The Melodeon
Let's talk about Melodeons in general and my Melodeon in particular.

So what is a melodeon? Well it's what you get when you cross a sailor's Concertina with a 'proper' Piano Accordion and then feed the offspring on beer and steak pie. It's the thing that makes that rather jolly, bouncy, rather mouth-organ-like sound you associate with folk and Morris dancing events. I consider them a fun, not particularly serious instrument that earns its place in the world by contributing to making people happy.

Can I play a Melodeon? No. Not yet. This page should blog me trying to fix that.

If you look at the picture on the right you can probably see why it is often referred to as a 'button accordion'. This particular model is a 'three row' '31 key' (under my right hand) '12 base' instrument (under my left hand) although, in truth, it has six base notes and six three note chords.

Also, let's get it straight right from the beginning, this is the wrong Melodeon. I bought it quickly as a simple, cheap instrument so I had something to doodle with and find out what they were like. I got a 'Diatonic', which was correct and had the sound and action I wanted, it had a nice case but it was keyed to C F G which is not so good although I didn't know that at the time. If you want to play along to British folk music you probably want a D G tuned instrument. I suspect this one has been sitting on the shelf being progressively marked down for quite a while as people who knew what to buy passed it by.

Do I care? Well not very much really. It would have been nice if there had been more CFG information on the web or CFG books to learn from but I've just had to write my own. If I make a huge success of Melodeon playing I might invest in a second instrument in DG but for the moment that would just be silly. I know enough about music to transpose things about and to begin with I just need to find my way round the keyboard. If I get frustrated and give up quite quickly I probably would have done it anyway I've saved myself a couple of hundred quid.

OK: I'm going to be using musical notation and a bit of musical theory to explain things but if you're not familiar with it don't worry. Musicians are rarely the sharpest pencil in the box, although I suspect they have more fun, and that stuff is all easy. You can teach somebody to read music in an afternoon. You can teach them enough to survive talking about music in an hour but getting them to invest the time in knowing instantly what bit on the lines has what letter name (just 13 of them will do) pays them back and they can then learn where to find those letters on their instrument and we have instant expert.

Time to move on and talk about the Keyboard... Look at it. All the buttons are identical. OK I can only just see the right hand buttons and I can't see the left hand ones at all so I have to count my position by feel to find the starting note for a piece.

I had hoped for a leaflet in the box but there was nothing, although that is not untypical for musical instruments, so I looked for data on the web and discovered it was a mess with lots of different, often manufacturer specific, ways to tune things. It was time to go all retired physicist on it and measure things. Let's start with the G-row, that's the right most one so the one nearest the edge.
This button row is in the key of G. That means it contains a major scale that runs G A B C D E F# G. The major scale is just a sequence of notes that work together, no obvious nasty discords, and no gaps. You can start on any note and make a major scale of it. In the major scale there are seven notes then it repeats. Seven, an odd number, then repeat is a bit of a bust for an instrument that likes to alternate between push (blow) and pull (suck) as it goes up the scale. However being musicians they didn't just sigh and accept it they tried to fudge it out and made matters far worse.

Right. Button one has a couple of weirdos on it. They will be quite useful later on but ignore them for now. Incidentally click on the scale picture for the full size copy if your screen has problems with my little text. Open it in a new tab.
Then we start on real notes with a G (blow 2) and an A (suck 2) and continue up alternating until you get to the step from E (suck 4) to F# (suck 5). My first Melodeon exercise was just playing the first G scale chanting G A B etc. but with a big smirk on F as I remembered to stay on suck. Then do it going back down. Don't just play the sequence but sing the ABC song and then the CBA song so the names begin to stick in your head. You have to learn to sight read onto things like this or you will be forever having to labour to learn a new tune.

I marked the operation for each note and I blobbed in the 'missing' C6 in red as there is one on the C row. I also got annoyed and took out the chord reed block and spent time blowing and sucking the three note chords individually but they don't work that well that way.

Hit counter