Overdue updates, a new development, and generosity

Has it really been 5 days? How is that possible? Business!!!! I have had several really long work days and with the weather being unbelievably seasonally warm too, more 'blog time' has been spent outside too. But, it doesn't mean I've quit! Nope! I'm plugging away.

First, let me talk about practice and developments. Practice has been more sporadic as my time has been more sporadic, but they have been good practices with seeing improvements nearly every time I sit down to play. I have decided not to move on to the next section of the method book yet I decided to  just keep going back through the tunes and exercises I have already started so that they start to feel less strained and approach even their lento tempo on the recordings. It feels a bit less horrible - not good, but less like random notes being played on a page.

The new development actually has me almost giddy. There has been a lot of discussion on melnet about how to learn and how to play the melodeon. I totally get the thoughts and feelings on this too. The melodeon is a folk instrument. It's meant for dance and singing along and for a showing emotion.  It's a music to be felt deep in the soul to be "good" really. I've posted some really, heart felt, deeply felt - either in joy or sorrow pieces. The players might not be feeling sorrowful or joyous, but their music expresses it.

Like these two in an off the cuff moment. They play off each other and let the tunes evolve. It's just a joy to watch and listen to.

I didn't grow up in that tradition or learn music in that manner.Maybe there is just less of that overall in much of the US? (I grew up in a mostly rural-ish part of the country - but as an adult I've always lived in or near large cities). I learned in school, on a classical instrument and I was to strictly play what was on the written page and to follow the director for tempo, etc.

There was a jazz band at school, but the French Horn is not ever used in a jazz ensemble (though I did get to play on one piece and got to go to state as there was an arrangement for horn... but it was still all on paper.)

And I think I'm a German deep in my soul and to top that - a mid-westerner through in through in my behavior - don't let loose -follow the rules - don't show emotion. All scripted music.

So, that has been how I've been approaching picking up the melodeon because that's how I know how to approach music. People on Melnet tell me to noodle around on the box. That leads to nothing. The melnetters who grew up with hearing the music and experiencing this instrument as a folk instrument are probably dying inside or wanting to throttle me for wanting to make this folk music into a classical, strict, style of playing. I get that, but I cannot undo my nature or my more formal learning on an instrument (despite huge gaps in learning).  The notes on the page work for learning and introducing new tunes to my ear -hearing it and seeing it written out gets it in my head. BUT... I do have an inner voice that does want to break free. More on that in a minute.

Anyway, one of the five pieces I'm working on in the method book is a catchy tune. I found myself this morning humming it, but not as it's written on the page, but how my inner composer is feeling how it could be played. In my head, the basses compliment the melody - it's not in the traditional um pa steady rhythm, but instead are stressing certain tones and notes. Just now I thought of it again, and the tune in my head sounds differently with stresses elsewhere in the piece.

This is a huge development for me. I am feeling the music specifically for this melodeon and it's off the book. It feels heartfelt in my head. It sounds fun! Yay! Now, there is no way in hell I can play that tune that is running in my head as I stink at this instrument as a beginner, but I"m feeling it differently for pieces that "stick".

And that might be a problem for the one piece especially that is not working well at all. I don't hear that song in  my head - it's either not interesting or not natural sounding or something. And I've decided that if I don't particularly like a piece, I shouldn't play it or practice it! There will be other pieces that go over the same skills I can work on that I do like and do feel more natural and will therefore be more interesting and easier to learn.

So 'by the ear' learners. Take heart. I will break free from the page too - somewhat, in time, within my comfort zone.

And now, generosity and how it comes at a time when I need it.

I had a hard Sunday this past week. I don't like it when my work doesn't feel "good". Not so much for me, but my volunteers. I want their experience working with kids to feel good and to be rewarding and when it's not possible (usually do to too many kids at one time), I don't feel good about it. 

Monday was a really good day, but it was a very long day. I had hoped when I got home I could practice... this in itself in interesting. I wanted to practice. because even as horrible as it is to listen to myself right now, it is a stress reliever. I look forward to it. However, I got home at 10 pm. Read to my son before he went to bed, and then it was nearly 11 pm. Too late! I was feeling a bit deflated, but then I saw there was a package for me. A package from Wally from Minnesota, Walleye on Melnet, I discovered. He had sent me a book of tunes for the diatonic accordion. I even recognized most of the names that provided the tunes. I felt dumbfounded... another gift - just because. I did choose to play the melodeon because I found that the group on melnet were so generous with helping new people learn and that it was a true community built around the playing (and restoring) of melodeons, but I didn't expect this generosity of materials and I'm really touched and I can't wait to dive in more.

Then I checked my personal email and I had two messages - one for tracking info from the UK and a message from Steve Rouse who makes the Streb e-melodeon. It was a note saying he sent me an older, loaner e-melodeon just to test it out and to use as a silent melodeon. So on those 12 hour work days, I can practice at work too without bothering anyone for a midday break. I had put myself on a queue for buying a new instrument a week or so ago. The queue for these hand-made electric melodeons is 12-18 months long. That he is lending his older one to me, is breath-taking generosity from Steve. 

Honestly, there is so much generosity, I need a list:

1. Scott Bellinger - spent his time with me helping me choose an instrument.
2. Scott Bellinger allowed a like for like swap of CF Hohner Liliput accordions so I can get it faster.
3. Scott Bellinger threw in a soft-sided carry bag and free shipping to send the two instruments.
4. Sean sent me the Pignol and Milleret Method book - just needing to pay for shipping.
5. Playandteach has answered so many of my questions and even answered one by doing a tutorial on a skill just for me on a youtube video.
6. I was sent two books via Amazon from an anonymous person.
7. I was sent a wonderful tune book by Wally.
8. I am being sent a loaner e-melodeon by Steve where I just need to pay for shipping.

This has all happened in the last two months. That is incredible. I am a giving person - always have been, but I'm not used to being on the receiving end of such generosity. I'm deeply touched and I promise it won't go to waste.

A silent melodeon

I don't like being heard while I horribly work my way through anything right now. It sounds horrible to me. It has to sound mind numbing horrible to anyone else. I find that I don't play out at home if anyone else is around. I'm more tentative. and where and when I can play is also limited.

It's a bigger problem at work. I would use break at work to practice for 10 minutes, but not if I can be heard anywhere. I thought today I might be able to, but our front area is on 16th Street in DC - cars, pedestrians and windows on our building everywhere so I couldn't hide. The back area has picnic tables, but again, people! There are nursery centers that use the play area and even if they were inside, they have windows and could see me and, people park in the back to come inside too.

My office has a door, but no room is sound proof enough. I would drive my colleagues nuts or invite comments and the snickers behind my back. Who wouldn't? It's awful!

Sure, you can say, "get over it"! It's not going to happen. I don't want to be heard by strangers and colleagues for sure. Home it's fine if my husband hears it (he's being unbelievably supportive) and my son just goes to his room to block me out. This is only OK if someone's not watching a movie or my son isn't doing some learning for homeschooling.  I can't really go to another room or another level because besides this one room, all other rooms are adjacent, over, or under one of my mother-in-law rooms. I don't want to invite criticism or interest or questions from her either. I just want a space to feel safe and quiet, without needing to disappear and that is the large family room which is over the garage and not near anything else.

When my son was taking piano, we bought a Yamaha Clavinova. That piano is digital, but plays and feels like a piano - weighted keys, etc. My son could put on earphones, or tun the volume way down low when he was practicing.  It was great and the piano is not nearly as annoying to listen to as the accordion while practicing. Believe me! 

So I looked to see if there was such thing as a digital accordion. Getting a silent or near silent melodeon would allow me to increase practice time by a lot - maybe double. And right now, anything to get me past this horrid early beginner stage sounds fantastic!

Creating an instrument that can do this, in theory, sounds simple enough, but you still want it to play like a real accordion. Meaning, all parts moving and feeling relatively the same as if air were passing through the reeds. You would want to be able to control the volume by bellow movement, etc. If it doesn't have these features, it makes it harder to move back and forth from the digital to the traditional melodeon and I want to be able to do that. It's why we bought the Yamaha Clavinova 15 years ago. It plays like a piano in all respects - unlike an electronic keyboard. 

So, is there something like this? Yes. There are basically two options - the Roland FR-18 and the Streb e-melodeon.  There is sort of other options, but that involves building something myself - not going to happen. And there is the option of getting a box with no reeds (I guess just for practicing fingerings with bellow movement to get it coordinated well?), but without any sound at all, it wouldn't help me realize I'm doing something wrong with notes.

Just as I was thinking about all of this, a Roland FR-18 came available for a very reasonable price.

It's advantage is that it's midi, so you can wear headphones and be silent and it has a lot of voices. It's affordable-ish even new and you can then play in any key which has advantages to having more music easily available. But other than that, I cannot get jazzed by it. It's big, heavy, and you need an amp to play out if/when you want to play without headphones. But the worst for me, is that it sounds like the accordion you think of when you think of bad accordion music. It has other sounds too, but again... reminds me of just bad music. (my personal opinion, of course) The Roland piano accordion is what Weird Al Yankovic plays. Need I say more?

Here's a sample. The kid is actually playing great, but it's the type of sound I just don't like:

Here is a demo of the instrument with many voices from Roland:

And on top of that, I've heard it's not very easy to go back and forth with this and a traditional melodeon and being able to do that is precisely what I want to do.

Then there is the Streb. This looks like a melodeon and is called an e-melodeon. It is also midi, but there is a built in amp and loud speakers in the body of the machine, so, it's easier to take and play like a traditional melodeon. And it too can be played in any key. It has fun sounds too.

Just listen to these:

Sounds like a melodeon. Which I love that sound.

And here is Helena playing her Streb. Again, sounds like a melodeon:

Clive has several great videos:

Clive does some interesting things with it too - strings! (and organ, etc... I didn't attach them all.)

I love it. Like love it and it is affordable as far as melodeons go. The only downside? They are handmade and there is a year wait to get one. I put myself in the queue. Not to replace the traditional melodeon, but to supplement it!

Oh but if I could just sound good! Today was an ok day of practice. I practiced about 90-100 minutes this evening at home... but everything is just horrible - though I feel and sense progress. I'm just not some late blooming prodigy.

Good day, bad day, good day, bad day next?

It's like that game you played as a child with a daisy like flower - he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not. He loves me! That is how learning feels recently. A horrible day - a great day, horrible day, great day. Today was a great day.

I didn't do anything different, I just started going through the pieces again. I even started a new one and it started to come (horribly, but recognizable) almost immediately. Muscle memory, head memory. I don't know. We all know it's true though. Sometimes stepping back, giving it some time is all that is needed to make forward progress. Today I had forward progress - significantly.

I am also realizing things about myself. I'm super self-conscious about playing and practicing and bugging people with practicing. I said on melnet today that I don't know if it's my personality (probably) or the years of being told listening to me practice was like listening to a dying cow when I practiced my horn in my early years.

Plus, I like to be with my family. We have this habit (which I love) of being together but doing different things. My husband will be playing chess. My son watching a movie or doing something on his iPad and my working or writing something all in the same room. We can tune each other in and out as we wish. But with practice... I sort of dominate the room. I could go to other rooms, but it's not as convenient and some of it then interferes with my mother in law's spaces and I definitely don't want to deal with snooping, irritating, etc.

I am highly thinking of getting a midi diatonic accordion just for being able to practice. It is more for me than anyone else. I don't play as well or as boldly if I'm worried about bugging people - or even as long. I had my accordion with me all day yesterday at work, but there's nowhere to go and I don't want to play and annoy people. And, if my older son wants a go at it, he can practice too as headphones will make it silent anywhere!

Being a beginner totally stinks

There is just so much to learn and nothing is intuitive and it's not much stress relief if it's having to learn and practice dreadfully. I mean, I am learning and I'm not getting impatient enough that I'll quit, but when I hear all these tunes and I cannot play any of them, and it feels like it will be a thousand years before I can play any of them, it's a drag. Like today, The piece that was introduced in the book today has 16th notes on basses (left hand) and quarter, 8th and 16th notes on the right hand and those 16th notes are opposite of the ones played on the basses. The 16th on right hand against the 16th note on left hand is so unnatural to me that I feel like I'll never get it. The recording I have of the song has it at speed and slowly. I can't play it if you halve the tempo at the slow version. Sigh.

And you wouldn't think I would have problems playing on and off the beat as I am a horn player and horns always get the offbeats while most of the the rest of the band is playing on the beat, but that is a different skill to be learned. This is learning to untie my hands.  When I was talking to my son about that, he said he remembers how hard that was in learning to play the piano too and that in itself is so interesting. It's not like we do the same things with our hands. Right now typing - my hands are working independently. I can drum fairly well (rhythmically using my hands and feet differently from each other) when drumming on the table or my lap. What is it about piano and the button box? I'm seeing progress in that, but any slight new step in making the hands more and more independent leads to a new skill that needs to be developed.

Now, I have only played it through a few times - or tried to play it through. I can't. I'll have to dissect it more and just have patience.

Maybe I'll record some of it. Here is a violin version of the piece, just to give you an idea of how it is supposed to sound: Reel du Sirop D'erable

Here is me... OMG... It's embarrassing to share as it is so, so, so bad. Well, it does say the song means maple syrup... maybe maple syrup is in my melodeon thus making it sound horrible?

I did two takes - no clipping, stopping before the end. Totally lost the thread, etc.

Take one. Stopped midway through.

Take two. Struggled horribly through - embarrassing to even share.

Playing it at the piano - sloppily - right hand only. I'm not a piano player, but it gives you a sense of what I'm trying to play.

The art I'm sharing today? It's how I feel when I play - dufus.

It feels like no progress is made, but the brain is faulty at remembering

Yesterday my college aged son was home. He's been curious about the melodeon, so he picked it up. He, like I, feel it's a bit non-intuitive. It all seems to be going along swimmingly until you hit a half step on a scale on both the C row and G row. Adrian asked, "why did they do that?" And I know why, because of being able to play multiple button play sound harmonious, but it's a bugger for learning as a beginner!

I didn't have much time to tinker yesterday with all I detailed in yesterday's post, but I played a couple of things for him, one being a beginner thing so he could try. I breezed right through it like I knew what I was doing and at a decent tempo. And I played one of the pieces I'm working on now, buturing it.

Today, I spent an hour after lunch, working back to front of the recent exercises and pieces I've been working on and amazingly, it's getting better. The newer and harder stuff is rubbish. I'm taking it at like 1/5th the speed it's intended and it's full of missed notes and pauses and starts and stops. However, as I kept working backwards, the tempo picked up, the mistakes lessoned. Nothing is perfect, not even close, but I can feel that what I found hard a week ago, is now not so daunting. 

In the two weeks I've had the melodeon, I haven't made tremendous progress, but I'm learning and it's serving its purpose of being a stress-reliever. I'm not training to be a professional musician. With that said, I would like to be able to pick up the instrument and play quite a few pieces without it being horrible!

So, despite having  super full day tomorrow, I just spent an hour practicing. Perhaps I'll record where I'm at later, but now it's time to take a walk on this gloriously sunny and warm February Saturday afternoon.

Not much time, but practicing where I can

Life has gotten busy the last couple days. I was commuting or at the office 14 hours on Thursday. I brought the GC instrument in case I found time to practice, but I did not. Today is a work from home day and I started bright and early, but between work with two jobs, making meals, teaching my older son to drive, spending time homeschooling my younger son, and grocery shopping, I was only able to nab about 15 minutes total. Tomorrow should be better.

To wind down the last two days, however, I started nabbing things for pinterest to post different forms of (non photographic) artwork pieces that included some type of squeeze box. I'll probably divide them out by theme/style at some point, but from about midnight until 2 am yesterday I grabbed about 400 of them, and today between 11 pm and 12:20 am, I grabbed the rest. There's probably some duplicates in there, but I have nearly enough pieces to supply 3 years of posts with accordion, concertina, and melodeon images. You can tell it's an important instrument through the last 100 years just by the shear number of things I found in such a quick time. Here is the link to the board. I've also created a Pinterest link on the sidebar.

I decided I would use a piece or two a day to include on this blog. Today I picked a cute pair - before and after. With more searching, I found a different pair, but quite similar. I'm not sure if the second pair are also Riedler or a copy cat artist... but they're cute. Looking forward to some more practice time, but if you want to see the stash of squeeze box images, feel free to take a peek on Pinterest.

Solving puzzles

The last couple days of practicing have been bits and pieces of time here and there, not long stretches, but I'm practicing. One thing I am struggling with is (in my head) what is the best way to remember bellow direction.

The music, pretty universally that I have seen so far, is written on staff with button number with the underline or no underline and basses either written in on its own line or like with guitar chords, written in over the staff. But there is no universal. Here I was trying to force myself to do something that is actually quite unnatural to me. I was trying to look at the notes on a staff and just remember what direction the bellows go. Well, this is somewhat unnatural because bellows switch based on key of instrument (I think?) and which row/button they land on. I cannot explain it well, but it is a thing either memorizing a song or written notation makes it easier.

So, the notes for the GC melodeon are these. Each button is two notes - both treble and bass side. Here's the keyboard layout.

And this is how the method book I'm using writes out music. Top section of music shows the notes written on a staff with fingering help noted just below the notes (the bad habit I've been forming is following those because it's telling me which finger to play and which direction of bellows - Underline is pull, not underlined is push.

Below that is C row - it's empty because everything in this piece is written on G row. 

Directly below the C row is the G row, and then you see different fingerings with some being underlined and some not. This is precisely telling me which button to push or pull. So, you see the first two measures it's 3 4 5 4. That means I should play the third button on the G row, then the 4 and then the 5 - all on pull, and then next measure back to 4th button on the push.

Directly below the G line on the top section of music (first 6 measures) the basses are written in with the rhythm of what to play being the bottom most thing shown. The second section of music is the same, but this time they took out the bass line. I was first confused by this because I didn't know what that meant. Do I not play basses? or was I supposed to just figure it out? But, I figured out that they were giving me bass information above the staff line for the first time. 

But there are other ways of notating music for the meldeon too. Here are some (found publicly on a google search). And I probably didn't capture them all.

All of them I now can figure out what they are implying, but there isn't a standard. And then I had a super "aha!" moment. This is for me. Not to please a teacher or to play while sight reading with no help. I am doing this for me, so if I want to scribble all over the music, or rewrite things to work for how my brain processes the music, then I just need to do what works for me. Even in my son's piano lessons and my years in band, we would make our own notes to remind ourselves of what to do. So, why have I been limiting myself and getting mad at myself for needing the fingering guides? Reality is, once the piece is in my head better, I will only be using the staff to remind myself of going up or down in notes and to remember the rhythm. Later, I can just ditch the music altogether. 

So, if, for now, it feels better to pay attention to fingering guides, fine. And if I know the rhythm in my head and just want to know fingering, then use fingering, or button guides. It's just notes for myself. It's not cheating! I can have crutches. I am not training in classical piano. Just like as a teen I would rewrite Eb music to F because I could never transcribe music in my head to play along at speed.