Dave Rogers

I've just uploaded a recording of myself playing this on SoundLantern: http://www.soundlantern.com/UpdatedSoundPage.do?ToId=13907#

I think I may have partly answered my own question - I appear to have a concertina with a Wheatstone left-hand accidental row and a Jeffries right-hand accidental row. Would this have been deliberate, or did the person who re-tuned it from its original Ab/Eb make a mistake? Does it matter?

What you said got me thinking - I don't read music and play entirely by ear, but I've just compared the notes on my 31 key G/D Crabb with the standard Wheatstone G/D tuning charts. I appear to have a non-standard right-hand accidental row - using the normal push/pull notation, I have (according to the digital tuner on Garageband): Bb/Ab, Ab/Bb, Eb/D, Ab/F, E/A The left-hand accidental row is "as standard" (as is the rest of the instrument). I haven't found any tune so far that I've needed to use the accidental rows for (including Fieldtown Glorishears - I wonder if I'm playing it wrong?), but I wonder if anyone could tell me what (if any) are the implications of this unusual arrangement? The instrument was made sometime between 1903-1921 and is stamped "Ball Beavon, London". Geoff Crabb thinks it was probably intended for sale direct from the workshop (going by the blank cartouche on the right hand side) but was diverted at the last moment to Ball Beavons.

The Morse Ceili comes "off the peg" in those keys and if you're doing a lot of playing standing up, it's very light to hold. I'm not sure that any of the currently available cheaper Anglos come in anything other than C/G. I can't think of any Morris tunes that you'd need more than 20 keys for, but when you consider how comparatively few Anglos you see being played for Morris, I suppose there's little incentive for makers to produce 20 key models .

The way I do it (not being a music reader) is to look at the dots. If there are lots of them very close together, it's going to be a tricky one to play. If there aren't that many and they're well spaced-out, it's going to be much easier. Crude, but it works for me. I think any sort of rating system is going to be too subjective to be of much use (plus an awful lot of work for somebody to undertake).

1) High demand for new instruments caused by 2) Scarcity of good vintage ones

I think this one looks rather pretty: http://www.apjmusic.co.uk/apj_30button_anglo.htm And the maker used to work for Andrew Norman...

Nice playing, Lester (even if it *is* on melod**n). Nice too that the theme tune from The Archers (composed by Arthur Wood in 1924 as "Barwick Green") has finally achieved "traditional" status (as Grundy's Delight from Moulton)!

Nobody seems to have picked up on this howler of mine from yesterday, so I can only apologise for any confusion caused and rectify it now. Quicktime will *not* open ABC files (I was thinking of the .mid files that you can download from this site: http://www.thesession.org/). For ABC files (on a Mac) the best utility is BarFly: http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/download.html

Currently Sportman's Hornpipe, Mr Moore's Hornpipe and Scottishe a Bethanie, all three picked up from the website of Boggart's Breakfast, a Border Morris side from Sheffield: http://boggartsbreakfast.org.uk/ee/index.php/site/tunes/

I use GarageBand too and there's a useful feature (I think it's called "lead-in" or something similar) that gives you a few beats grace before recording starts. From memory (I'm on a PC at the moment) it's next to the metronome function.

you gotta be careful in 'good green woods'.....there's knights, wild women and all sorts of characters wandering round them Plus Trolls in Scandinavia, I should think...

Or, if you prefer, "Humpity Dumpity". Wendy, there are some great simple Morris tunes to learn and you can download the ABC notation for them here: http://www.themorrisring.org/more/Tunes/index.html When you save an ABC file and click on it, your Mac will use Quicktime to open and play it - this utility allows you to play the file at half-speed, which is really useful for learning.

Unless they're German angels: http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=h...NWE:en%26sa%3DN

I've just been alerted to this on another forum (don't worry, I'm not a closet accordionist): http://accordionnoir.org/drupal/node/90 That link goes to stuff from Anglo International (I haven't tried it yet).

And when you finish playing it, you can always say, "That's shallot".

Another factor in the whole "playing music from one's own culture" (or not) thing is the embarrassment felt by a lot of older folkies in the UK about the policy that Ewan MacColl was said to have enforced at The Ballads & Blues Club in the 60s. The full story is here if you're interested: http://www.folkmusic.net/htmfiles/edtxt39.htm I suppose fashion comes into it as well - when I was going to regular roots music sessions in the early 90s, French, Italian and Galician tunes were the ones to play. Eastern European stuff later came into vogue. Playing anything Irish (or English) at that time was guaranteed to provoke theatrical yawns from the assembled company.

"Cool" was a beatnik expression from the '50s (I remember a TV programme called "Cool for Cats"), so it must have just been having a rest in the '70s before it came around again (as things tend to do).

That is a *very* pretty instrument and it sounds great, whoever made it!

Yes, I think I too could lay the blame largely at JK's feet. I loved the sound he made on his Crabb Anglo and saw him a few times with Sue Harris at various folk clubs in London in the 70s. In those days an Anglo of any sorts was way out of my reach. I took up melodeon (the inevitable Hohner G/D Pokerwork) after moving to Northampton and joining Moulton Morris in 1980, but still yearned for an Anglo. Finally bought a Rochelle in February this year, and only kept it for 3 months before paying Chris Algar a visit in May and coming away with a vintage Crabb in G/D (leaving behind the Rochelle plus my old melodeon as a token bit of part-ex!). I'll probably be bumping into JK at Hammersmith Morris's 50th birthday bash next July, but I'm not sure that I'll risk my Crabb on such an outing - I think I'll just be taking my cheapo fiddle...

Nah, you won't - just experiment with dabbing down 2 or 3 keys on the left hand side that correspond to the ones you're playing on the right hand side and you'll find that the chords appear as if by magic! Or perhaps that's influenced by the fact that I came to the Anglo via the melodeon...

The appropriate question at that point is, "Is there some OTHER way of playing the accordion?" http://squeezebox.tribe.net/photos/e38c93c...34-15ac58cdd05c

That tune ("The Banks of the Bann": http://www.mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5832) does sound great on an Anglo! I know that General Booth famously asked "Why should the Devil have all the best tunes", but "To Be a Pilgrim" certainly pinched from "Our Captain Cried All Hands" and I guess there must be plenty of other examples. I've heard "John Barleycorn" sung to the tune usually associated with "We Plough the Fields and Scatter", but that may be a borrowing in the other direction?

To be used with extreme caution, as "Boff" is also slang for a boiled sweet and you wouldn't want to be caught out sucking a boff in the wrong context.

You little devil, Martyn! And there was me thinking you were after an Anglo! Good English models are a helluva lot cheaper than good Anglos, anyway...