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Song Accompaniment - Melody & Thirds?


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I'd be grateful if an Anglo player, in particular, would take a listen to

and give me their opinion on what Bellamy was playing. It's a simple song with three or maybe four chords; if you played a chordal accompaniment as written you'd end up with something very drone-y and sluggish, and quite unlike this performance. On the other hand, there are chords involved - although the accompaniment follows the melody quite closely, it sounds as if he's playing dyads or triads more or less throughout. I'm just at a loss to work out what the chords were, or how to produce a similar effect (I play an English, just to complicate things). Is it just a case of playing the melody line with added thirds?

 

Any thoughts?

Edited by PhilEdwards
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Playing the EC myself just like you I can tell you as much on a fly: Peter Bellamy has the fifth prominently in his accompanimengt, whereas the melody mainly features the third. This makes up just another (minor) third frequently, and my guess would be that you were referring to this.

 

Regarding the chording he is basically limiting his playing just to two chords (tonic and dominat), very Anglo- or, if you will, harmonica-like.

 

Besides, I personally appreciate the post for hinting me at this recording, which is quite appealing to me. Thank you for that!

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I knew Peter Bellamy from the early Sixties, and was at his first public performance at the opening night of the Rochester Folk Song Club.

A few years later he got an Anglo-concertina in London. His first attempts at playing the Anglo consisted pressing several adjacent buttons and simply waggleing it in and out. Although his later accompniments became a little more sophisticated it always retained this waggle quality. He was such a fine folk singer that any accompaniment was always secondary to that distinctive voice.

I have no idea how this might be done on an English Concertina; I couldn't do it on my Duet. If you really want to emulate the "Bellamy" style the best solution is to buy a cheap 20 button Anglo and experiment on the lines that I have described above.

Inventor.

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His first attempts at playing the Anglo consisted pressing several adjacent buttons and simply waggleing it in and out. Although his later accompniments became a little more sophisticated it always retained this waggle quality.

Yes. It sounds like a harmonica accompaniment, for the same reason. On a harmonica, if you want to play more than one note at the same time, they pretty much HAVE to be adjacent.

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It's a source of eternal regret to me that I never saw Peter Bellamy, although I'm old enough to have seen him in the 80s if not earlier; sadly I wasn't even aware of him until a few years ago. People who knew him fill me with fannish awe!

I'm not dead set on reproducing the particular sound of his accompaniment, which clearly owes a lot to what happens on an Anglo when you reverse the bellows. What I want to achieve is a fairly basic EC accompaniment to "Death is not the End"; if it sounds a bit like Bellamy's, so much the better. Chordally the song is very simple - the verses are basically several bars of I followed by several bars of V - so it needs a bit of livening up. I've tried breaking up the main chords with passing chords, but it still sounds pretty dismal - so I was wondering how you'd go about doing what Bellamy seems to have done, essentially playing a melody line in dyads & triads. Or, I suppose, if you'd do it that way (on an EC).

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I've just had a listen to "Death is not the end", and I have to agree with Inventor that the accompaniment is achieved by playing the melody and holding sets of adjacent buttons down while pressing and drawing the bellows as dictated by the melody. As David Barnert said, like on a harmonica.

 

I think this is a wonderful example of letting the instrument do all the work of arranging the piece. Bellamy is just "giving the Anglo its head" and using neither whip nor reins.

 

I must say, there's something "Dylanesque" about the recording - not pretty, but very expressive and elemental.

 

When I think about it, as a singer and multi-instrumentalist, I sometimes consider which instrument I would prefer to "collaborate" with when working up a new song. The Anglo, the Crane, the banjo, the autoharp and the guitar all make something different out of the same melody and chord structure, not to mention the rhythm. Sometimes I'll try several instruments, and usually find that I prefer how one of them accompanies a given song, rather than the way the others do it. As a self-accompanied singer, you have to divide your attention between song and accompaniment, and the more arranging work the instrument takes over on its own, the more concentration you have to devote to the actual song. The cited Bellamy recording is a good example of this!

 

Cheers,

John

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I must say, there's something "Dylanesque" about the recording - not pretty, but very expressive and elemental.

 

This is exactly what I have been thinking since listening to the clip for the first time..., can't get it off my head... :)

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I don't know if there may be any connection, but you might be interested to know that the Folk Song club mentioned above was started by (?Peter) Abnett who was a teacher at Maidstone Art College; where Peter Bellamy was an Art Student. Mr Abnett played a long-neck 5 string banjo and sung Bob Dylan songs (Hard Rain, Times Changing era). I am trying to remember, I think he also played a neck mounted harmonica like Bob Dylan, or perhaps that is false memory syndrome.

He brought along Peter Bellamy with him who sang a couple of songs, accompaniming himself on a guitar. One was Kosher Bailly, a typical student song of that time, and about the only student song that was just about respectable enough to be sung in a gathering of non-male students; together with another (I think) American folk song. The songs were nothing to write home about, but that distinctive voice you could never forget.

Inventor.

Edited by inventor
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