Chords for My New Gear4Music Anglo Concertina

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_ [Ab] _ While I was just going to_
[D] _
_ _ [Em] _ _ [E] Okay, okay.
_ [F] _ _ A new year and a new instrument to show you.
If you follow me on Instagram, you might have already heard me play my first wobbly tune
on this _ concertina.
_ Recently, I've been thinking that I would like an instrument that can provide a sort
of driving rhythm to the pieces of music I put [Gb] together on my recorder and with other [F] instruments.
And hopefully, that is something a concertina can provide once I learn how to play it. _ _ _
_ _ _ I knew nothing about concertinas until a couple of weeks ago when I started researching them,
and I definitely didn't know how much they can cost.
An entry-level basic beginner's model can set you back around about £400, and they
only go up from there.
Of course, our old friend Amazon does have some cheaper alternatives at around [Eb] £160.
But I couldn't find anybody with a good word to [D] say about them.
Apparently, they have leaky bellows and are badly tuned and are difficult to play.
So I decided to steer clear of those.
[Eb] _
_ _ For a while, I did consider buying myself an antique concertina.
Concertinas were invented in the 1820s, and throughout the 1800s, they were produced by
the tens of thousands, some of them to a high enough standard to make them still playable today.
I found a beautiful-looking concertina that dated from 1860, and I think it was about £140.
I came this close to buying it, but then I realised that concert pitch wasn't standardised
in the 1860s.
So the concertina might well be [F] fine if I just wanted to play it by itself, but I don't
want to add it to other instruments and it would have just sounded out of tune.
So then I would have had to have found a concertina workshop, had it retuned, serviced, any little
wearable parts replaced and brought up to date, and all that, it turns out, would have
cost several hundred pounds.
So I was back to square one.
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I thought I was going to have to give up on the idea of a concertina.
They were just too much money.
But then I realised there was one place I hadn't tried but never let me down.
Gear for Music has a huge online catalogue of all different musical instruments of different
levels and for different budgets.
And one of the things they do is to produce all different instruments under their own
brand name, and they're meant to be more affordable, entry-level budget instruments.
And that was the case with this concertina.
This is Gear for Music's own brand.
I couldn't find a tonne of reviews about it, but the ones I did find were generally positive.
Apparently the instrument is well-tuned and reliable enough for a beginner to get started [D] on.
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[Eb] So I went ahead.
I got mine in the clearance sale thingy, but I think I'm right in saying that when these
aren't on sale, they still cost over £200, which isn't an inconsiderable amount of money.
So we'd better [E] have a closer look at it.
_ Looks-wise, I don't think it's too bad.
It's certainly a bit better than I was expecting, anyway.
Sure, it isn't in the same league as a beautiful handmade wooden instrument to look at, but
it's not too bad.
It's got a kind of rough-and-ready charm to it.
The bellows maybe feel a little bit stiff when you're pushing them in and out, but I've
got nothing to compare it to.
This is my first concertina, and maybe the bellows will soften up with playing anyway.
The straps are leather and they feel really soft and comfortable.
They're also adjustable, [Eb] _ dependent on the size of your hands.
_ There are several different types of concertina floating about.
This particular one is an Anglo concertina.
The Anglo system means that each one of these buttons will give you two different notes,
depending on whether you are pushing or [Cm] drawing the bellows. _ _ _
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And I [C] think that's going to take me some time to wrap my head around when I'm trying to play.
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_ _ _ [Eb] There are also a few different examples of Anglo concertina.
They start out with just 10 buttons, so you would have just one row of buttons, five buttons
on each side of the concertina, and they generally play in a C major scale.
Next up, there are 20-button Anglo concertinas, which would give you a C major row and a G major row.
And then there are these 30-button Anglo concertinas, which gives you the C row, the G row, and
then this top row is all accidentals, flats and sharps, to technically allow you to play
in any key.
How a concertina layout works is that you have your lower notes on the left-hand side
and the higher notes _ on the right _ -hand side.
Down here we have the lowest note, _ [C] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [Gb] _ and up here we have the highest.
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If you want to play chords, you need to press down more than one button.
There's no way to make one button play a chord like they might be on an accordion.
That _
[Dm] _ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ _
_ [Ab] _ _ means you can play [Eb] melodies across both hands, or you could do a sort of bass rhythmic
accompaniment on your left hand with the melody in the right.
I can't show you any of that because I don't know how to play it yet.
But I have started.
This arrived on the 28th of December.
It is now the 3rd of January, so I've only had it for a few days, and during those few
days I have not managed to grab much time at all to practice it.
I've had the odd 5 or 10 minutes here and there.
But I have managed to learn just one-note melodies at the minute.
There's Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Frère Jacques and Oh Susanna.
I should have also mentioned that as well as the 30 buttons for playing notes, there
is also this extra one button here, controlled by the right-hand thumb.
And that's an air valve.
Any time you open or close the bellows without playing a note, you must use the air valve,
otherwise you'll break your bellows, and nobody wants that.
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[D] _ _ _ _ [Em] _ _ _ _
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_ _ _ I also [F] learnt the same tune in my right hand.
Because of the weird pattern of the push and pull sing to get the different notes from
the concertina, it means that you have to use an extra button to play it in your right-hand
side an octave up.
_ You only need to use three buttons for Oh Susanna on your left hand.
It's a great beginner's song, but it's four buttons and a slightly different fingering
pattern for your right-hand [D] side. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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_ Eventually, I would like of course to be able to play chords and things in one hand and
the melody in the other, but we're not there yet.
But I'll keep you updated with_ _ _ _
_ _ _ [G] _ _ _ _ _
[C] _ _ _ _ [N] _ _ Anyway, I thought I would just give you a quick introduction to the newest member of
my musical instrument family.
I'm really, really excited about this one.
I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into learning it.
And I will of course keep you updated on my progress, as well as the progress of the instrument.
How will it hold out over time?
We shall see.
Thank you so much for watching [G] and I'll see you again next time.
Bye! _ _ _ _ _ _
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