About

When I first started playing a German Concertina (Chemnitzer-type, 52-key "104", white Star brand) in January of 2014, with no concertina or accordion experience - the challenge was finding information on how to play it.  I had a pile of music with the right hand buttons notated, so it might be possible to learn to play, song by song, but any proficiency would take years of practice.

Not ideal.

So I decided to create a blog to help out other people like me who may have a concertina and want to learn how to play it, or anyone who wants to learn how to play one.

The great thing about the concertina is that you can gain proficiency without any other musical knowledge - reading music is optional.  If you want to use music, you will need to learn how to count the notes properly, but as you will see, you only really need to follow along with the button numbers.  You'll be polka-ing and waltzing in no time.

However, I think that concertina playing here in the US could use a systematic "how-to" guide.  Playing the german concertina is not intuitive - unlike the Irish and English concertinas, or an accordion, or even a guitar, which are all chromatic.

How to use this site: I'll be posting content periodically, so the blog posts themselves will be all out of order as far as learning how to play.  For this reason, see the "Learn to Play" link, where I will try to order the posts in a useful order.

As far as my own experience, you could call me an intermediate amateur enthusiast.  I'm actually just a trumpet player, but can make my way around a piano if I have to.  Professionally, I'm an electrical engineer - so when I see a problem, I can't help but think of how to fix it.  This site will be heavily influenced by my exposure to the J.B. Arban cornet method book (approx. 1880 and still the gold standard of trumpet playing manuals).