Azalin

For those of you who never had the chance to hear Caitlín Nic Gabhann, here she plays with her sister and other members of her new group, NicGaviskey. I had the chance to see them play a lot at last year's Catskills festival, very impressive stuff! I love their CD. http://livetrad.com/Videos/nicgav/

Thanks Dave. Yes, I will try to work on it and use pulls instead. I can use this phrase as a test case. You are also right I will definitely be caught with my pants down because the 'lift' will die, but I'll try to add some life to it. Thanks for the tips! As for timing, just slow down and your timing will improve, that's an easy magic trick ;-)

I'd buy a copy! Since I learn only by ear, it would be great if the CD contained different versions of the same tune, maybe two different speeds, then one simple version and one more 'ornamentated'. Also, a few tracks detailing some techniques and how they sound would be nice.

Good stuff. I've got a different approach to that tune. I'm satisfied with the result, but I understand it might not be the "best" way when it comes to ITM on anglo, I don't know... Anyhow, in this phrase I will use the push D on LH and the high D on the RH. I understand Nathan wanted to avoid using the RH D because it sounds 'flat'. Maybe, but pulling many notes on the C row sounds a bit flat to me, so it seems there's no perfect solution! I recorded a small clip, first played slowly and then played faster than my ability to play, just to show that pushing the LH D on higher speed is still doable with acceptable result. What do you think?

Aye Alex, purely out of curiosity I too was following this one & saw 12 bids yesterday up to £2,051. Although of course all were secret bids, so I've no idea how many individuals were actually involved. However, I've no doubt anyone who bid on both auctions for this Concertina will be a little P..... Off that it was pulled TWICE. Like you though, I'd love to know how much he got for it. Cheers Dick Any chance he might get banned from eBay for this?

Awesome news! I'm not sure if I can make it to Toronto during that time, as I'll be just back from a recent journey to Vietnam, and with the Chris Langan festival in Toronto the following week... hopefully they'll visit Montreal and/or Quebec and I can catch them there. There's a non functioning reed on my concertina, a very high note I never use, maybe I'll try to keep Mr. Dipper busy

Heya David, First it would be good for you to learn the right terms. Am I wrong or your concertina is actually a C/G concertina, and not a "C/D" concertina as your title says? It's important you try to use the right terms and right keys to define your instrument. Also, what you call a "line" is actually a "row". The C row and the G row. As for the rest, you could easily search concertina.net because there are dozens of threads explaining technique to play the anglo. You can decide to play 'on the row', which means using mainly one single row, or 'cross row', which means you use all the rows. I personally try to play 'cross row', meaning I switch from the C row to the G row and don't really use a main single row. One important thing I think, I'd say you should always leave your fingers on the C row as your 'home' position, and go down to reach the G row when needed... if one day you get a 30 buttons with an accidental row at the top, being in the middle row will be ideal position. Also, your index finger should be positioned and be use to play notes on the first column... your second fingers on the second column, etc. Don't use the same finger to go all over the keyboard, they should be assigned to their own position. If you search the site a little you'll find lot of good posts about that.

Yes I'm a bit puzzled as to why the instrument won't sell for US$7000, seems like a terrific price to me to get your hand on a Dipper concertina with no wait time. I remember when I was in the market for a new concertina, I would have jumped on that one like a wolf :-)

Does anyone know the person who owns #40? I would like to know, after two years, how is the "switching reed pans" going...

Can someone enlighten me? I don't see any posting about a C/G Jeffries for sale... I checked eBay and when I search for "jeffries concertina" only that Bb/F shows up... I'm not interested in buying, I'm just very curious about how much it will go for.

I know it's not of my business, but you really don't want to consider putting it on eBay? You can set the minimum price at US$7,000.00 if you want, but it will allow a bigger crowd to be aware of the instrument, I think.

Careful, now. If you rub him up the wrong way too much, he may try to get you banned from Ebay. Chris Much better not to sink to his level. Ebay has a procedure where this kind of poor behaviour can be reported. Life would be so boring if I had to be politically correct all the time! Meanwhile, he 'answered' my message: I guess he did not like my honnest question!

I asked him how he could be such a moron. I wonder if my question will appear in Q/A...

Wow, sounds so musical to me, both of them.

Haha, you've been 'caught with your pants down' in that video, when he starts playing an octave lower we can more easily distinguish your notes (or lack of some of them!) ;-) Yes I've been told before in some workshops that we should try to control the volume of the concertina so that it stays stable. I often hear people playing chords and the volume goes up 50% in the process, it's not very musical in my opinion and distracts from the music. But I think you're doing OK volume-wise, but it's true we can only mainly hear the fiddle, it's very loud! In a perfect world, musicians would try to adjust their volume to match other instruments and I don't think we need that much volume when being recorded... but some people can only play loud and have a hard time toning down, I think.

A few years ago before I took the time to learn complete 'cross row' I was mainly using the RH pull D on the C row and I remember having similar problems as you're having in tunes in D, especially because I had to pull the Ds and F#s... but with both possible push D on each side, tunes in D don't end up pulling the bellows that much anymore, anyway not with the way I play my tunes. There's still a trace of my old habits of trying to avoid too much pull in D tunes though. In the tune "Fred Fynn's", I start the first phrase with push A on the LH accidental row. I don't use that button much, and today I could probably use the 'normal' pull A on the LH C row, but I still like the 'bounciness' going from push A to pull F# in that tune, so I kept it intact. But I had to re-work pretty much all my repertoire of tunes when I switched to using mainly push D/pull E in the LH G row index finger, although I'm still using the reverse one on the RH in many tunes, and often combining both.

Using the air button for phrasing, wow, one of these days send me a sound sample please, I'd curious to hear that. Meanwhile, please don't become yet another Martin Hayes clone, I can't stand it! (Although I've never met a Martin Hayes close that wasn't cloning on fiddle!). I often readjust my bellows by playing a note while pushing the air button... so the note will require more air and will allow me to pull a lot, but I'm not sure if it affects the sound of the note.

Yeah as Ardie stated, I guess it depends on how your concertina is built. The way the right handle is positioned and its size and shape means that my thumb sits directly on top of the air button, and I would have to make an effort to have it further away. I'm sure it's just luck that my hands and thumb fit the current design so well.

Ah and sorry about that sentence, the fact that I'm not native english speaker makes me write 'weak' english sometimes. I just meant that you would probably sound better at a slower speed on those tunes, as would I. ("as you probably would... if you played the tune slower") :-)

As I said, I would do as bad or worse at the same speed, so if what I said was an insult, I was insulting myself in the process, it's not so bad is it?

Yeah, eBay must have its reason to use a fixed deadline. I can't believe a multi billion dollar company, with huge R&D teams, would not have thought of it if it could bring more money to eBay. My wild guess is that by allowing extension on the deadline, you piss off some bidders. The deadline on eBay is somewhat 'exciting' as you *know* it's the end, and if you're lucky the other bidders might not have enough time to outbid you. It might generate more excitement with bidders and also a belief that it's easier to get a cheaper price that way. So maybe eBay knows that by using an extended deadline method they'd make more money in the short term with higher item auction prices, but would lose money in the long run with less people overall bidding. Does that wild guess make any sense??

Well, the way I see it, this is not something that can be debated. The speed discussion is something you get or you don't. The clips of reels you've got on your page might sound amazing to many people, but it sounds very irritating to me, too fast and out of control, lacking depth in phrasing. I always thought, if it *sounds* fast, it's because there's a problem. In the following clip, the speed isn't far from yours, but the phrasing is more relaxed, there is more breathing between the notes and the music are controlling the music, not the other way around. http://comhaltas.ie/music/detail/merry_blacksmith/ Please note that I'm not saying my own playing is better. I think I'd sound better if I played the tune slower than you, but not at that speed, as you probably would. But discussing tastes and ITM phrasing can require lot of energy, attracts the usual "ITM nazis" comments and usually leads nowhere David is doing a good job at reminding us to try to play slower. In the irish music world, it's easy to get excited and try to 'push' it a bit. "Everyone's doing it, why can't I?".

Yeah, I only bid on eBay using snipping. I think of the maximum price I'm willing to pay, and I enter the price on my snipping website, I either win or lose but I never get into a bidding war.

Yes, same here, it's always standing very close to the air button...

Yes by looking at the bids history, Algar waited at the last second (maybe using a sniper) and had a buy order of 3000... In my opinion it's a good technique as it doesn't leave enough time for someone else to place a manual bid. The only way to defend yourself against this is to do like the winner did, a higher limit that will automatically bid for you. It's funny how an eBay auction is a bit irrelevant until it reaches its last minute. You can see that neither the winner or Algar bid on the item until the end, the other bidders ended up being 'decoration' for the auction's statistics :-) One thing I'm convinced of is that this last minute bidding allows for the item to be sold at a cheaper price than if the 3000+ purchase offers would have been entered earlier. Someone who doesn't want to spend more than, let's say, 2500 on the time... can easily change is/her mind in the last few hours and push the price a bit. Something like "wow, I can't afford to pay more than 6000 pounds for that Dipper, but there's a chance I could get it for 6500... Maybe I can sell my TV or my car... I want to push that button.........".