Song Accompaniment On English

[Daniel Hersh]

The following exchange on song accompaniment on Anglo led to a similar question (below) from Trilby, who plays English. As an Anglo player I didn't feel that I could help much. Are there English players out there who would like to respond to Trilby?

 

Can any body recommend any resources for how to approach song accompaniment on an Anglo?

 

- W

Here's one way to approach this:

 

You can start this from a couple of different places: harmony to go with the vocal melody, or chordal accompaniment to the melody.

 

First, harmony...when I started singing with the Anglo (a very long time ago) I began with songs played on my concertina's home keys, primarily in C in my case because it matched my vocal range better than G. I would first work out the melody on the concertina and play in unison with my singing. Then I would add a harmony on the concertina by playing the next button on the same row, either higher or lower. This generally gave me a tolerable harmony to go with the melody, usually a third above or below the melody. If something really didn't sound right I'd look for a different harmony button to play. Initially I would play both the melody and harmony on the concertina, then for variety I would play only the harmony on the concertina while singing the melody. My next step was to expand on this by playing more complex harmonies by adding more harmony buttons from the same row. Then, as I got better at cross-row playing, I started pulling harmony notes from the other rows, which gave me many more harmonic options.

 

This is still where I tend to start when working out a song accompaniment on Anglo. But I eventually realized that I could also take a very different approach, starting with chords rather than harmonies. I figured out where the chords were on the concertina and would play chords to accompany my singing, in an "oom-pah" style or just playing two or three notes from the chord or using various other chordal possiblilities. Now on my most fully worked-out arrangements I'll often use both approaches, sometimes alternating between a harmonic approach for one verse of the song and a chordal one for the next.

 

Something else that I'll do that combines both approaches is, on a long note in the melody, play the melody note on the first beat and then, while still holding down that button, playing a quick chord on the next beat. Another idea along the same lines is if a few consecutive notes of the melody form a chord, I'll just play the melody but hold each button down while adding the next one, "constructing" the chord on the concertina while playing only melody notes

 

I also sometimes add variety by changing octaves.

 

I'm sure there are other, very different ways of looking at song accompaniment on Anglo, but this has worked well for me.

 

Daniel

I've found some of what you said very interesting Daniel. I play English and am beginning to try to "flesh out" my playing, though not with too much success at the moment. Any tips ?

I've been thinking about your question, and I don't think that I have anything to offer an English player beyond what I said in my earlier post--and I don't know how much of that would apply to an English. I've heard some great song accompaniment on English--Louis Killen comes to mind, and Riggy Rackin here in California--but since I don't play English myself I don't fully understand what they're doing or why they take the approaches that they do.

 

I'm going to start a new thread to see if any of the English players on c.net want to chime in on this.

 

Daniel