The Cross-Bellows Strap & Bellowsing!

[Dick Glasgow]

Hello Goran,

I've just been watching your new YouTubes which demonstrate your very interesting "cross-the bellows-strap" broad straps & Bellowsing technique.

Walking my baby back home

Värmlandsvisan

Tango Uno

I see your approach actually employs the use of:

"ergonomic handle" (wrist support, broad steady thumbstraps, broad steady wriststrap, no finger-plate) and a 'cross-the bellows-strap' facilitating articulation and rhythimical playing

On the positive side, I can see how this could mean you could now play an English Concertina with more of a rhythmic style, which I'm sure will interest all Irish Music enthusiasts who play the English Concertina.

However, surely there is perhaps a downside, in that you then can't play music with the same flow & you no longer have the possibility of playing lovely long notes or slow, lazy passages?

Cheers
Dick

[guran]

Hello Dick,
Very glad to notice your interest in this issue! Many players find it either ridiculous, a cheating way of playing, or even contradictive to the concertina idea itself but it all comes down to basic mechanics. I got the idea first when struggling with strenous bellows reversals pumping old melodeons while holding them with just the tiny right hand thumbstrap. I locked the lower bellows folds by a similar strap and playing the melodeon got much easier. Later on I did the same with the larger pianoaccordion too just by keeping the fitted lower bellows lock locked and I met other accordion players doing the same. After a while with concertinas and having even greater problems firstly with the English - just like you guess - wishing to play it intensively and rhythmically - I applied the concept with concertinas as well and it really meant an entirely different world of playing.

Precisely as you imagine I have tried to inspire English folk players to use it in order to manage playing the English with more 'beat' for instance in the bouncy Morris idiom. If you wish to make the English sound Anglo-like for Irish styles it might also be handy although I have to say also that in my opinion playing Irish tunes basically ought to be more natural with the English than with the Anglo (except for the obvious settled "tradition" saying the opposite ...) since Irish tunes tend to be more speedy, more fluent,more decorated and elaborate than the British, Morris Anglo styles, and thus more suited fore the typical melody instrument the English in real is - compared to the Anglo which invites primarily for rhythmical pumping.

Anyway, using the English rhythmically as I like to do and with full throttle, up to 8 or so simultaneous notes, engages the whole "ergonomic" concept since a stable connection then is the primary neccessary feature.
One interesting reflection comes up : Many players wrongly believe Anglos commonly are "louder" than Englishes but this is mainly depending exactly on this - by using a 'handle' as stable as the Anglo/Duet attachment with the English this system can be played precisely as energetic or loud as any Anglo or Duet !

Now to your last comment on the "downside". Yes of course there is one, but you will be surprised how insignificant it usually is.
a) The "volume/capacity" of he bellows. The total volume resources of course are reduced. Playing polyphonic hymns with long phrases on a treble with 4-fold bellows is a challenge allready and with the strap certainly worse.With a baritone it seldom is an obstacle despite the larger reeds consume more air.
What happens with the strap and fanning is that the increased mechanical efficiency of pumping mostly compensates more than enough for the limited extension of the bellows.

b) This leads to another issue .One bonus with the strap concept is that spontaneously one learns to combine musical phrasing more efficiently with bellows reversals and this in turn leads to change of habits and articulating more delicately.

With the risk hurting some feelings my impression is that Anglo players commonly learn to articulate in a more precise and sophisticated way than many English players who spontaneously adopt an idle playing style just moving the bellows in and out as much as the construction admits independently of what the actual music may have to say about it...

So - summing up ..in my view one meets some, but very few specific occasions when he restriction from the 'cross-the-bellows-strap' may cause disadvantage. Usually the improved precision, better articulation, options for playing more dynamically and rhythmically offer so much comfort and enjoyment that this in my eyes is the 'most natural way' handling concertinas.
Naturally you arrange the strap so that it can be easily removed. I have put some distance washers on the endbolts used fo the strap so the bolt head forms a little knob and the elastic strap is hung up on that by a hole punched in the ends of the strap.( On the larger instruments I actually use 2 or 3 straps)

The "concertina concept" itself has got one particular inborn 'un-health' and that is its extreme instability while demanding the duty to carry the instrument by the hands simultaneously as forcibly pumping air with it and on top of that trying to execute precision movements with the fingers. This is asking for trouble !

Goran

[alanday]

Interesting to see a recently added Utube of Mary McNamara playing a tune using the Fanning Technique (Bellowsing).
Al

[guran]

Alan,
I guess this is the one you refer to
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JELM7IJliwM

Yes, she does "fan" - by the maybe most traditional way of doing it - riding the instrument bellows on the thigh. If we analyse the methods again lets us skip the standing variants at first, just talking playing seated. You can
1) fan this way like Mary does -resting the bellows on the thigh
2) do it like Edel Fox - resting one (or maybe both) frames on the thigh
3) do it like Danny Chapman and sometimes I - strictly resting both frames on the thigh and keeping them together
4) like I mostly do it - resting just the edge of one frame on the thigh and balance the instrument in that position

In all these 1-4 you open and close the upper folds primarlily but as you can see Mary opens the lower folds quite a bit as well

When playing a large accordion you can do it in a sequence, taking advantage of gravity both ways - open the upper folds on pull and letting the left end fall out - and when reversing closing the upper folds first and letting the lower part of the end "fall" back when closing. Shall we call that a "double fan" maybe ?..:-)

This may be applied with concertina too and we get a variant
5) using the support from closed lower folds on pull and upper folds on push. I have tried to illustrate that a bit at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT8NRIOLGyQ

Some comments on the variants
1) the stability is superb and it works fine with long slow movements and demand for much air. With speedy or vigorous pumping friction is a disadvantage and wear of bellows and clothes in the long run
2) excellent for fast reversals and single note playing, likely a reason why it works fine for Edel Fox as an example
3) good stability particularly when combined with bellows straps
Some, but little friction.
4) stability is less than with 3) but symmetry can be almost ideal. Even less or no friction
5) slightly eccentric maybe but it works like illustrated firstly if you really want to pump energetically while seated

I leave the standing options out for the time being...questions?

Goran

[guran]

Folks,
I am just writing on the 6th part in a series of articles on "Concertina ergonomics" for the International Concertina Association newsletter "Concertina World" and I would like to put a question to you:

What is your opinion on the choice of the term "bellowsing" like I have been using it here, in earlier discussions, and in presentations at YouTube?
Feel free to say whatever you like about it!

The background is that after reading some dozens of old tutors I found that most of them used the in my view clumsy formulations like "Management of the bellows" or "Manipulation of the bellows" for this matter while simple terms like "carrying", "holding", "supporting", "fingering" and so on were used for other activities.

So - in spite of maybe not being proper english some decade ago I started using this term "bellowsing" for all activities executed with the bellows - not only pumping air but also the articulation I have talked about earlier in this thread.
It was ridiculed in the beginning but I get the impression that it is not precisely rejected nowadays.
If accepted for a wider use I believe it might facilitate 'speaking english' about this important part of mastering squeezeboxes.

Goran

[Dick Glasgow]

Sounds fine to me Goran.

However, you should know that the word has been used before in English, in reference to the work of the Blacksmith.

Charles Dickens actually used it in 'Great Expectations':

"It's easier than bellowsing and hammering"

N.B. See the 6th paragraph here: Great Expectations

However, I can't find any evidence of this word in the Dictionary here, so Dickens may have just picked it up as slang of the day, which has been forgotten now, as Blacksmiths are very thin on the ground, today.

Cheers
Dick

[guran]

Thank you Dick!, very interesting about Dickens. I had searched dictionaries too but got no entry for it. A funny thing is that we got something alike in swedish. The most common meaning of 'bälgande' (=bellowsing) is 'drinking heavily' while the author August Strindberg has used it BOTH for exactly the same blacksmith activities as Dickens, saying "bälgande och hamrande" AND he also uses it in a different place for playing the accordion.

I looked at the "Great expectations" link but in the haste I didn't read it through...Can you say what it IS that is "easier than bellowsing and hammering" ? Does that phrase sum up the blacksmith's job as a whole maybe?
Goran