40 Button Anglo: Kato Video Prompts Some Questions

[Don Taylor]

KATO has just published another fascinating Youtube video of him playing a 40 button Bastari (Stagi):

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwXtd21p9eI

 

"I played Greensleeves on Bastari (Stagi) 40 key Anglo concertina in CG, changing keys into 7 basic minor keys: C minor (Cm), Dm, Em, Fm, Gm, Am and Bm.
A 40 button Anglo can be used like a small duet concertina or a small free-bass accordion."

 

So, just how far can you push a 40 button C/G Anglo, and how easy is to play in the keys that are a long way away from the home keys?

 

KATO has demonstrated playing in all of the natural keys, but what about the accidental keys? (If that is the correct expression, I mean the keys with sharp/flat key signatures).

 

Monitoring eBay sales, it seems that 40 button Anglos either do not sell, or do not fetch the same sort of price as similar 30 button Anglos. Is there a technical reason for this? Maybe it is more difficult to play the home keys of a 40 button because of the button spacing?

 

Don.

 

PS. A couple of observations about KATO's video:

 

It is interesting to hear the different keys played almost identically one after the other on the same instrument.

 

The video itself is well done, it is shot at a slightly oblique angle to the ends that makes it easy to watch his fingering. It is counter-intuitive to me that such an oblique angle makes it easier to see the fingering than the usual more open angle, but it does.

 

Lastly, maybe the best hope for a concertina revival comes from Japan.

[ceemonster]

[Monitoring eBay sales, it seems that 40 button Anglos either do not sell, or do not fetch the same sort of price as similar 30 button Anglos. Is there a technical reason for this?]

 

i'm throwing out theories here, not objective knowledge...most of the 40-buttons you see on ebay are stagis, i.e., poor quality. stagis have gone up quite a bit in price over the years, and that means you are going to be laying out over a grand for one of these things, and that's a chunk of change for a not-very-playable instrument.

 

another theory might be, 40-button concertinas do not tend to have predictable, uniform layouts. with english-made such as jeffries or wheatstone, the ones with lots of buttons were often custom jobs to the taste of the purchaser. so, you don't always know what you're getting, and what you're getting may not be what you would want in a 40-button. take myself. i would love to have a 40 or 45-button anglo, but ONLY if the extra notes were extra doubles or triples of the note range up to "high c." or, say, no higher than the C# and D above "high C." i don't want a 40 or 45-button concertina where many of the extras are wasted on on super-high notes i neither want nor need.

[ceemonster]

here is another thought. i dont' really understand this, but per a more knowledgeable poster than i on another thread, there was something about the "extra" buttons on this big anglos being outside the sonic core of the sound board or something like that, such that they did not sound as loudly and fully as the 30 "core" buttons. perhaps people are put off by that....

[Don Taylor]

I was actually thinking about the 40-button Anglos from South Africa, several have showed up here and on eBay in the last year, some of them appearing to be pretty good, but they all took a while to sell when most 30 button Anglos are snapped up.

 

It looks like you can get a concertina reeded 40 button Anglo for about the same price as a Morse Ceili. Is there a technical reason for this, or is it just that it would be unacceptable to play ITM on anything other than a 30 button C/G. I guess for ITM you don't really need anything more than a 30B, but for anything else these 40B look like a bargain. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut!

[sqzbxr]

I play in the English harmonic style and prefer a 30-key over a 38, 40, or 45 mainly due to weight and size constraints. With a 30-key, I can have long-scale reeds in large chambers in a 6" frame; adding those extra reeds means smaller reeds, chambers, or both. Also, since I frequently play standing for long periods of time, weight is an issue as well. What I lose in added fingering flexibility I get back in volume, quick response, and lighter weight.

 

BTW, best of luck finding a decent Jeffries 38 or Wheatstone 40 for the price of a Ceili...

[Daniel Hersh]

The key issue here is not the number of buttons but the dates when these concertinas were built. Wheatstones made after World War II sell for much lower prices than older ones because people feel that the post-WW2 Wheatstones are generally of lower quality.

 

I was actually thinking about the 40-button Anglos from South Africa, several have showed up here and on eBay in the last year, some of them appearing to be pretty good, but they all took a while to sell when most 30 button Anglos are snapped up.

It looks like you can get a concertina reeded 40 button Anglo for about the same price as a Morse Ceili. Is there a technical reason for this, or is it just that it would be unacceptable to play ITM on anything other than a 30 button C/G. I guess for ITM you don't really need anything more than a 30B, but for anything else these 40B look like a bargain. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut!

[Dan Worrall]

"I played Greensleeves on Bastari (Stagi) 40 key Anglo concertina in CG, changing keys into 7 basic minor keys: C minor (Cm), Dm, Em, Fm, Gm, Am and Bm.

A 40 button Anglo can be used like a small duet concertina or a small free-bass accordion."

 

So, just how far can you push a 40 button C/G Anglo, and how easy is to play in the keys that are a long way away from the home keys?

 

 

The South African players are the masters at this, playing a CG Anglo in C, G, D, A, F, Bb, and Eb (and more). The key to what Kato is doing -- and to what these South African 40 button players are doing -- is to observe that he is playing each differently-keyed version of Greensleeves in the same, legato manner (a long phrase on the draw, then a long phrase on the push, with little or no push-pull bouncing going on). When you have enough buttons (and the modern Boers have nearly all gone to the 40 buttons) then it ceases to be a push-pull anglo with push-pull scales, and instead can be seen as a bunch of nearly randomly located notes on the left side: one set of random locations for the press, and another set of random locations for the draw. The right presents yet another two sets of randomly located notes, only these are an octave higher. Thus one has the makings of a duet, with the bass side on the left.

 

Hence Kato's point: he is playing it like a "unisonoric" 'duet', with the melody played on the right an octave higher than the oom-pah left chords. Note that he changes bellows directions mainly to manage air in the bellows, not to push-pull his way up the scale. If his bellows were long enough, one senses that he could play the whole tune in one direction, and then play it again in the other direction. To play in this manner requires two things:

1) You have to have enough notes to make nearly every 'important' note duplicated on the press and the draw

2) You must memorize two complete sets of button locations (one on the push, another on the pull), rather than just one, as for a unisonoric duet or an EC. Twice the memory work.

 

On an evolutionary scale, modern Irish players have only just ventured into this heavily cross-rowed territory in the past 25 years or so, and of course they are only playing one note at a time. They can only go so far with this, because they are severely limited by the number of duplicated notes on a 30 button. They fit this knowledge however into choosing different types of phrasing (bouncy or legato) to fit to a particular phrase of a tune, and hence straddle both the push-pull world and what bits of the uni-directional world (if you will allow me that made-up phrase) that the 30 button allows. Similarly, most British harmonic players are still based in a world of push-pull scales, typically in the two home keys, but they use more complex chording than the Irish, of course. A few, especially Fred Kilroy, have ventured into the fully chorded, more uni-directional, multi-keyed world. He played mainly in octaves, and used a lot of chromatic notes, and played in keys like Bb...very like the Boers. Few in his country followed him into that territory, from my limited viewing point.

 

40 button Boer players play in a completely chorded manner this way, and not just with left hand oompah chords -- they chord on both sides of the box. And they play lots of jazz-like improvisations too in these 'strange' keys like Eb etc, which indicates a level of familiarity with the keyboard that is difficult for others (like me), who tend to be stuck in the push pull world, to envision. The answer is in the 40 buttons with its repeated notes. With a 40 key, and the ability to memorize button locations on the push (or all on the pull) in various keys, the Anglo ultimately becomes much simpler, which seems counter-intuitive.

 

I've been spending too much time lately unravelling the playing of Faan Harris, who played the 30 button in the 1930s and who, in my humble opinion, is one of the greatest Anglo players to ever have been recorded anywhere. LIke Paddy Murphy and Noel Hill several decades later, he was pushing the limits of his 30 button, playing entire phrases on the push or pull, and in non-home row keys like Bb and F. And chording on both hands and doing jazz improv all the while. He set the stage for the somewhat later arrival of 40 button concertinas in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, which were eagerly snapped up by hundreds of players who pushed along farther down that route; almost no one there uses 30 buttons now. If you listen to some of these modern players -- Nico van Rensburg and Neels Mattheus are examples -- their playing is so unidirectional that they sound like they are playing a piano accordion....which is precisely the territory Kato is wandering into. Once you get there, playing in many keys is fairly straightforward.

 

Another bit of Faan Harris's genius is that he fit the needs of a piece to the appropriate key. One of the waltzes that he composed was named Hartseer (Heartache) in memory of his son, who was killed in a car accident (hit and run, I think). To make it sound sad, he needed to play legato....hard to do on a 30 button bounce box. He chose the key of Bb, because one can play it all on the draw with hardly any bellows directions changes needed, so very legato. He didn't play in Bb to impress anyone....he fit the characteristics of the Bb key on a 30 button to the needs of the whole tune. Quite a few steps ahead of the Irish players of today, who just fit phrases this way. And he did it with chords and improvisation. Amazing.

 

It is a wondrous instrument, this Anglo.

Edited February 6, 2014 by Dan Worrall

[Anglo-Irishman]

 

Monitoring eBay sales, it seems that 40 button Anglos either do not sell, or do not fetch the same sort of price as similar 30 button Anglos. Is there a technical reason for this? Maybe it is more difficult to play the home keys of a 40 button because of the button spacing?

 

Don,

It may be that people who have hitherto played the 30-b Anglo in "Irish", "English" or their own style either with harmonised melodies in the home keys or single-line melody in related keys, and now want to branch out into complex arrangements in arbitrary keys, go for a Duet! This was my reason for taking up the Duet (Crane system, but that is immaterial in this case!)

 

Alternatively, if the 30-b Anglo feels too restrictive, why make do with a 40-b Anglo when you can get a 52-b Bandoneon? If it's legato playing in one direction that you're looking for, this is state of the art on the tango Bandoneon!

 

If, however, you already have a large repertoire of sophisticated 30-b Anglo arrangements - as the Boers usually seem to - it would probably be more productive to upgrade to a 40-b Anglo. You could then continue to play your 30-b pieces while learning to use the extra buttons. I would imagine the situation is similar to upgrading from a 20-b to a 30-b!

 

Cheers,

John

[asdormire]

I looked at a very nice Wheatstone 40 button G/D a few years back that I would have liked, but the asking price was beyond what I could afford. Neither the weight or the size seemed unreasonable.

 

That being said, I think Dan has covered a lot of the points I would have liked to have made, with nice examples and scholarship that is beyond my knowledge. What I do have is my own experience. On the 30 button C/G Tedrow pictured as my avitar, I regular play in eight keys: the two home keys of C and G, the three keys above the home rows of D, A and E, and the three keys below of F, Bb and Eb. I find it is just a matter of knowing my keyboard. I imagine a 40 button would give even more versatility. I also find that as I move to the keys farther from the home rows the more unidirectional the playing becomes. An example would be Stephan Foster's Hard Times which was written in Eb. I play that almost entirely on the draw, with only one push for an Ab.

 

Alan

[Don Taylor]

Dan W:

 

I just tried to PM you to thank you for your answer, but your inbox is full and will not accept new messages.

 

Thanks very much for your answer, it answers my question and is much appreciated. Thanks to the other answers too, most illuminating.

 

Don.

[gcoover]

A most excellent analysis, Dan! Never thought of a 40-button as being two different instruments - one with an all-push scale and one with an all-pull scale. I guess the big question is how chromatic one wants to play, how smoothly one wants to play, and when and where to take advantage of the Anglo's push-pull bounciness. With the Anglo being the only concertina that has a different note pushing or pulling, it almost seems a shame to treat it like a smooth duet. But what amazing versatility it has, with the ability to be played in so many ways. In a way, that almost makes it harder to play! Decisions, decisions...

Gary

[Geoffrey Crabb]

Probably a little late now but the attached may be of interest.

 

Apologies, due to a content error, please see revised attachment in later post.

 

Incidentally, years ago the 40 button Anglo was sometimes referred to as 'The poor mans Duet'.

 

Geoffrey

Edited February 7, 2014 by Geoffrey Crabb

[Dan Worrall]

Glad you all liked the analysis. I've been thinking about all that a lot lately, in off moments. I am learning a lot from studying Faan Harris, and one day will share it all in writing, I hope.

 

Geoff, what a superb keyboard chart! Best I've ever seen. From it, one can see straightaway that a 40 button is good to be played in either direction for a solid octave and a half...enough for most tunes. And it is partly bidirectional in another half octave or so in either direction. So one is good to go to play it as a duet in almost any key. Making a key choice might entail knowing the key in which your fiddle friends like to play it, or better it could entail knowing how that tune's range falls on the octave and a half of the bidirectional territory. There is more to it than that, of course, but that would be the start.

 

One other thing I forgot to say about the Boers. After 40 button, multi-key unidirectional mania had permeated the culture in the 50s to 70s, a fair few of them began to realize that they were beginning to lose the plot....that the music no longer sounded particularly traditional. Many didn't care, of course, being modernists in taste. But for those few, they spun off and started building high quality two row German style concertinas, which they gladly play in the old push pull manner (although they cross-row those two rows in novel ways). You will see them coming to a (usually TBK) session with two boxes. One when they want traditional bounce, another for when they might want something else. Why not just play the inner two rows of their 40 buttons when they want a traditional sound? It is a bit like my dieting; hard to maintain that discipline if there is a plate of cookies on the table.

[Wolf Molkentin]

Why not just play the inner two rows of their 40 buttons when they want a traditional sound? It is a bit like my dieting; hard to maintain that discipline if there is a plate of cookies on the table.

I've experienced that with my GCF melodeon - much less push/pull than on the two-row (or more still my very first, a one row pokerwork...). Edited February 6, 2014 by blue eyed sailor

[gcoover]

Probably a little late now but the attached may be of interest.

 

40 CG Anglo Crabb Typical 1.doc

 

Incidentally, years ago the 40 button Anglo was sometimes referred to as 'The poor mans Duet'.

 

Geoffrey

 

Geoffrey,

I'm curious as why there is only one choice for the lower E, F (and D#), your numbers 11, 12 & 13. I would think at least one alternate in an opposite direction would be desirable, as opposed to having so many alternates of some of the G's and A's. Of course, I only play the 30-button so haven't a clue how those extra 10 buttons (20 notes) work in the real world!

 

Gary

[Don Taylor]

The diagram does show a reversal for button 13 - green F - on button 25. I do not see any reversals for 11 and 12.

 

Correction: There is no reversal for the LHS green F, it looks like button 25 on the LHS should not be green - wrong octave.

 

Don.

Edited February 7, 2014 by Don Taylor

[Geoffrey Crabb]

Don,

Thanks for spotting that in the previous draft.

 

The sequential number for the LHS, bottom row, green F should be 13 not 25. This provides the reversal for the LHS middle row green F.

 

Please see this revised Draft,

 

 

 

Hopefully, it will be realised that comprehensive Anglo layouts can be quite difficult to construct, especially when one considers the number of variations in button number, home keys and preferred allocation of notes one may be required to make.

 

 

Gary,

being primarily a maker, I can't really give a definitive answer to your query re: 11 & 12 (13 see above), I will have to leave that to the experienced exponents of the 40 button.

The draft layout, is typically based on that most popularly requested of Crabb Concertinas.

 

Geoffrey

[hjcjones]

Geoff, that's a great diagram, but nothing like my Crabb 40-key!