tzirtzi

Here are some photos: In case it's not legible, the logo says "National Band" and "Made in Germany".

Well, the air button is indeed on the RHS, and having reexamined it, I think I just drew my diagram backwards . So the above diagram for the left is actually for the right. I'll just take some photos and upload them...

I bought an old anglo off ebay. It was a risk, as the description was minimal - a risk that, sadly, has definitely not paid off. Thus I am going to resell it (although, I suspect, for less than I paid for it). However, I'd like the next buyer in the chain to be better informed than I was, so, having dis- an re-assembled it (one end was on upsidedown...), I'm trying to work what keys it is in. The problem is, I know next to nothing about anglos and so don't know what notes the buttons are supposed to play - made harder to work out by the fact that some of them are obviously hideously out of tune, and there is nothing written inside it that might give me a clue. Here is, as far as I can tell, are the notes played by each button on the LHS. I guessed the top row might be in B major? The bottom row... I've no idea. Doesn't look like any key to me - which could be a matter of some notes being too out of tune to tell what they were meant to be. Could anyone shine light on the problem for me? Given that my understanding is that the LHS of an anglo should be lower than the RHS, I suspect the ends may also have been fixed on the wrong ways around.

I play sitting down - I've been trying to teach myself to play standing up for a while, and haven't got very far with it. I'm interested that your reason for preferring standing playing is greater bellows control, because that's the exact reason I can't do it - with nothing to rest one side of the instrument on, I can't control the bellows properly. I've tried using a strap borrowed from my saxophone, but no joy. So definitely sitting down for me.

I must say I feel a bit gutted hearing this - when decided what type of concertina I wanted to learn last autumn, I ruled out Hayden as too expensive - had I only waited 6 months I would I put a pre-order for one of these in! But never mind, I love my Jackie and this at least means that learning the Hayden duet will be a feasible future project one day. It seems really great to me that the available Haydens are starting to fill out the price range.

Very disappointing - mostly melted away So much for the weather forecast talking about it lying on the ground all week...

Concertina and snow! Sadly, the actual flakes don't really show up but it's actually snowing quite hard... They might have shown up better if not taken through a window but, similarly, I don't think I'd want to bring my concertina out in the snow .

Apparently the weather's meant to stick like this all week - and it's certainly looking good, still snowing now halfway through the day!

Thanks for the advice I'll try the triplet in the first bar, though I can just about manage that one as written - might be easier just to stick with what I know . I have indeed been playing 2:1 rather than 3:1, but as the fortuitous result of being used to playing jazz rather than knowing that it was meant to be like that Good to know that I'm actually doing it right!

Thanks very much! I hadn't realised that it was meant to be syncopated - so I've found a different version, http://www.folktunefinder.com/tune.php?id=9144, which writes it like that. The triplets fit rather better with the dotted rhythm, and playing triplet e-f-g rather than e-g helps a lot. Once I've got my fingers a bit more used to playing it with a dotted rhythm, I'll experiment with patterns of legato and staccato, as you suggest..

Sorry to revive an old thread, but as it's on the same topic as the original post... I've been crossing fingers to be able to play fifths legato, and that's been working fine for me until I came across this piece. Much of the first section I find very difficult because of the fifth-followed-by-thirds pattern. In bar 3 (the Em bar on the top line) the only way I've been able to finger it without using the same finger twice is 3-2-3-4-5-2, and it seems a bad idea to take my fifth finger out of the rest. Listening back to myself playing it, having a single pair of notes not legato doesn't necessary harm the piece that much, but it would still be nice to have the option... So is there any trick to playing a piece like this?

Thanks John and tallship for the advice on fingering fifths - I managing to get somewhat smoother playing by cross fingering, and hopefully that will improve with practice. (The fifths questions was actually not for the Rochdale Coconut Dance, but generally and for a couple of other pieces). John - thankyou for pointing out the WCCP to me. I've had a look and won't be able to come along any time this coming holiday (I'm at uni in Essex so back in the west during the holidays) but will watch out for future possibles . I've tried out your suggestions for chords and they sound good. I wonder, though, whether I was wrong to try to put chords only on the notes I did - I was imitating the Spiers and Boden version of the song, but with the concertina on its own the contrast between chords and single notes seems a bit too obvious... I'll have to experiment further. And thanks Christian for your advice on fingering chords!

Thanks - that video will be quite helpful I think! I have watched it through and will try out the fingering in the morning when my playing won't annoy my neighbours

Hello all I was wondering whether someone could advise me on a couple of issues? Firstly, I need some help with chords. I would like to add some chords to the Rochdale Coconut Dance - I'm keeping a diary of my learning with bad-quality uploaded videos and audio files here, it's the third entry from the top and I've included the ABC of the music I'm trying to play. I would like the crochets in the third and seventh bars to be chords, plus probably the dotted crochet at the end of each section plus the minim at the very end. But I don't know what chords to add! Also, I was wondering if there was any standard way of doing fingering for chords? Secondly, the fingering of fifths I'm finding difficult. Using the same finger for both notes works fine with staccato or portato, but obviously it's impossible to play legato like this... Is there any standard alternative fingering to use to get around this? Thanks in advance for your helps

A good article.. Worried me a bit though, because it compared the human ability to metabolise theobromine with that of rats and dogs - I always used to feed my pet rats little bits of chocolate and they were extremely keen on it. Clearly that was quite dangerous But probably not in a sitting - or so I infer from your ability to post here

My Concertina connection Jackie weighs 1410g - so that's around average/slightly higher? I haven't had much problem with finger strain, but then I have only been playing for a fortnight and most of that sitting down...

This idea makes a lot of sense to me. I've been playing music since I was quite small and at times in my life feel that I have been quite technically good, including at dynamics, tonality and putting in the expression that my teachers have suggested. But nonetheless I've never got to the point where I felt able to express my own emotion in any fluent way through my playing, so I wouldn't class myself as a musician. Though perhaps this is only one definition of the word and others that are not logically compatible with it do coexist - for example, the idea of making a profession out of music. Someone who composes and performs "elevator music" or similar might never have to (and thus might not need to be able to) express much emotion through their music, but I think most people would nonetheless class them as a musician. A word doesn't need to have only one definition - as Wittgenstein said, a word means only its usage in the language.

Perhaps we should create a more complex survey of the forums which would allow us to make such links and create some more analysable results than just bar charts . We'd have to put it on another server and link to it but that wouldn't be hard. However, people might be bored of answering demographics surveys by now and just ignore another one...

Nah, it's just a bit of fun. Horses for courses. Essacly - and games like this don't replace musical instruments. They're just games - for fun - that are themed around them. I have friends who are very into and very good at Guitar Hero and Rock band - and they have, had, and will have no interest in playing the guitar.

I've always been very much a solitary player with my other instruments - part of my choosing the concertina was because of its connection to folk music and so the folk scene, as I would like to get into playing more with other people! I'll have to get a little better before I start trying to do that in earnest, though...

Sympathetic vibrations would certainly make sense.. I'll keep on playing for a while in the hope that it is indeed a 'teething problem' and simply solves itself . Thanks for the link, btw - I've read and bookmarked the thread, and will return to it if I ever have to open up my instrument!

I am listening to Radio4 - so no music. I am learning Sprig of Shilelah, Battering Ram, and The Man in the Moon (from the Jack/Jackie Tutor). And I have the aforementioned Battering Ram stuck in my head, as it was the last tune I played .

People's ability to learn changes continuously as they age - brain pathways are more easily formed when young, thus learning is easier (although the more associations and previous experience when older actually also aids learning). But the term 'critical period' refers to the discrete period in which it is not just easy to learn language but possible at all. If a person isn't exposed to any language before a certain age (probably between 7 and 9 - obviously no actual experiments have been done to test this, only observations where children have been isolated by circumstance) it is impossible for them to acquire certain aspects of language at all (ability to acquire morphology seems to be lost first, then syntax, then lexis). If you have acquired one or more first languages (more properly, mother tongues, or L1s) then after this period has ended you can acquire a second, but it is a different process using different areas of the brain. I quite agree with your description here - just not with the comparison with language. As a small child you are able to learn more readily and less consciously. Later on, you are then taught terminology and a structure for the information already acquired. However had you not been exposed to music as a small child it is not the case that you would be unable to learn later on - I know someone who started playing the fiddle at 40, having never done any music previously, and now plays in a band. Nor is it the case that music learned later on is learned in a qualitatively different way than music learned as child. Well... I would argue that it isn't - or at least there's no evidence that it is. Do you think so? Then how can a horse change so elegantly from a walk to a trot to a canter to a gallop, if it hasn't got an innate sense of rhythm? Equally, every animal has a regular heartbeat. However, these are just automatic functions of the body which happen to generate a rhythm. Experiments have shown that a horse couldn't choose to walk, trot, canter or gallop in time with anything. Nor can any animal thus tested recognise or respond to rhythms - including animals very close to us, such as chimps etc. EDIT: double posted with Ishtar, but I think that our posts generally agree . The rhythm stuff I learnt from a psycholinguistics teacher last year - she said that one of her colleagues was in the process of investigating this apparent lack in non-human species and the possible connection between this and the uniqueness of human language. However, I don't think very much has yet been published on the subject - so this is a very debatable area.

Interesting - hopefully, it's just a problem in the way I'm playing, then.

Hmm.. Quite possibly - it's hard to tell because the difference in the sound from the live player's perspective and from a recording is quite significant, but I would guess that it is the same kind of buzzing. Did you find the cause of yours?