Steve Mansfield

Quacking information, thank you

As an ignorant English system player ( and a duck-lover), why a Wheatstone 'duck'?

Likewise The Music Room in the UK, and they have got a baritone Geordie listed as in the shop at the moment. I'll be very interested to hear the outcome of this thread, as I'll be in the market for a Bari in about a year's time and am definitely leaning towards the Geordie at the moment ...

Lovely stuff. Reminds me I haven't bought the Lost Chord CD yet, must do that!

Am I really the only one who has no idea what this thread is about?

I've seen the show twice now, once in its 'Time Gentlemen Please' incarnation and again on the current 'The Lock In' tour recently when we (The Powderkegs) danced outside The Lowry show as part of the pre-match entertainment. Brilliant stuff, the level of dance skill and technical ability in both the Morris and the urban street dance is most impressive and some of the sequences are quite breathtaking. And of course with Damien Barber playing his EC there's even some concertina content! When they did the show at The Lowry there was even a quick encore-to-the-encore out in the foyer; I suspect that doesn't happen every night (purely because there won't be an appropriate space in every venue), but it really rounded the evening off with a bang 'just when you thought you'd seen everything' ...

Traditional Slow Airs Of Ireland by Tomas O Canainn is a really good collection of Irish slow airs - here's a link to it on UK Amazon, The notation and explanatory notes are excellent, and there's an accompanying CD. Don't forget about Carolan, there's various editions of his complete works about (not by any manner of means all slow airs of course, but quite a few of his tunes have been played as slow airs down the years). Many slow airs started life as song tunes or dance tunes, so don't be afraid to experiment. For example the Dorset tune 'Sun Assembly' makes a beautiful slow air, the French revolutionary song 'Le fils de mon pays' stands alongside any of Carolan's given the right treatment, and I have also been known to play a deep soulful heavily ornamented air on low whistle which it usually takes people who've not heard it before a while to realise is actually Kylie's I Should Be So Lucky ...

Looks lovely and no doubt sounds just as good. I don't suppose there's any plans to make a Baritone version?

Didn't see any morris dancers though, or even realise it is important in that field. The Upton Upon Severn stick dance is one of the central Border Morris dances and has also been adopted by many Cotswold sides; and as has already been mentioned it is traditionally performed to the Appalacian tune Maud Karpeles put to it. Once again proving that innovation + time = tradition Except that the dance most American teams (and, I gather, British teams as well) call "Upton Upon Severn Stick Dance" is only distantly related to the dance Karpeles describes in the above pdf. It is derived from an expanded version performed by the Chingford Morris Men, and some suggest (read: demand) that it be referred to as the Chingford Stick Dance. True enough, but as I understand the Chingford MM called their version of the dance by the original name (e.g. Upton), those seeking to retrospectively rename it 'Chingford' are fighting an uphill battle by now! Anyhoo we seem to have deviated .... I also don't recognise the first 27 seconds of the original video, sounds Cotswold-ish but no idea.

Didn't see any morris dancers though, or even realise it is important in that field. The Upton Upon Severn stick dance is one of the central Border Morris dances and has also been adopted by many Cotswold sides; and as has already been mentioned it is traditionally performed to the Appalacian tune Maud Karpeles put to it. Once again proving that innovation + time = tradition There's also a big Morris presence at the May Day weekend Upton folk festival, although as there is no attempt to timetable the performances or separate the big noisy sides (like, er, us!) from the quieter and more introverted performances, the overall effect is fairly unsatisfactory ...

Enjoyed that a lot. Thanks for posting it Jim.

I've got a Jack and the low reeds do speak a little slowly, they're fine for accompaniment basses but you wouldn't want to try playing a polka on them! Morses are lovely and much quicker to speak, but even second-hand are at least 4x the price of a Jack, so it depends on your budget. As regards the OP I don't think its necessarily a matter of keeping the chords far apart, as avoiding strings of successive thirds -a good effect used sparingly, very dull sounding if over-used. Have a search through the forum for some of the audio recordings the great player who calls himself Ratface has put on here and you'll get a good idea of the variations of chords (and single note bass 'emphasis' notes) that the rest of us can only aspire to and be inspired by. Good luck

I wasn't there but strongly suspect that was 'Shape Note ' singing, a popular American method of passing on hymns without teaching standard Western notation. I'm as grumpy old atheist as the next grumpy old atheist, but I don't think there's anything sinister or proselytising to be read into the use of religious material, that's just the technique's home material. I'm sure a quick Google for 'shape note singing' would tell you more than you want to know, unless you think sight-readers should be restricted to only using Altavista of course ...

I have absolutely no idea how you made that cognitive leap. Unless you missed out the bit where another group of wrens selected their songs from a book ( the Penguin Book of Wren Songs perhaps) and were comparatively less successful in finding mates ... Someone I was playing music with last night developed a blister on their left thumb from their octave key. That doesn't actually prove that Boehm flute players have smaller brains than concertina players.

Much though I'm a huge and unshakable advocate of music notation as a means of transmitting, learning and storing tunes, this is definitely one of those cases where you need to interpret the dots with experience and knowledge. On top of what tallship has said there's also the subtle variations in emphasis and 'swing' that cannot be conveyed in music notation (or, rather, cannot easily be conveyed in music notation that doesn't hide the tune under a welter of expression marks and performance directions). Most traditional tunes are notated to provide the overall bare bones of the tune: the tunes published in sources such as my abc transcriptions, the Village Music Project and the source-books the VMP works from, and O'Neill's Music Of Ireland, are all representations of the 'core' of the tune, not performance editions. Reels, hornpipes, and schottisches can all be notated 'straight', yet when you hear them played the difference is clear. Roxbrough Castle springs to mind as an example of a common Northumbrian tune which can be found notated 'straight' or 'dotted', and can be heard played straight or dotted - both versions have precedent and are 'valid'. A French bourree can look pretty much like an Irish polka on the printed page, a mazurka can look like a waltz, and don't get me started on the myriad attempts down the years to notate Swedish polskas in 3/4, 3/2, 9/4, 9/8 .... The only way you'll get more experience at turning the printed page into music is through going through the process of playing, listening and learning, figuring out why a particular tune works better (or is most commonly played, which is not at all the same thing!) in a particular version; and for me that process is part of the fun of playing music with other people, absorbing their experience and influences and building and sharing your own at the same time. Things were so much easier when hornpipes were in 3/2. Apart from the ones that got notated in 6/4 of course ...

Those are lovely, thanks for posting the links!

I'm enjoying these transcriptions and look forward to the completed abc file (I guess I could make my own file by copy'n'pasting like I do for the Something For The Weekend tunes, but I'm being lazy!) Good job Peter, you'll hit a point like I did on the La Bourree project where you think 'why did I start this', but the end results are well worth the process ... [edited to insert link to La Bourree)

I'll look forward to hearing about how you get on with the Geordie baritone - as I've said I've got my heart set on one, so it'll be good to hear an owner's thoughts ...

From Shrewsbury Folk Festival, August 2012, just up on YouTube: That's 1 duet, 3 x EC, sorry ...

That's a really odd-looking concertina. Is it one of Guran's 'let's improve the design of the concertina by throwing away absolutely everything that makes it a concertina' jobs?

I'm going for the Geordie as soon as house-rebuilding expenses finally end, mainly because of the extra range given by the extra buttons. I'll mainly be playing tunes rather than accompanying song, so the extra notes will come in handy sooner or later ... I've played both and they are both absolute beauties! I certainly wouldn't consider a Stagi over either of those two.

Do you have a link for this system? I would like to replace my Microvox. I'd be interested in that as well - very happy with my Microvox rig but always prepared to look at alternatives ... I googled for Thomann Ovid and found various general pages, but nothing i could see that would work with concertina.

I know you guys are discussing anglo technique: but from the EC side here's a video (taken at a gig I had the enormous pleasure of also being at on Monday) of Alistair Anderson, giving a fairly extreme demonstration of how moving the concertina around can influence the tone and colour ...

Nothing too tricky about this one, but a cracking tune I've just come back to ... X: 67 T:Morgan Rattler R:Jig B:A Northern Lass ed. Jamie Knowles Z:Steve Mansfield 27/05/2000 M:6/8 L:1/8 K:D AFE EFG | FEF D2B | AFE EFG | B2A Bcd | AFE EFG | FEF DBc | dcB edc | B2A Bcd :: ded fed | cAc edc | ded fed | fge fga | d2e f2g | agf edc | dcB edc | B2A Bcd :: D2d dcd | E2e ede | D2d dcd | BcA Bcd | D2d dcd | E2e efg | agf edc | B2A Bcd :|

A couple of thoughts that I hope might help .... Don't think of the 4th finger as part of the 'pulling' mechanism; the 4th finger rest is there for stabilising and orientation, not as something to be gripped to give traction. Also, don't shove your thumbs too far into the loops; I play with the thumb not much further than the first (nail end) knuckle. I have seen people complaining they can't reach any of the bottom octave comfortably, who have the thumbs pushed right the way through the straps. Thirdly, I always play either sitting down, or with my left leg elevated on a chair or a collapsible stool, with the left-hand reedpan resting on my thigh. That takes a lot of the weight and makes playing (for me) very much easier. Good luck and keep at it