertina Extravaganza in the East Texas piney woods! Once again a jam-packed weekend of all kinds of concertina music for all kinds of concertina players and concertinas - English, Anglo, Crane Duet, Hayden Duet, McCann Duet, Hayden Duet.
If you're thinking of playing a particular type or make of concertina, this is an excellent opportunity to see and try out a huge assortment of different squeezeboxes.
To recap, Jody Kruskal is our headliner, Sean Minnie will be teaching Boer music, Greg Jowaisas will be doing a repair workshop, Dan Worrall will be teaching octave playing, Gary Coover (that's me) will be teaching a Beginning Anglo workshop and an Ensemble Workshop, Ron Wilson will be hosting a Slow Jam, and there will be other tune swaps and duet workshops and who knows what else what might happen - maybe even another late night session or Concertina Caterpillar?!?.
With the recent loss of Harold Herrington, we also definitely need to come up with an appropriate moment of noise or maybe even a full blown Irish wake in his honor.
I've been sending out music for most of the workshops, so once again, if you haven't been receiving those emails that means we don't know you're coming.
Friday night dinner will again be at the Ranch House Restaurant, 305 E. Crawford Street, Palestine, TX, at about 5:15pm (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g56414-d3134307-Reviews-The_Ranch_House-Palestine_Texas.html). Polish up your "party piece" tune(s) to regale your fellow diners with!
The website for the Old Pal Concertina t-shirts and coffee cups: www.zazzle.com.
The website for the festival; www.oldpalmusic.com.
And here's the street address of the festival:
Museum for East Texas Culture
400 Micheaux St
Palestine, TXIt's in a wonderful old 3-story brick Tudor-Gothic High School built in 1916. After you pay at the front door for the festival (we'll hit you up later for the $30 concertina surcharge), turn right and go down the stairs and you'll find us in our usual place, taking over two rooms in the basement at the base of the stairs.
Hope to see lots of old friends and make lots of new friends!
Gary -
Erratum: page 11, D major scale. Tab for the first E is given as 3 push but I think it should be 4 push? Nice book though. Looking forward to getting some of the tunes off pat!
Excellent catch, "Strig", let's hope that's the only one, or at least nothing else terribly major! Keep me posted on how you get on with the tunes and the tablature. Enjoy!
Gary
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You can also scan and input music into PrintMusic (by Finale). But the original needs to be nice and tidy (nothing from the 1651 Playford!) or you'll spend way too much time cleaning it up.
Gary
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My vote goes to PrintMusic, since it's very easy to transpose to any key, and mostly since I learned to read the "dots" at an early age and still haven't been able to learn abc notation.
Gary
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Ok, everything is 100% set up for all the different Amazon.com's. But I just noticed today that a reseller is already offering the book (new) on eBay at a jacked up price, so if you're interested be sure and check with Amazon first!
Gary
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I've been buffaloed, but now I know where the term "bison-oric" comes from!
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I'm pretty sure that Sid and Henry Kipper would say these tunes are "Norfolk and good"!
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Fellow Hexagonists, Octagonists, Dodecagonists and Squarists,
It's two weeks to Old Pal Concertina Time (March 21-23), so here's an update and a preliminary schedule.
Activities and highlights this year will be:
- Jody Kruskal - Oldtime Anglo workshops featuring The Storms are on the Ocean, Can You Dance A Tobacco Hill, Throw the Old Cow Over the Fence
- Sean Minnie - South African/Boer Music workshop
- Dan Worrall - Octave-Playing for Anglo workshop
- Greg Jowaisas - Repair & Maintenance workshop
- Gary Coover - Harmonic Style Anglo workshop
- Ensemble Workshop featuring Welcome Welcome, Rose of the Redlands, Evening Shade, Northfield, Sons of Sorrow, Si Beag Si Mor
- Slow Jam, Tune Swap, Duet workshop (McCann, Crane, Jeffries, Hayden)
- Concertina Dinner at the Ranch House Restaurant
Of course there will be offsite expeditions to Sheps BBQ and to the little Mexican taqueria I can never remember the name of.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there are some late night sessions again this year - some have been absolutely magic, even if we were evenutally shut down by the late night security guard.
I've also attached our wonderful logo, created by famous cartoonist (and EC player) Carol Lay (www.carollay.com). If you go to www.zazzle.com anyone who wants to can get this logo on t-shirts and coffee cups. Guaranteed to make you play better, or at least show you to be a concertina fashionista.
So far I know we've got folks coming from New York, California, Michigan, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. It's going to be great fun, but we're really going to miss Harold Herrington - I'm sure we'll be able to come up with an appropriate moment of silence or moment of noise in his memory.
Gary
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Anglo Concertina in the Harmonic Style
New tutor now available!
If you’re interested in learning to play the Anglo concertina with full chords and harmonies, as of today there is a new tutor that will get you well on your way by showing you how to play 60 tunes with a variety of different accompaniments.
The tunes are mostly from the folk traditions of Great Britain, Ireland and America, but also include some classical, blues, oldtime, newly composed tunes and even a movie theme or two.
Written for the 30-button C/G Anglo with Wheatstone/Lachenal accidentals, the tunes start out very easy but get difficult fairly quickly, especially if you are accustomed to just playing along one row. However, as you know, playing across the rows and utilizing the third row on top are essential for learning how to play the Anglo in the full harmonic style. This book will give all of your fingers a good workout, including the pinkies on both hands.
This book also includes bios, discographies and transcriptions of tunes recorded by the top Anglo players of the last several decades: John Kirkpatrick, Jody Kruskal, Bertram Levy, Brian Peters, Andy Turner, John Watcham and many others. I’ve enjoyed their music for so many years and it’s a real thrill to have them a part of this project.
Perhaps the best feature of this book is the super-simple and super-easy button numbering and tablature system that is very straightforward and very easy to understand. This is probably the easiest tablature system ever for the Anglo concertina.
Many of the tunes are in the key of C, but you’ll also learn to play in G, D, F, Dm and A Dorian, and just for fun, Burchard’s Hornpipe is presented in 4 different keys.
Instead of including a CD with the book, I will be putting videos of the tunes into a playlist on YouTube.
The book is available right now at www.createspace.com/4109594, and within a few days at:
A pdf version may be available someday assuming I can figure out how to set it all up.
Basic specs: 108 pages, 60 tunes, price is $30 / £20 / €23.
I’ve attached an excerpt, feel free to PM with any questions. If you're coming to the Old Palestine Concertina Weekend in a couple of weeks I'll have copies available at a special introductory price. Enjoy!
Gary
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Frank, thank you so much for your kind words about Harold, and it is so sad to hear of his passing even though we knew the end was near. He was a great friend and a tinker in the truest sense of the word, and I had the pleasure of first meeting him back in 1983 when his band, The Irish Rogues, and mine, The Four Bricks out of Hadrian's Wall, were both part of the First Texas Ceili that later turned into the very successful North Texas Irish Festival. Harold was a tenor banjo player at the time and didn't play concertina, but he was fascinated with the mechanics of it.
I well remember a few years later at the now much larger North Texas Irish Festival when he rather secretively asked me to meet him backstage, that he "had something to show me", hidden in a nondescript sack. It was his first concertina, beautifully well-built, square, 30-buttons.....but the rows were in the keys of A-D-G like a three-row button accordion! Needless to say, he quickly learned how a 30-button Anglo's buttons were supposed to be laid out, and at the Old Palestine Concertina Weekend last year we had the unique pleasure of seeing and playing this very first instrument.
Harold was a regular attendee at the concertina weekend in East Texas from the very first, always willing to show folks how to tune, repair, and showing his latest innovations. Remember the part about him being a tinker? I'm not sure if any two of his concertinas were built quite the same. I feel very honored to own and play one of his first metal-ended hexagonal Anglos built in 2000 - it still has the coil springs at the lever arm fulcrums and also under the buttons, a design he later rejected but is still working fine for me in nearly constant use.
He had a scare with cancer a few years ago, but had seemed to recover from it, and was full of life and vigor when we saw him last year about this time. We had heard he had taken a turn for the worse, and had hoped we would be able to make it to Old Palestine one more time, but found out he was supposed to enter hospice care this week.
I was surprised last year when Harold told us he had only built about 40 concertinas - I guess he spent most of his time tweaking, experimenting and tinkering. A few years ago a new tune appeared while playing my Herrington Anglo, in the style of an English Country Dance tune, so of course I had to name it after him, giving it the title "Herrington Hall". He was thrilled about it, and I can think of no better way to honor my late friend than to remember him every time I play the tune named for him.
The color photo was taken last year at the Old Palestine Concertina Weekend, where he gave a wonderful presentation on the trials and tribulations of building concertinas from scratch. Harold showed us a wonderful collection of his past experiments, and he was very excited to announce that he had found a source of new concertina reeds (as opposed to accordion reeds) and would soon be building Anglo concertinas in the traditional style. Frank has now started making instruments with "real" concertina reeds, and I'm sure Harold is up there smiling and wishing him all the best.
Harold loved Irish music dearly, so here's to lifting up a pint of Guinness to that wonderful "rogue". He's helped make the world a better place and you can ask no more of that from anyone!
Gary
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I'm guessing you play Anglo since my palms don't touch at all when playing EC. If you have an Anglo and you have large hands, raising the handrest to 1" or so can help. I play with the left end on my left leg, with straps fairly loose, so the bottom of my palms only lightly touch the ends and sometimes not at all. I keep the straps loose enough to be able to just barely insert the fingers of the other hand in between the strap, hand and handrest - but not while playing of course! "Bracing" is not a word that comes to mind - my hands stay fairly loose and limber since I play in the harmonic style and need to reach lots of notes and chords. Is there something in the design of your concertina that has sharp edges? If so, you might be gripping it too tightly, or might need to try a different instrument.
Gary
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I know Robert Louis Stevenson mentioned a concertina in his short story "The Isle of Voices", but does anyone know of any concertina players in Hawaii today? I'll be there shortly for work (ah, life's tough sometimes), and it would be nice to meet up for a tune and a drink with an umbrella in it.
Gary
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How many times do we have to keep reporting these listings as fraudulent??? Does eBay not have an internal fraud-detection system?
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Lovely arrangements! You're selling yourself way too short. Your playing, much like Andy Turner's, is proof you don't always need fistfulls of chords to play beautifully. Simple can be quite effective, and your use of octaves helps keep the melody in the forefront. I sense a little hesitancy in your playing, so just keep after it with more and more confidence and expression - you've already got a great sense of accompaniment!
Gary -
Octaves can really drive a melody with more volume, and don't conflict with any other instruments playing accompaniments. Having said that, I mostly play by myself in a full harmonic style, but it drives me crazy if a guitar player jumps in with "their" version of accompanying chords, usually totally oblivious to the chords already being played on the concertina. That sentiment probably belongs in a different post on pet peeves!
Gary
9Th Annual Old Palestine Concertina Weekend - Recap
in General Concertina Discussion
Posted
I'm sure others will join in on this thread with their pictures and experiences, but the 9th annual Old Pal Concertina Weekend in East Texas was a huge success and a great time was had by all. We even had nice English weather - cool and rainy - as opposed to the oppressive heat and humidity we've sometimes had in years past. We had concertina players who came from New York, California, Michigan, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.
In addition to English, Anglo, Maccann, Crane, Hayden and Jeffries Duets, we we thrilled to have concertina doctor extraordinaire Greg Jowaisas doing a history and repair workshop and bringing along a fine selection of instruments available for checking out and possibly purchasing. He also brought along the new Art Deco styled Anglo by Wally Carroll.
Jody Kruskal was our main headliner once again, and he taught how to play oldtime music on the Anglo - "Throw the Old Cow over the Fence" and "Can You Dance a Tobacco Hill" . He also organized a group performance on the main festival stage of the old Carter Family standard "The Storms are on the Ocean", which even included a bass concertina solo that I'm sure brought a tear to many an eye.
Another special treat was Sean Minnie, originally from South Africa, who taught us the "Turfloop Walz" and showed us how to do that amazingly bizarre Boer music bellows shake.
In the ensemble workshop we tackled some great old Sacred Harp hymns - "Welcome Welcome", "Northfield", "Evening Shade" and "Sons of Sorrow". Powerful stuff for massed concertinas!
Dan Worrall taught us the "Blue Gentian Waltz", which originally was a minstrel tune called "Why Did My Master Sell Me", in the old octave style. He also presented interesting historical info about how this tune and others traveled to Europe, Australia and South Africa.
We were saddened by the loss of Harold Herrington, who passed away only weeks before the event. He attended and supported the weekend from the very start, and we had several of his instruments represented at our workshops, and of course played several tunes in his memory.
BBQ. What can I say? We pigged out at Shep's, Bishop's and Bubba's. Oink, oink.
Great food, great people, and great music - doesn't get much better than that!
Gary