Coover Anglo Concertina in Harmonic Style adapting for G/D

[Peter Turvey]

Have just bought a copy of Gary Coover's Anglo concertina in the harmonic style to further my understating of chord playing- My concertina is a G/D and the book is written with a C/G in mind. 

 

Are there abc notation versions of the tunes as written in the book anywhere, to save me having to create my own abc files to transpose.

 

Or am I missing a trick here?

[Steve Schulteis]

I'm not aware of any preexisting transposed notation. Maybe somebody else is, though.

 

I play G/D now, and I started out with the same book, but playing a C/G at the time. When I switched, I retrained to read music for the G/D.

 

There are a few options, depending on your goals:

 

If you're not concerned with reading standard music notation, you could just play from the tablature. These days, that's mostly what I do for harmonic arrangements from Gary's books and that others share online. I still read standard notation for melody-only pieces and my own arrangements, especially when playing with others.

 

If you're not concerned with playing sheet music in the key written (e.g. when playing with others), you could read the notation as written for C/G, treating the G/D as a transposing instrument, similar to Bb trumpet versus C trumpet. Ironically, this is actually how I treat the C/G now, when I go back to it.

 

You could try using some kind of OCR software to automatically convert the music to a format that's easy to automatically transpose. I don't have any experience with such software, but it's been discussed on this forum in the past.

 

If you do manual entry, I'd copy it down in the original key first, to make it faster (and easier to check for errors). Then let software do the transposing. I like https://www.mandolintab.net/abcconverter.php for that, but I also use MuseScore a lot.

[xgx]

Just tried https://www.mandolintab.net/abcconverter.php and it says 'unauthorised' ... anyone else had the same difficulty in using it?

[Steve Schulteis]

9 minutes ago, xgx said:

Just tried https://www.mandolintab.net/abcconverter.php and it says 'unauthorised' ... anyone else had the same difficulty in using it?

 

Hmm, I'm seeing the same thing. It's been a bit since I've used it; it's a shame if it doesn't work anymore.

[Peter Turvey]

Steve, thank you for your suggestions, have had a go at playing from the tablature and treating the G/D as a transposing instrument (my knowledge of music theory is rather limited, I think this is the correct description),  which works quite well. Since I am  trying to learn more chord patterns and how they fit in with  tunes, this  is really helpful.

[Steve Schulteis]

You can use the circle of fifths to figure out which chords you're actually playing. To translate, find the chord that's written, and move one step around the circle in the same direction as C to G. So C chords become G chords, G becomes D, Am becomes Em, and so on.

 

I also find it helpful to think about chords relative to the current key.

 

Gary's books are a great place to start. I still make heavy use of the basic chord finger patterns found there. There are only so many ways to play a G chord on the left hand, and some are clearly better defaults than others. But eventually, it is worthwhile to sit down with a button diagram (or the fabulous anglopiano.com by @Luke Hillman) and work out different options yourself.