Playing The Concertina

[Susanne]

I wonder if there is something I should think of when learning to play the concertina, I've been playing a couple of months now, I can play both by sheet music and by ear but I haven't concentrated enough yet to learn certain tunes well, but I'm planning to do that so I can bring my concertina to the jam events (spelmansstämmor) this summer. Should I use the same kind of phrasings as on the fiddle? What should I think of to play well rhythmically?

Any hints are welcome. I don't know anyone nearby who knows the concertina so I have noone to teach me, hopefully I can go down to Skåne during the spring but I'm quite busy right now. There are lots of accordion players around but they seldom play polskor, Irish tunes, etc. I've tried to listen to some concertina music off the recorded links page, but there are so much ornamentation that I can't do yet, so it's hard to hear the simple melody and how I should be playing. Or is it just to play around and find my own thing?

[Mark Evans]

Or is it just to play around and find my own thing?

 

Disclaimer right from the start: I don't follow rules very well, so anything offered is suspect.

 

As I remember, your mandolin playing is very rythmically sound. Think of the way you would present an Irish tune on the mandolin. What can it hurt? Don't worry about the ornaments. They come with time and are a mine field with other players anyway.

 

With singing I often think of my voice as another instrument, sometimes a cello and once as a waldhorn. I took it so far as to vocalize an aria from Don Giovanni that was giving a lot of trouble by imitating the horn's sound. The phrasing I was looking for revealed itself as if by magic. My lips were kinda numb for awhile .

Edited February 9, 2006 by Mark Evans

[JimLucas]

I don't follow rules very well, so anything offered is suspect.

No, no! Rules are suspect!

[Henrik Müller]

... Should I use the same kind of phrasings as on the fiddle? What should I think of to play well rhythmically?...

Since you play the fiddle and the English concertina , consider this:

 

Your bellows is your bow - not only air supply - IMHO, it's the only chance to get colour and even rhytmic feel out the thing.

 

Attached is an example that illustrates this very well: a small movie of one (quarter) note, picked out from one of my own audio files of the tiny Stagi. Vertical is the volume of the sound, horizontally is time. Be sure that your computer's sound is turned up.

 

Not only volume changes, of course, but also colour - overtones, harmonics, but that's another movie, probably overkill, unless someone out there insists

 

 

A word of warning here- I haven't tried to attach movies before and when I downloaded it (right-click (Win), control-click (Mac), I get the file but with an extra file extension - so it looks like this: "BellowsDynamics.wmv.avi".

 

Now, that's rubbish - simply remove the last ".avi", leaving only .wmv, and Bob's (whoever he is) your uncle...

(Available in QuickTime too, should somebody want that).

 

/Henrik

[Samantha]

I am working on a tune which our local fiddlers play, and I asked one of them whether they change bow direction at certain points in the tune as I wish to emulate their way of playing. (Even though I play Anglo it is still possible to remove altogether, or simply smooth out the bellows changes, and work some in, in order to shape the tune). So I think you could do well to think of your bellows as you would your bow, if you are a fiddle, too.

Samantha

[Larry Stout]

As a fiddler who also plays EC I'd say that the bow-bellows analogy isn't completely accurate. The bow and the bellows both provided the nuance of volume and the shape to the individual notes. On a fiddle playing staccato is a bowing issue; on the EC it is a fingering issue. Bowing in traditional fiddling has many more changes of direction than you would want on an EC. I think that breath control for a singer and bellows control on concertina also have a lot in common, particularly for long legato phrases.

 

Larry

[JimLucas]

As a fiddler who also plays EC I'd say that the bow-bellows analogy isn't ompletely accurate. The bow and the bellows both provided the nuance of volume and the shape to the individual notes. On a fiddle playing staccato is a bowing issue; on the EC it is a fingering issue. Bowing in traditional fiddling has many more changes of direction than you would want on an EC. I think that breath control for a singer and bellows control on concertina also have a lot in common, particularly for long legato phrases.

True. Some effects are parallel; some are not. On an English or duet concertina bellows reversals can be used to separate notes and provide emphsasis as on a fiddle, but few players use their bellows that way. Or should I say "to that extent"?

 

On a concertina one can use the fingers to separate notes in a way that's not possible on a violin. I.e., on a concertina, lifting a finger stops the note; on a violin it only changes the note, only the bow can be used to stop the note. So concertina players use their fingers for things like this because they can, and neglect bellows reversals because they can.

[RatFace]

On an English or duet concertina bellows reversals can be used to separate notes and provide emphsasis as on a fiddle, but few players use their bellows that way. Or should I say "to that extent"?

 

When I saw Rob Harbron a while back he was using quite a lot of bellow changes - in some ways like you might use bowing for certain kind of phrasing/emphasis (certainly not the same, but similar ideas behind it). Also, he was playing with the bellows mostly not wide open and not nearly closed (mostly in the middle third, though if anything more closed than open). Two reasons for this (1) it's easier to control the bellow direction change when they're not wide open, especially if you hold the concertina as he does (and I do) - on your leg and fanning the bellows to open the top much more than the bottom [*see below] (2) he can - i.e. he's practiced keeping control during the bellows direction change, unlike most people who see it as an unwelcome practical necessity that gets put off for as long as possible.

 

*which, in my opinion as a bellows control-freak, is by far the best way to control the bellows.