gcoover

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

I've been buffaloed, but now I know where the term "bison-oric" comes from!

I'm pretty sure that Sid and Henry Kipper would say these tunes are "Norfolk and good"!

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

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: www.amazon.com www.amazon.co.uk www.amazon.de www.amazon.fr www.amazon.it www.amazon.es. 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

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 HerringtonHall-C.pdf

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

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

How many times do we have to keep reporting these listings as fraudulent??? Does eBay not have an internal fraud-detection system?

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

Be very careful who does any replating! The folks in Houston who replated the ends of my Jeffries Duet many years ago did a total hack job when removing the old plating, leaving huge comet-like tails gouged out to one side of every button hole. And that's not fixable. Must. Resist. Urge. To. Kill! Gary

For octave playing it's good to study the old players like Scan Tester, and you should definitely check out Dan Worrall's recent digital CD book "House Dance" which is full of tunes and music and history about playing in the octave style. Gary

So Bernard Wrigley has named it well! The low F on mine is located where the low G# would normally be. A very sensible substitution, especially if used for band music. I got it from Lark in the Morning many years ago but don't know any history previous to that. Jim - we need to get together some time and work up a version of Spinal Tap's "Big Bottoms"! Gary

If it's an emergency, and you don't need the G#, just put some tape across the hole until you have time to check it out in detail. Gary

I've got 35-button double-action EC bass, #39216 and presumably a Lachenal, that starts at middle C and goes down two and a half octaves to a very low F - a "fartophone" if ever there was one. I'm guessing this would be a double-bass? I can't imagine getting reeds to go much lower in pitch. You feel the bottom notes more than you hear them! Gary

If you have a single note melody input you can try Audacity to convert mp3 to midi, and use a different program to go from midi to notation, but it's a far from perfect process and only results in a melody line that usually needs a ton of cleaning up anyway. There's just way too much going on in your standard sound file for any program to magically convert it into notation, and there's no way at all if there are several instruments and sounds happening at once. So far, the human brain is the best computer for doing this! Gary

I made this one many years ago out of birch plywood, covered outside with bookbinder black leatherette cloth, with velvet-covered thick cardboard in the interior. Yes it was heavy, but very handy for sitting on at crowded sessions, with easy access to all three. A friend called it my "concertina condo"! But..... I made it to fit three specific instruments and subsequent purchases don't necessarily fit, so make sure you design it with some flexibility in the interior. Gary

Thanks for your excellent advice. I noticed that the paragraph in question in the contract is the only one that has a very limited right click MS Word menu, and no access to the "font" command for strikeouts, etc. But the select and delete function works just fine! Gary

It's that time again, time to start thinking about bringing yourself and your concertina to the East Texas piney woods for the 9th annual Old Palestine Concertina Weekend. Held in conjunction with the 12th annual Palestine Old Time Music & Dulcimer Festival (www.oldpalmusic.com), this year it will be March 21-23, 2012, in Palestine, Texas. Jody Kruskal will once again be the guest headliner and teacher, and we will also have two days of volunteer-taught classes for those who play English, Anglo and Duet, plus plenty of time for jamming and comparing instruments and tunes. Last year we had over 20 concertina players from all over the US including Oregon, California and Maryland and New York. This year, Dan Worrall will present a workshop on the old octave style of Anglo playing based on his recent book and CD “House Dance”. Gary Coover will be teaching beginning and Third Row Anglo and will be premiering his new 100-page tutor “Anglo Concertina in the Harmonic Style”. There’s even rumor there will be a Boer music player attending. With luck concertina builder Harold Herrington might even be able to attend to talk about concertina construction and repair. All in all, a fun weekend with good music, good friends and good BBQ, plus you get to meet and hear some of the country's finest old time musicians. And if you’ve never heard Sacred Harp singing, it’s almost worth coming just for that. For more information watch this space at concertina.net or contact Gary Coover at gcoover(at)swbell.net.

In getting permission for a previously published tune from Alfred Music Publishing for the upcoming "Anglo Concertina in the Harmonic Style" tutor, I noticed this clause in their "Sub-Out License Agreement": "our signature below, together with yours, shall assign to us all of our rights in the arrangement and the copyright in the arrangement, together with the sole right of registering the copyright as a work made for hire in our name or the name of our designee" Is this normal, to claim someone's arrangement as belonging to the original publisher? Or am I missing something? Not that there's a huge market for concertina arrangements (yet!), but it seems the arranger would have some rights. Gary

Just now turned in the $0.99 Jeffries. This is getting to be almost a daily occurrence with these spammers. If eBay's not more careful, they're going to lose all credibility.

So, do they think concertina players are more gullible than the average person, or are there scams like this on millions of other products??? Here's hoping we're not just being singled out!

Amen! Instead of tutors we should call them "concertina codebreakers"...