Hi Gena! Thanks for asking (and prompting me to clarify!)
Hi Mel, sorry for not getting back to you. Not sure if this idea is still going since I don't think anyone asked anything last week, but I wanted to get back to you anyways - Monday is band practice for me and completely overlaps your Q/A hour, and we've had some uh... band things? I guess? to resolve. Anyhow, thanks for talking about what your history has been. I've been playing (DG) for around a year and a half, but also feel equally enamoured with the idea of, but disinterested in the reality of, anything past 2 row/8 bass.
I have probably endless questions, or things I'm working on (or things I'm supposed to be working on), and my first thought is that it seems a little off to capitalise specifically your time, but I also think this is a neat idea and surely
surely people have questions they want answers to or advice on, so, I'm not sure why you're not swamped here.
I met up with a friend some months ago now, and they asked me to show them 'what I got' etc, after I played some of the tunes I know the best, they then asked me to play the least morris thing I knew, and I realised that, well, pretty much everything I know how to play comes across like that, since I pretty much only play tunes for dancing. I've started attending a folk club that's broken up over the summer and am trying to broaden my repertoire and improve my sound as a solo musician.
To sum up the two areas of interest/barriers to progress that I guess I have right now, I would say: 'getting comfortable with tunes in the key of B minor (relative minor of the outside row)' and 'augmenting tunes with additional buttons to add 3rds/5ths under or over the melody'.
One of the tunes I'd like to have figured out is The Origin of the World, which Paul Young made a lovely video of
here. I can play the melody as he does, but, I can't work out what chords he's playing exactly (he tends to lay his fingers on the buttons, I think), but I also don't know how to even really translate useful chords for the key of Bm onto the 8 basses a standard DG box has. I think his video sounds perfectly lovely but I can't work out which buttons he's pressing with which bellows direction and put it all together myself. I mean, I probably should just contact him and ask about it, but I'm also interested in any vague advice for playing in this key, including if you might know any simpler tunes that would be a good fit that I could use to get more familiar.
Regarding adding right hand notes, in
another thread recently about playing these I linked this part of this video of
Tim Edey doing a quick little run up and down his buttons. I
think I know what he's doing here now, and that it's something I should be able to do too, and that I understand the principal of playing these other notes. When people say playing a third above another note, I was never sure what that really
really meant in terms of, like which third of which key, so, I sat down today and I think figured it out. Instead of trying to work it out any the ways I had been, I tried just rotating the scale around a little bit so the notes I knew did work lined up, so for D you would play a:
play a
Main D E F# G A B C# D
with a
Third D E ) F# G A B C# D E F#
or a
Fifth ...F# G ) A B C# D E F# G A
And I think that all sounds right? I should be able to start practicing scales with those and working out what my options are with the left hand: I guess I never worked it out before and felt maybe there wasn't fingering for the correct pairs for certain notes, especially around pull/pull part of the scale, but, they all seem possible. Assuming I'm not a lemon and have, in fact, figured this out, are there any exercises you would advise just beyond scales to try and build enough familiarity to drop these combinations into tunes?
No worries if this project hasn't worked out or you're swamped with your actual work, I'm sure I'll figure these things out eventually, apparently if I sit down and really put my mind to it I can achieve a bit more than just blindly pushing buttons. I thought I'd try and give you something to at least sink your teeth into a little though, just in case.
Cheers for all the help you offer, and also for making your short tune videos for your students publicly available.
