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[pgroff]

Hi all,

Is anyone working with GCB -- either as a classic "mixte" accordion with stradella basses, or using the GCB melody layout with diatonic bass layouts?

If so I'd be interested to discuss ideas for style, techniques, etc.

Paul Groff

[Chris Ryall]

Me I have two, though confess to nudging a couple of C# reeds to get more chromaticity. It's a very fluid system as you end up with more 'accidental/helpers' than main scale notes!

But is this mixte? i've speculated in the other thread that this refers to Stradella left end, though a "mix" of quint and halftone is still there.

As an aside, Joel Stewart, occasionally of this parish, took a CBA right end with standard melodeon basses to France in 2011. Is that mixte enough to count? Joel's been searching for his musical centre of gravity with commendable lack of prejudice; this was just one experiment. Sadly it's rumoured he bought a nickelharpe last summer; the melodeon world may be the poorer for that.

[triskel]

I think this is the equivalent C#DG

No, it's the other way around, so the D/G equivalent (if anybody ever made one) would be D/G/F#

[pgroff]

I think this is the equivalent C#DG
   
http://www.tr-accordeons.com/les-modeles/les-mixtes/le-mixte.html

Perhaps she could point you towards users?

Hi dunlustin,

I'm really asking about the GCB layout here, fishing for anyone else who might be working with it.  Over the years, I've run into a few players including my former Neopolitan barber who used an old Paolo, and Jehan Paul who had a trichord converted to GCB. Along with other systems, I play a little GCB myself, and transpositions of it including ADC# and BbEbD.  Hohner offered both GCB and the transposition CFE in one of their late 1920s catalogs, but I thought of it as mostly an Italian system until I learned from Stephen Chambers that this was the system of the earliest musette players in Paris, especially Emile Vacher.

In another thread, I see you are skeptical about what system Vacher played but as I listed there, some of Vacher's instruments are still around -- one of them is demonstrated (I think by chromatic player Marcel Azzola) in the Paris Musette film, and that same Fratelli Crosio box is shown being played by Daniel Denécheau in a photo on his website:

http://denecheau.free.fr/IMG/jpg/Vacher.jpg

Denécheau, who plays mixte himself, describes Vacher's system as GCB (sol do si).  According to Krümm's fictionalized "posthumous interview,"  Vacher also did try the "box that's chromatic on both sides" himself, a bit, and among the photos of Vacher on that page is one where the great man is shown with a Cayla chromatic box and another with a tiny 1-row diato that he brought out for special effect.

http://blogs.mondomix.com/accordeon.php/2009/01/23/emile-vacher

Anyway -- I have the feeling that those in a position to know best are confident that Vacher mainly played GCB.

Anyone else here on melnet, besides me?

PG

[pgroff]

I think this is the equivalent C#DG

No, it's the other way around, so the D/G equivalent (if anybody ever made one) would be D/G/F#

Yes, exactly, and that's one system I've had in mind although I have not assembled it yet. It would probably work best if the keyboard along each row were extended downward quite a bit -- maybe a "button 5 start" in the terminology sometimes used here on melnet.

PG

[squeezy]

Sorry PG ... my new venture is close but no cigar!

It's closest to D/G/F# - but it's definitely not an F# scale I have on the inside row - the note sequence (scale if you can call it that!) goes Bb,D,Eb,Eb,F,F,G# and then back to Bb - repeating in every octave as if it were a proper scale.

I'd love to have a go on a G/C/B system though - I'm sure if Emile Vacher could make it sound as sublime as he did then there must be something about it!

[pgroff]

squeezy,

Well you might be disqualified from the status of "learner!"

To any possible fellow GCB students out there . . . I'm listening for example to Vacher's "Mado"  which reaches way down to the low notes of the G row.  I just discovered an especially beautiful video of this recording, with more information and photos included:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaOQgUWh-vM

PG

[Chris Ryall]

Still pondering on the fundamental meaning of an F# scale with no F# in it

… I'll come back to you.

[squeezy]

Ha ha!  It's a very special F# row!

[Etienne]

Ha ha!  It's a very special F# row!

I assume the box should be a A/D/noF# 

[Chris Ryall]

er, I appear to have just suggested Clive consider this system, as his proposed unisonoric left end is (fundamentally) what seems to make mixte a successful system

[waldoB]

I have a B,C,G, notated from the outside, with a 48 stradella, if anybody would like to give a go. Easy semitone for sharp keys, easier chords to go with them.

[pgroff]

Hi waldo

Very interesting!

Can you post (or link to) a photo, or tell us more about your accordion?

Not sure I've seen a B/C/G if that is what you are describing.

I have seen some atypical GCBs . . . one was a 1940s or 1950s Lo Duca 3 row built in a small black rounded celluloid body. two voices. The rows were G, C, and B from the outside in, but the B row did not have the usual offset of the "B/C#" button that starts the full scale.  This may have been put together as a custom job, well after the GCB had declined in popularity, and built in a way that misunderstood the customer's wishes.  But it had been played!

PG

[triskel]

Not sure I've seen a B/C/G if that is what you are describing.

I'd suspect it probably started life as G/C/B, but somebody switched over the G and B reed-blocks.