How do you set about making an arrangement?

[Don Taylor]

I messaged Gary Coover this question as he seems to be able to create arrangements by the truck load!

 

With Gary's permission, this is what he told me:

 

Hi Don,

A very timely question, especially since I am in the midst of trying to adapt a couple of tunes by Japanese rock band SCANDAL to the Anglo - a daunting task to be sure! 

 

 

 

I suppose the first thing is to find the key that will best fit the chords available on the Anglo depending on direction. "Shunkan Sentimental" is in F#m - not so good for C/G Anglo, but taken down to Em it fits much better ("Amazing Slow Downer" to the rescue). So figuring out the chords (sometimes by finding them online and transposing) is perhaps first, and then seeing if the melody works with those chords. If the melody note is only on the push and the only notes of the chord are on the pull, then it's time to get creative and only play some of the notes, or in rare cases play the chord on the off-beat.

 

Regarding chords, as we all know, playing too many notes at once in the left hand can easily drown out the melody, so it's often a matter of leaving some of the notes out (often the third) or playing staccato or arpeggiated (is that a word?). Sometimes even just one note works just fine. How do determine? Experimentation! Sometimes for overall sound, sometimes for variations. I do a lot of "hunt and peck" trying to find surrounding notes that might work. I don't know the musical theory, but my ear will tell me if it sounds ok or not. And luckily for Anglo, the choices are relatively limited due to direction and what you can actually reach. 

 

So I suppose I start from full chords and pare it down from there for most tunes in the harmonic style. But for others, maybe I just feel like parallel thirds sound better, or octaves, or whatever stray notes my fingers hit by accident and my ear says "hey that sounds good". Sometimes I do variations just to keep it from sounding boring.

 

"Shunkan Sentimental" is still probably a couple of months out for me, but I think SCANDAL's "Koe" (in F) is getting close to posting on YouTube. 

 

One thing I love about the Anglo is that everybody plays it differently, so there are lots of different approaches and styles to learn from. It's also fun to see if non-Anglo tunes like the SCANDAL songs, or like Queen's "Love of My Life", can be made to work and still sound presentable. 

 

Happy to take all this onto cnet - I'd be curious to see where the discussion goes!

 

Gary

 

 

[Mikefule]

That's interesting, thank you.  The Anglo is (as Keith Kendrick describes it) the "thinking man's piano" and should be capable of playing a wide variety of styles.  In reality, it seems to fit some much better than others.

 

I find it is usually fairly easy to come up with an interesting range of arrangements for tunes in a familiar style.  So, for example, it I play a Morris tune that remains in one key, I can usually develop an arrangement with 3 major chords and 2 or 3 minor chords and the occasional 7th, and with various "standard" bass figures that will fit very nicely.  It's just a matter of playing the tune lots of times and finding which of the "available solutions" sound best.  I've moved a long way from the 3 chord trick and "oom pah" in the tunes I know well.

 

However, outside of my Morris background, my first love in music is in that overlap between rockabilly, hillbilly, country, and blues.  I have listened to this sort of music for 40+ years and I have a fair repertoire of such songs  thatI can sing unaccompanied, but I struggle to put them onto the Anglo.

 

In theory, country music is only "three chords and the truth".  Much of the music I listen to is based on standard 12 bar or 8 bar blues patterns.  Yet, somehow, I consistently struggle to find a concertina arrangement that conveys the feel of the music.

 

Strangely, I find myself drawn into alternative fingerings of the melody, often with whole phrases in one bellows direction but the "left hand" alway sounds clunky or sparse.