jburke

Entertaining thread, thank you for initiating...treasure scores aside, here's how to find a good concertina: 1. Buy a cheap instrument in the right key and type for the music you want to learn, so that you can learn the buttons and develop bad playing habits. 2. Hock instruments you no longer have time to play. Use to pay for Noel Hill summer school, and to prime your purchasing fund. 3. At school, look pitiful with your wretched concertina & jingle coins in your pocket. 4. One day, a traveling banjo player, or a traveling nuclear power plant inspector will appear on your doorstep with a concertina. Be ready with the cash. It works! J.

Sorry tunesters, there are a lot of 'tunes' out there that were once 'songs' until the instrumentalists forgot the words...I have a friend that can summon up lyrics to half the GHB standard repetoire, it really spooks pipers to hear someone singing 'their' tunes. That's what happens when a native language is steamrollered and forgotten. Si Beag Si Mor does indeed have lyrics, they can be found on a lovely tribute to O'Carolan 2-cd set recorded by Grainne Yeats, harpist and singist. Yes, one of those Yeatses. In true folk tradition, the lyrics go on forEVER in documenting the war of the sidthe. When I want tune/song history, I go back to the oldest voices in the tradition: harpers, pipers, singers. Jewels

I'd be interested in opinions/suggestions on an adhesive for sticking purely decorative papers on leather bellows -- something that can be removed and leave no marks. Has anyone tried attaching papers with wax, for example? Jewels

Related to this is how you respond when you hit that mental block...or brick wall.A friend has a terrible habit of loudly voicing 'shit!' when he encounters a mental block...in public performance. Thank goodness this was curbed in really large venues, he only did it when in small groups. I've heard others do this too. It's a terrible habit, and only draws attention to your clam, which is not what you really want. You're not a CD, you're human. A Pro picks up the tune somewhere past the 'dropout' of information and continues. Or repeats the last section and goes on. Singers, if you choke on a verse, start the verse over or repeat the last chorus and continue. This is graceful and perfectly acceptable. Remember the reason we have 32 versions of every folk song and tune is because no one can remember exactly how it goes all of the time. When I get nervous about performing, it means I have not practiced enough, I don't know the tune or song in my bones, and i'm not thinking about the music enough. Forget about yourself and think only of the music. Jewels

Well Brian, you could join the Irish Concertina cult and learn to play real Irish music on a real instrument. In a just a few short months we'll have you pawning all your worldly goods to ransom a Jeffries or Dipper or Carroll, and by this time next year you'll be pounding pints in Clare and speaking knowingly about turf, whisky, and Hurling. American musicians will sound lame and slow to you. You'll learn completely different names for tunes everyone knows, and get the inside story on tunes like "the Doverman's Wallet." Don't wait, sign up for Noel Hill school and get started properly on the concertina. See concertina.net/learning.html Jewels

Did the Chemnitzer concertina originate in Chemnitz, Germany? Chemnitz is Akron OH's sister city and I had opportunity to meet musicians, woodworkers, and other craftspeople from Chemnitz, but none of them knew the answer to this obscure concertina question. Possibly the inventor was run out of town shortly thereafter because of the noise? Jewels

Hey emars; What you have is actually a button a-------n, an instrument that is not mentioned in polite conversation on this forum. See: http://www.hmtrad.com/catalog/winds/sbx/sbx-hero.html At one point hmtrad or someone had posted a scan of the actual instructions, but I can't locate it anymore. You can actually squeeze a tune out of these babies, an easy way to get your hands on a BA and see how one works, diatonic scale and all. Jewels

Good gosh golly, do test-drive a Morse, a Tedrow, and whatever else you can get in on spec in your cost range for the price of shipping. Playing an instrument yourself is worth eating the shipping fees because you can so easily buy the *wrong* instrument, then have to sell it to buy the *right* instrument when you find it down the road. Allow me to introduce my "$3000 accordion that would have cost $1000 if I had known enough to buy the *right* one FIRST." (Yes, I'm bi.) At a class I attended, all Stagi players on a budget aspired hungrily to MorseCeilidom. We also had a nice Tedrow to try which had gorgeous woodwork and was a little heavier and had narrower button spacing than a Morse--it's owner adored it. All the Ceili players aspired to a second mortgage and a Jeffries/Wheatstone/Lachenal "when I'm good enough or the kids are out of college." Personally there was a Dipper at hand that was very very hard for me to let go of. "When you are ready the master/right instrument will come." julie