What an odd way to play that!

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

It has often been commented upon my own very individual way of holding my own concertina ( hardly at all.. loosely in fingers). And with my whole hands inside the leather straps.. very daring and odd .. and unusual(😊)!

I wonder if anyone else has a particular, very individual method of playing instrument, that they also employ?

It doesn' t bother me as long as I can play my tunes, but is commented upon by others, now and again.. So be daring, and let everyone know if you or someone you know has most unusual way of performing, it will be interesting to compare( said with humour, please understand)!😊

Edited May 15, 2023 by SIMON GABRIELOW

[Richard Mellish]

I try to minimise what John Vernon described as "Anglo player's shake", i.e. lots of bellows reversals, by using alternative buttons. There is much more scope for this on a 40-key (or, I suppose, on a Jeffries 38-key, of which I have no experience) than on a 30-key. I do this partly for more legato and partly out of simple cussedness. People who see me play sometimes think I am playing a Duet. I should mention that I regard this as a matter of personal preference, not a matter of right and wrong.

[wunks]

I play with much weirdness, Including left hand fully inside the strap and using thumbs to engage the bottom row of my Jeff duets.  I've had one re-tuned to D core and introduced some bi-sonorics all with fabulous results ( and completely reversible ).  I've experimented with flipping the box end for end ( which works surprisingly well ) for a different effect....😊

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

 

4 hours ago, wunks said:

I play with much weirdness, Including left hand fully inside the strap and using thumbs to engage the bottom row of my Jeff duets.  I've had one re-tuned to D core and introduced some bi-sonorics all with fabulous results ( and completely reversible ).  I've experimented with flipping the box end for end ( which works surprisingly well ) for a different effect....😊

Oh, at last there's someone else that put their whole hand inside the straps! It's good to be daring, and different!😊😊

[richard]

Hi

 

It's interesting to hear of different manners or approaches of holding and managing your instruments. 

 

I'd like to hear the benefits and advantages you get from your particular way of playing and/or choices, how it helps or solves some issue that was an obstacle. 

 

Richard 

[Alan Day]

I will repeat an old posting of mine, that one of the ladies at one of my playing workshops ,I noticed ,was playing the concertina back to front . She had been doing this for about two years and wondered what the air button was for on her left hand.

[Stephen Chambers]

1 hour ago, Alan Day said:

... one of the ladies at one of my playing workshops ,I noticed ,was playing the concertina back to front ...

 

And I've mentioned before that my late friend the Irish button accordion player Paddy Hayes used to play the concertina upside-down, because it made more sense to him that way, and did so so-convincingly that even won the title of All-Ireland Concertina Champion one year...

 

https://www.facebook.com/ciarank1/videos/10154559823379125

[David Barnert]

@SimonThoumire has a unique way of holding the EC, using only the thumb straps (ignoring the finger rests) so that the long rows of buttons align perpendicular to the axis of the fingers, rather than parallel to it.

 

 

 

It is possible to play the Hayden duet concertina upside-down (the right and left layouts are the same except for the octave), but although I’ve toyed with it once or twice I don’t find it useful.

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

As I started this particular topic this time; I will say, I only know that I have always put my hands completely inside straps.. the main benefit is that I do not have to keep fiddling about with adjusting the buckle on the leather strap itself ( it gets left as it is) very slack and gives greater movement for the hands anyway, so is more relaxing.

[Łukasz Martynowicz]

Well, I’ve designed unique handles  if that counts. The benefit is decoupling the wrist while retaining bellows control, and anchoring the hand firmly, so I don’t get lost on 66b Hayden. I never got along with hand straps, as I have really long fingers.

[wunks]

13 hours ago, richard said:

Hi

 

It's interesting to hear of different manners or approaches of holding and managing your instruments. 

 

I'd like to hear the benefits and advantages you get from your particular way of playing and/or choices, how it helps or solves some issue that was an obstacle. 

 

Richard 

1. Left hand through the strap solves an achy wrist (for me) and allows for a floating hand and a prehensile thumb, essential because....

2. I can play a bass line ( sparse ), chords ( spare ) and melody through the overlap zone on the LH, effective because....

3. The 50 button  ( at 6 1/4" AtF) Jeff duet reaches down into the Cello range and is chromatic through the Viola and Fiddle range, efficient because....

4. A Jeffries stroke of genius was to include the Bb ( for a C core instrument ) in the two rows of the C scale allowing for easy fingering in C, F, Bb, and G, Eureka!,  because....

5,  Converting to D gives me D, G, C and A.  The most common keys for the music I play....😁

[Roger Hare]

22 hours ago, Stephen Chambers said:

...play the concertina upside-down...

I hold the concertina in the 'conventional' way, and am not planning to change, but I've been here before.

 

If I hold my concertina upside-down, when I pass my hands through the straps, the buttons are covered by the heel/palm of my hands, and my fingers are waving about in inter-galactic space, with no accessible buttons to press. Could some-one please explain what is meant by 'upside-down' in this context.

 

Thank you.

__________________________

Note - there are of course, two ways of turning a concertina upside down...

[Roger Hare]

On 5/19/2023 at 8:54 AM, Alan Day said:

I will repeat an old posting of mine, that one of the ladies at one of my playing workshops ,I noticed ,was playing the concertina back to front . She had been doing this for about two years and wondered what the air button was for on her left hand.

I stopped a bloke on the Reddit concertina forum doing exactly this about 12 months ago. He was wondering why all the books were wrong in describing the high notes as being on the right hand end of the instrument, and all the low notes on the left-hand end! 

 

He had worked out some way of using his left pinkie for the air button - he must have had double-jointed fingers! Fortunately, I got him when he was only a week into the journey, not two years...

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

1 hour ago, lachenal74693 said:

I stopped a bloke on the Reddit concertina forum doing exactly this about 12 months ago. He was wondering why all the books were wrong in describing the high notes as being on the right hand end of the instrument, and all the low notes on the left-hand end! 

 

He had worked out some way of using his left pinkie for the air button - he must have had double-jointed fingers! Fortunately, I got him when he was only a week into the journey, not two years...

The solution here could have been to use a mirror.. then he could see it nearly correct way around!😊

[Alan Day]

The sad thing was that after a couple of years she had worked out a way of playing the concertina reasonably well.

Al.

 

[David Barnert]

On 5/19/2023 at 3:54 AM, Alan Day said:

one of the ladies at one of my playing workshops ,I noticed ,was playing the concertina back to front

On 5/19/2023 at 5:33 AM, Stephen Chambers said:

Paddy Hayes used to play the concertina upside-down

4 hours ago, lachenal74693 said:

If I hold my concertina upside-down, when I pass my hands through the straps, the buttons are covered by the heel/palm of my hands, and my fingers are waving about in inter-galactic space, with no accessible buttons to press. Could some-one please explain what is meant by 'upside-down' in this context.

 

I think we’re all talking about the same thing, here. Concertina rotated from normal by 180° about the forward/back axis, so that the left end is on the right, the right end is on the left, the top on the bottom and the bottom on top. The keys remain on the side of the handrail furthest from the body. No mirror reflections involved.

[Roger Hare]

7 hours ago, David Barnert said:

I think we’re all talking about the same thing, here...

 

I think that's right. I think of this sort of thing in terms of a 3-dimensional Cartesian co-ordinate system, but it depends which axes you label X, Y, or Z. One way, rotating about the X and Y axes turns the thing 'upside down' in two ways which are both unplayable. Another way turns the thing 'upside down', also in two different ways - but one of which is (arguably) playable.

 

Personally, I'm a little uneasy about a situation in which 'upside down' and 'back to front' mean the same thing - but I guess that's just me...

 

Thank you for clarifying that point - I thought I had finally lost the plot - it really didn't occur to me that folks might be using different terms to mean the same thing...

 

Edited May 20, 2023 by lachenal74693

[David Barnert]

22 hours ago, lachenal74693 said:

I think of this sort of thing in terms of a 3-dimensional Cartesian co-ordinate system...

 

I was a biophysics major in college, so I’m well-acquainted with the 3-dimensional Cartesian co-ordinate system, but I was trying to avoid that kind of terminology.

 

Yes, if you consider any real object with respect to three orthogonal axes, reversing any one of the axes gives you a mirror image. Unless the object is symmetrical this is inconsistent with reality. Reversing a 2nd one brings you back to reality. So unless we’re contemplating turning the concertina inside-out, or otherwise making a mirror image out of it, we have to reverse an even number of axes. In this case, we’re reversing up/down and left/right while leaving front/back intact (the keys remain under the fingers).

 

A classic puzzle/question about this goes: A mirror reverses right and left, why doesn’t it also reverse up and down? The answer is that a mirror doesn’t reverse right and left, it reverses front and back. But we’re vertically oriented beings, subjected to vertically oriented gravity, and when we look at something reversed back-to-front we instinctively turn it around in our heads about a vertical axis, swapping right/left and back/front in the process, leaving us with right-left reversal. It would never occur to us to turn it about a horizontal axis, swapping up/down and back/front in the process, leaving us with up-down reversal.