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accordion

Wheezing Wednesday #2

Posted on August 13, 2014 Leave a Comment

Yep, I suck at the accordion.

And what should I expect, being as I never practise the thing?

Anyway this week I just couldn’t coordinate left and right (even though the left is just an alternating bass pattern) so it’s another lame offering from me. Hey, maybe I can make this one song stretch out for the whole month.

Moonlight Densetsu: Melody. Piano Accordion. Sheet was posted last week if you want to play along.

I encourage you to just skip this and not even bother listening. It’s hardly good – I’m just putting it up to fulfill my posting quota for the month. Hey, at least Blaugust made me pull out and “practise” the accordion!

https://ale.chenonetta.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Densetsu.mp3
Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, recording, sailor moon

Wheezing Wednesday #1: Moonlight Densetsu Sheet

Posted on August 6, 2014 Leave a Comment

Well it’s Wheezing Wednesday, where I hoped to share with you some recordings of my very bottom-of-the-barrel accordioning.

However this past week I contracted a cold, and so feeble and weak as I am I haven’t much felt like picking up the accordion. I’ve done quite enough coughing and wheezing on my own without needing to bring an instrument into things!

I will however share with you a sheet that I have prepared. It’s a very simple version of the old Sailor Moon theme, Moonlight Densetsu. The only tricky bit is a last-minute alteration I made at the end of the bridge, with a little walk-around in the bass (bars 23 and 24). It could just be replaced with an alternating G – G7 if it’s too difficult.

Maybe we can see how I manage by next week. I can’t avoid putting up recordings for the whole month, can I?

moonlight_densetsu_p1

 

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, sailor moon, sheet music

Musical Monday: Storm in a Teacup

Posted on August 20, 2013 Leave a Comment

This will probably be the best recording I put up this month, and that’s taking into account the fact that I’ve edited the ending slightly to take out a flubbed chord.
https://ale.chenonetta.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/SongOfStorms.mp3

I forgot to notate some of the fingering and counterbass notes in yesterday’s sheet music update, but I think it’s fairly self explanatory. There are some respectable jumps in this one, but even with the distances involved they feel quite manageable.

Anyway, enjoy!

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, video games, zelda

Sheet Music Sunday: Song of Storms

Posted on August 19, 2013 2 Comments

Running behind… running behind. I’ll get the recording up tomorrow.

This transcription presented me with a few dilemmas as I kept swapping between time signatures (3/4? 6/8?) and tempos. Anyway, here’s the score. A very straightforward one – but feel free to repeat ad infininatum instead of ending after two loops as I’ve done here.

SongOfStorms

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, video games, zelda

Musical Monday: Rocket Jumping our way across the bass keyboard

Posted on August 12, 2013 Leave a Comment

Yesterday I shared with you the sheet music for the Rocket Jump Waltz. It’s a fun little piece that isn’t at all like a waltz.

Today I’ve got my attempt at playing it!

https://ale.chenonetta.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Rocket-Jump-Waltz.mp3

It’s not perfect… I did promise that my recordings this month would be a bit choppy. The most distracting part for me is the C major to B minor alternation that means I need to do some leaps of faith across the bass buttons, which look something like this:

rocketJumps

Currently I’m doing that big jump between B and C marked by the arrows. There’s a B counterbass which I might be able to transition through, but I haven’t quite worked out how to use it yet. I think the key is just more practice. Also A minor.

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, video games

Sheet Music Sunday: Rocket Jump Waltz

Posted on August 11, 2013 Leave a Comment

Oh, right, this blog thing.
Been busy this last week… I’ll see about getting the fan art post up Tuesday if not its watercolour version on Wednesday.

Today’s sheet music is the Rocket Jump Waltz, which like Petite Chou Fleur originates from Team Fortress 2.

No it’s not actually a waltz.

Get the score here!

This transcription is an accordion-ised version of the track based on a transcription done by another fan.

Tomorrow we’ll find out if I can still play it!

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, video games

Sheet Music Sunday + Musical Monday: Korobeiniki

Posted on August 5, 2013 3 Comments

On Sundays/Mondays throughout the month I’ll be sharing my adventures in accordioning. The accordion is an awesome instrument capable of rich depths of harmony and melody. Unfortunately, I barely make any time to practice it, so what I share with you this month is going to sound rather choppy.

For the rest of the month I’m hoping to share accordion arrangements on Sundays, and recordings on Mondays. This week I’m a little behind, but that’s okay, because if you’ve followed my blog in the past you’ll have already heard the recording I’m going to share today. (I’m too lazy to record a more recent/fluent version)

https://ale.chenonetta.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Korobeiniki.mp3

That’s right, it’s Korobeiniki, a delightfully suggestive Russian folk song. It’s best known for its inclusion as the Tetris A music across a multitude of Tetris titles. A simple transcription of the song is below. (I haven’t done music theory in aaaaages, so apologies for errors. Let me know if I’ve notated things poorly and I’ll endeavour to fix them)

korobeiniki

This is a pretty straightforward arrangement mostly comprising of alternating bass patterns. You start on the hatched E button in the top half of the keyboard and alternate with the E minor chord, then move to A -> Am. After that is the E Counterbass (G#, denoted by the underlined fingering) which alternates with the E Major chord.

There’s only one tricky bit in the arrangement, a little bass run through A A B C. It crawls from the upper half of the keyboard to the middle section, ending on the middle C button. I’ve put in some suggested fingering.

Then it’s a slow progression back up the bass through D minor. (I used to jump up to a different chord from the C, but my hop was just too unreliable)

I was going to add some little diagrams here but is anyone actually going to find them helpful? I’ll consider them for my next post if anyone is interested.

EDIT: Scribbled a thing in the end. Dunno how helpful it is.

korobeiniki_fingering

Have fun with Korobeiniki! Don’t have an accordion? Try out my accordion simulator. You’ll be able to play most of the piece except for the G#s in the right hand. Just hum them or something.

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, video games

In Accord

Posted on March 1, 2012 2 Comments

[Edit 8th May 2015: I’ve been alerted to the fact that in Windows the audio sounds decidedly piano-like. This is not intentional! I will see if I can fix this at a later date.]

Well March Blog Badness Madness begins today! This challenge, having snuck up on me, has left me racking my brain for ideas of what to post. This time I have no weekly classes to guarantee me at least something to post each week (not that I did take advantage of said classes in order to put together posting material…) so I need to come up with ideas. Ideas of March.

Anyhoo, let’s start by discussing a coding thing I worked on last year. A prototype Accordion emulator written in Java

Screenshot below, you can download the program here. (Requires Java).

This program started as a simple attempt to generate a Stradella button map that I could refer to while playing the piano accordion. I wanted to draw up my own as a bit of fun in remembering my music theory (each row is a perfect fifth interval from the one below it). After some annoying attempts to draw the thing up by hand, then some fiddling around in Photoshop, I concluded that it’d be faster to write a program to generate the thing for me.

Once I’d done that, I decided it’d be fun to make the buttons play notes when they were pressed. Things snowballed from there.

Inspired by a program I’d spotted a few years ago I realised that I could use a keyboard with the program and could map a number of keyboard keys quite easily to the bass button keys as both key layouts contain diagonal rows. Quite fortunately, a standard keyboard should offer 12 rows and four columns of keys allowing for every note in a scale to be represented in my emulator. Although the focus of the program is on the bass keys, I added in a section of the piano keyboard as well to allow for a bit of experimentation with melody and bass.

Finally, I flipped the keyboards so that they correspond more intuitively to what a player would expect to see while playing, as the buttons face away from the player. This also became handy for when I wanted to practice accordion and didn’t have a mirror handy to check my hand placements 🙂

As you can tell I’ve had a few changes of heart in naming this program – it started as AccordionIng which naturally became Accordin’. I’ve started thinking of it as In Accord lately, not that I’ve been really thinking about it lately. Other people tend to just call it Accordion Hero. One day I’d like to turn this into something like an “Accordion Hero” type game or a music tutor. That would probably call for a rewrite. For now, I’m quite pleased that it allows me to practice with my headphones in and not bothering other people.

Posted in: Code, Music | Tagged: accordion, java

Petite Chou-Fleur Transcription

Posted on January 22, 2012 4 Comments

Not an art update. Oops.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been putting a bit more effort into practising the piano accordion, spurred on by the idea of doing an Accordion Thief cosplay at AVCon next year. I hope to learn some songs that match the in-game “buffs” that the accordion thief casts, as well as a few video game pieces. (Maybe more on that later)

One song that seemed perfect was the track Petite Chou-Fleur from Team Fortress 2’s Meet the Spy video. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the sheet music easily! So I ended up transcribing (what I’ve dubbed the unscientific process of, “earballing”) the song myself. The results are here.

One of the fun things about using Lilypond to do the transcription is that I get a MIDI file to play with too! Here it is, though I’ve found the grace notes don’t sound correctly. Yay MIDI.

If you play piano you might want to grab this version of the sheet music instead, though you might want to revise the chords. I haven’t put a lot of effort into ensuring they make sense – they’re mostly compromise between getting the chord notation to come up properly for my simplified accordion score and getting some bass notes to sound in the MIDI.

I’ve done my best to transcribe the piece accurately, but there will inevitably be errors. Let me know if you think anything’s wrong. I hope to have a proper accordion recording of this up soon, too!

Posted in: Music | Tagged: accordion, team fortress 2, tf2, video games

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