Recommended Song Books for English Concertina

[Isaiah]

Hello!

I'm finishing up the tutor that came with my instrument (Jackie english concertina), and getting comfortable playing mostly everything in it. At this point, I'd like to have another book of tunes to work through to practice sight reading and continue stretching my performing muscles. Does anyone have any good recomendations? As far as I can tell most of the books listed in the pinned post are either intended as tutors from a beginner standpoint or are in Anglo tabs. The genre doesn't particularly matter, but a book of Irish session toons would be good as I am interested in learning a variety of them. It doesn't necessarily have to be a concertina book either, but I want something where most tunes are immediately playable on an english concertina (ie primarily melody focused, mostly in the octaves my english can reach, G below middle C to the second C above middle C).

Thanks all!

[Johanna]

Paul Hardy's tunebooks are great (and are free to download): https://pghardy.net/tunebooks/

 

If you're interested in Irish session tunes in particular, go to thesession.org, sort the tunes by popularity (https://thesession.org/tunes/popular), and start working through them.  That will keep you busy for several lifetimes.  Or go to the session nearest you, note the tunes that people there like to play (you can use https://folkfriend.app/ to get the names, or just ask people), and learn those ones.

 

The vast, vast majority of popular session tunes are in a Jackie-friendly range (G below middle C to second B above middle C), because that's the range that can be played on a fiddle in first position.  

 

And some unsolicited advice: Sight reading is a good skill to have, but an even better one is the ability to learn tunes by ear.  Take a recording you like, and try to mimic the tune without looking it up.  The way I do this is to break it down phrase by phrase (modern media players make it easy to listen to a phrase over and over again, and there are apps that will slow down the recording if it's too fast) until I can sing each phrase back, and then try to play what I'm singing on the concertina.  I don't do this for every new tune I learn, but it's very much worth knowing how to do it.

[Turtle]

Hey Isaiah. The International Concertina Association has pdf scans of the Hayman Concertina Book for free on their website. They have scans of "part 1" and "part 2". I recommend part two: [link].

 

It's a pretty big book, and you'll likely want to skip to page 30 (pp. 1-29 are concertina & piano scores). There are many fun little pieces from page 30-on.

 

I'll attach part one as well, but I much prefer part two: [link]

 

I'm not sure how much you know about "theory", but it's good to recognize intervals of thirds, sixths, fifths, octaves, etc. in your pieces (the Hayman Book is dense with these). An understanding of intervals will help you create better music when you don't have pre-written notes.

 

Hope this helps.

[Isaiah]

Thanks all! Should have probably mentioned I played piano off and on for a number of years so I have a basic-intermediate knowledge of theory. Also, I'm specifically looking for sheet music to practice my sight reading. I can pretty comfortably pick up music by ear, and have transcribed pieces before , and while it is something I'm near constantly practicing (the reason I chose English was so I could play along with anything I happen to hear), I've very much been wanting to improve my sight reading since I think I prefer having sheet music to reference over memorizing music.

[Tiposx]

I use the Gary Coover books for Irish Session tunes. Standard notation is included.