Anglo-Irishman

Interesting thread! Admitterdly, like @David Barnert, I played both ends of my duet (a Crane) straight away when I got it. Just one bass note for one treble note at first, but both my hands learned equally quickly (or slowly), so eventually I was playing - well - duets on it! But the thought occurred to me that the Anglo already has what you're thinking of for the duets: an instrument with the same note layout, but only half the notes of the original. It's readily available (has been for over a century!) and it's definitely not a niche instrument. I mean the harmonica, mouth organ or blues harp, whatever you like to call it. The notes on a simple, 10-hole harmonica are the same as the notes on one row (across both hands) of an Anglo in the same key. So if you can play a harmonised tune on the harmonica, you can easily transfer the skill to along-the-row Anglo playing. As a child, I got to play my Dad's harmonicas, so when, as a teenager, I got an East German 20-button, my progress was rapid. Playing Dad's old Hohner Echo Harp in C/G even gave me the feeling for when to change rows on the Anglo! Of course, the harmonica is not merely a training device for the Anglo Concertina - it is a well-established musical instrument in its own right, and even indispensable in some genres of music. Cheers, John

What a wonderful collection of old favourites! The title reminds me of my very first public "gig" with the concertina. I must have been around 18 at the time, and when our church Youth Fellowship went to North Donegal for a summer camp, I took my recently acquired, 20-button, GDR-built Anglo with me. On the Sunday, our group got to lead the service in a small Presbyterrian church in the next village. And guess who was the "organist" - me! My concertina was introduced as a "mini-organ." A Scottish metrical psalm and a few Victorian hymns were required - great fun! My favourite spiritual tunes at present are Crimond (to which the Scottish metrical Psalm 23, The Lord's my shepherd" is usually sung), By cool Siloam's shady rill, and Guide me O thou great Jehovah. I must try some of the tunes in the book! Cheers, John

Hmmm.. As a folkie, I find that the only place where chord charts are any use in in the practice room. By the time you get the piece on stage, either you have the chords off by memory, or you know the tune so well that you can improvise the chords. With classical musicians, it's different. In my church choir, singing Bach, Mozart or Mendelssohn, I'm in "classical" mode, and need my reading glasses to know where I am and what comes next. Cheers, john

I'm afraid I can't just leave that accusation unanswered, @Lakeland Fiddler! The person in the music shop was simply passing on a piece of information that is universally accepted in the free-reed world. I personally learnt the mouth organ as a small boy from my father, and later inherited his harmonica, a Hohner Echo Harp in C/G, which I played frequently, if only for my own amusement. When I later acquired a 20-button Anglo - intending to work diligetly and come to grips wth the apparently abstruse arrangement of notes - I was pleasantly surprised that I could play the scales up and down both rows before I had even read the introduction of the instruction manual! I don't know how long you've been playing the harmonica, but you say you're just a week into Anglo. You may yet get that "Eureka!" moment. The common feature is the Richter scale (blow, suck, blow, suck, blow, suck, suck, blow), which is the most effective way of arranging the diatonioc scale on a bisonoric instrument. You'll find it on Bandoneons and melodions, too. Cheers, John

Hallo, b13, No, you're definitely not the only other Bandoneon player who doesn't play tango music! But you and I may be the only ones left on CNet. As Jim Lucas pointed out back in 2008, Bandoneonistas - tango or not - are more likely to meet in a Bandoneon forum. I'm here because my main free-reed instrument is the Anglo concertina. My Bandoneon is just a side-line. Back in the early 1970s, my first concertina, a Klingenthal 20-button, had gone out of tune. Then, on a trip to West Berlin, I saw an interesting old button-box in a junk-shop window. I picked it up, and discovered that the buttons in the middle of the keyboards reacted very like the 20 buttons on my Klingenthal. So I bought it (for 60 DM, if I recall correctly!) I soon found that I could play my whole Anglo repertoire on it (in the keys or A or E rather than C or G), and that the combination of the G and A rows could be quite useful in some situations. It was only later that I learned that it is a 104-Tone Bandoneon! It's not exactly a typical Bndoneon. It is smaller than usual, just 20 x 18 cm. And it has only one pair of reeds per button, so the familiar "dry-octave" sound is not there. Harry Geuns dated it to around 1900, but it's still very much "in tune with itself", although it is tuned to A=435Hz. Because of the tuning, I can't play my Bandoneon in groups, so I play it mostly for my own enjoyment. I'm not good enough on it to play solo, and I now have a good Anglo for group work. My playing style is very much like Anglo harmonic style, and my repertoire is mainly British song tunes. I've heard that Herr Band developed his instrument for small evangelical congregations that couldn't afford harmoniums, and accordingly, I have a couple of Welsh hymn tunes and Scottish Psalm tunes. My only public appearance as a Bandeonista was at my son's Confirmation service, where I played a selection of hymn and Psalm tunes during the laying-on of hands. The Bandoneon can sound really sacred! Grüße aus Schwaben nach Franken, Cheers, John

I haven't lived in Northern Ireland for more than 50 years. Before leaving, I even "walked" on one "Twel'th" as a tenor drummer in a pipe band! I remember the pipe bands, the brass bands, the flute bands, the accordeon bands, the military bands and, of course, the Lambeg Drums with their accompanying fluters. But I have no recollection of concertinas in this context. 50 years is a long time - things may have changed. Cheers, John

I have a Stagi, which is also Italian, and similar in construction. It has been a reliable instrumet for over 20 years of public playing. However, it has a quirk - the buttons can slip on the levers that control the pads, and when the bottom end of a button thus gets out of alignment, it sticks in its hole. Not all buttons stick. It depends on whether you press them down straight, or hit them obliquely. But after playing for a while, it can happen that you put a button out of alignment. So what I do (and have done for over 20 years) is to give the buttons a quick visual check whenever I take up my concertina, and if any buttons look even slightly doubtful, pull them in the direction that straightens them (this is the opposite to the direction in which I push them while playing.) I've found that just the one check-and-pull keeps me right for a whole evening's playing. No tools, no dismantling required! Cheers, John

An interesting project, @mendipman - especialy for me, because the 5-string banjo and the Anglo concertina are my main instruments! Admittedly, my Anglos are both "modern," and my two zither-banjos - a J.E. Dallas and a Windsor - are both Edwardian, rather than Victorian. And their low strings are nylon, not gut or silk. I do, however, enjoy playing Victorian music on them, such as arrangements of Thomas Moore songs. My only concertina-style instrument that is in historical tuning is my Bandoneon, which an expert dated to around 1900. Being a German instrument, it is of course below modern concert pitch, at A=435Hz, which was customary in Germany at that time. This set me thinking about pitches and concertinas. If I recall my history correctly, England was flooded with cheap German 20-button bisonoric concertinas in the mid-19th century. It was their popularity that gave rise to the development by English makers of the "Anglo-German" concertina: English build, German button arrangement. Which raises the question: Were these imported German concertinas in Continental or British concert pitch? Did it often happen that a Victorian English banjoist had to tune his instrument down to play a duet with a friend who had "one of those new-fangled foreign things?" Just wondering! Keep us posted on developments! Cheers, John

I've found this to work for me. One aspect of it is that if you write one syllable per note, then when you've "recited" your lyric in your head, you've played all the notes in the tune. Another aspect is expression. if you build up your fake lyrics with statements, questions, emphatic replies, explanations and exclamations, you can let the phrasing, dynamics and tempo follow them. I suppose, when you folks talk about ITM you mean Irish jigs, reels, etc. Not much room for dynamics or tempo there! However, my idea of Irish instrumental music is Carolan compositions and the often beautiful tunes to well-known songs. When I play an instrumental version of a song, of course the lyrics are already there, making my playing tender, boisterous, sad or happy, as the case may be. With one Carolan piece, I experimented with a "fake" lyric. It's for "Eleanor Plunkett" - it's not great poetry, but it keeps me from just playing one note after the other: It's a lovely day today! (Positive assertion by voice 1) Do you think so? (Critical question from voice 2) Yes, I think so; it's a really lovely day. (Emphatic re-assertion by voice 1) If it weren't such a lovely day, there'd be clouds in the sky, (Long argument from voice 1 ...) And the little raindrops would keep on falling, (... argument continued ...) And I'd be so sad. (... culmination of argument) It's a really lovely day! (Final re-statementof positive assertion by voice 1) Works for me! As I said, not great poetry - but hey, some of the trad. lyrics to beautiful tunes are not that great either!😎 Cheers, John

I've been cycling since my primary-school days, and playing the concertina since my student days. I've never had pains anywhere from the concertina, and the only pains I get from cycling are in the ... part of my anatomy that has nothing to do with music. (I haven't found the perfect saddle yet!) In short, I've never found cycling to affect concertina (or banjo or mandolin) playing, or vice versa. But hey, I'm only 77 - maybe I'll get problems in my old age!😎 Cheers, John

We might be onto something here ... 😉 John

I suppose something like a set of small pipes - the ones with a bag and a bellows ..

As I see it, the concertina is a German one. The handstraps are parallel to the adjacent sides of the hexagon, not perpendicular to them, as in English-made Anglos. Cheers, John

Just a piece of info that might help you to get the Anglo into perspective with other instruments: Before I got my first Anglo, I'd had childhood piano lessons, and had been taught to play the mouth organ (AKA harmonica) by my Dad. When I bought the Anglo, together with the Tutor, which called it the "Anglo-Chromatic Concertina", I decided to relearn all that piano stuff with the sequence of sharps and flats in the various keys. But when I'd had the concertina for a couple of days, I realised that this was nonsense. All I had to do was think of the mouth organ, and equate bellows press and draw with harmonica blow and suck - and I was playing familiar tunes on the Anglo in no time at all! If you come to think about it, standard staff notation is specifically tabulature for the piano/organ keyboard. Cheers, John

Hmm ... I don't know how easy it would have been in those days to reverse the image on a celluloid film. And anyway, although the mirror image of a right-handed violinist and a right-handed violin would look as if both were left-handed, the mirror image of the grand piano would look distinctly odd! Cheers, John