Steve the beginner

Andy, it could be useful to know which country you are in. Best of luck, but midi anglos seem to be as rare as rocking horse dung. Myself: I would kill for a 40 button midi anglo. But whose feet to throw myself at & beg/plead to make one?

I'm on the same page as Leo. It takes me about 5 minutes to make a .midi file from a piece of sheet music. Once this is done, the tune can be heard exactly as it is written. Occassionally I like one enough to bother with learning it. The versatility of .midi means I can: Transpose the tune into another key, Improve/amend parts of the tune (eg, if the written arrangement I happen to have differs from a more popular or more familiar arrangement) Speed or slow the tempo of the tune to taste. Then I can listen to any/all variations, and Print as staff notation the final (or any) version so I can learn the tune. (I keep them all, even if I HATE a tune, once the few minutes is taken to .midi it, it will be stored, not deleted. I prefer to scan sheet music, keeping it all in computer as .png files in "my pictures". Then I can bring them up on the laptop screen as a slideshow anytime to read. Anytime I have my laptop, I have rapid access to what would be a pile of sheet music (cataloged by name/genre/favourite/however I like) and while I don't live my life with a laptop open in front of me, there is no hardship in anytime I am able to pull out concertina & practise, to also have the laptop open & read from it.

Isolated. Alone, for my own pleasure. I don't even know anyone who plays an instrument, even if they lived anywhere near to me.

Very happy to send the midi files, to where shall I send them?

Some very pleasant melodies on that site. Have turned them all into .midi files. Look forward to seeing more notes added.

Steve, I see you say you are "on the PNG/Indo border". Are you up the Fly River..? Bit rough on a concertina up there. They get something like 10 metres of rain a year in the Star Mountains. Chris Chris, the Fly River is in PNG. I am in Australia. Accross the border is another world, and a bulldozer couldn't pull me into either Indo or PNG. And yes, we get a lot of rain, often all day every day for what seems like months on end. Humidity is quite high for about 367 days each year, and is quite a problem, not just for concertinas. In the past humidity hasn't been an issue for my concertina, as I have had a varnished, black (countersunk) buttons, red bellows Hohner 20 button, which I got by mail order as a youth by writing to a music shop with: "send me a musical instrument & an instruction book so I can learn to play it". What I got was the Hohner wrapped in tissue paper and a bill for roughly $350 ( for me 2 to 3 weeks wages at the time). This is how I became a player of what I now know to be an anglo concertina. By comparing it to someone's piano I learned 6 buttons on each hand & play them in unison an octave apart. I have never met another anglo player, and have never heard a concertaina played (until youtube). Work priorities interfered a lot. Sporadically I have got myself barely beyond the "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" stage. Getting online, which led eventually to ebay, then to this forum, then to youtube, I learn (after 20 years) that my fingering sucks, that the concertina is not meant to be played slow and mournfully, and that the left hand is for "chords" or something (still don't know what to do with the left hand). Ebay has brought me music books. For the first time in my life I am not starved of sheet music. The internet has taught me that the Hohner, (by now well and truly "had it") wasn't much of a concertina anyway and that much nicer ones exist. Hard work, or good luck, or thrift, or something, has after 20 years brought me enough to buy 3 real concertinas (and very nice ones) on ebay. Now that I know there is a world of concertinering out there, I hope to make it to a workshop or school in 2008, to try to turn myself in to a concertina player. Bit rough on a concertina up here? Not as rough on one as is my playing!

There's an awfull lot of North Yorkshire which bit are you in ? I'm on the coast at Whitby. There isn't all that much of North Yorkshire.

The seller ID was created at the same time as the listing. 10th October 2007.