The Session >> Discussions >> Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
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Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I've been learning the Irish pipes for a couple of years with lots of frustration because of the usual reed problems, then I learned reed-making and today I have perfect reeds in my great chanters. I was quite happy with my progress in learning the pipes since then, until I gave a try to learn the button accordion (B/C). I was/am much faster in learning the button box, and I like much better playing the box than the pipes. The pipes have terrific sound but the amount of work required to make any progress is enormous. On the pipes when you want to make a sound you should lift your fingers, often more fingers at a time. On the box you press a button with one of your finger, and for me this is far more natural and easier. I'd like to read other pipers experience.
Miki
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I'm not an uilleann piper or box playewr, but I have tinkered around on Scottish smallpipes and melodeon, and what you say makes perfect sense.
With the pipes, it is a complex process even to just produce a single note - working out where to put the many components, getting the bellows speed right, keeping the bag pressure constant. Then you've got to do all that whilst playing *different* notes. There's getting the hang of closed fingering, opening and closing the bottom of the chanter, changing octave (which to me, as a listener, appears to be the most difficult part of playing the u. pipes), grace notes (which are a more essential to piping than they are to playing most other instruments).
With the box, all you have to do is press the right buttons and know when to push or pull the bellows. Of course, I'm being flippant - it's earsier said than done, but the point is, you press a button and move the bellows, and you get a note. You move the bellows faster and you get a louder note. And it's perfectly possible and acceptable to play a tune on the box without any grace notes. So the complexity of technique required to play a tune in it's most basic form is far less.
However, once you have overcome the initial technical obstacles with either instrument, you begin to face different challenges. The pipes allow you considerable manipulation of a note - you can shade the pitch microtonally, you can produce the same note in more than one way, giving different timbres, it is relatively easy to play lots of fast grace notes. With the box, on the other hand, a single note offers considerably more physical resistance, which makes playing fast grace notes much more difficult. It also requires the whole hand to move relative to the instrument, so big jumps in pitch are more difficult. The box also does not allow much manipulation of an individual note, besides varying its loudness. Of course, with enough skill, variation in loudness can be used to great and subtle effect.
No doubt, pipers and box players will jump down my throat over some of the points I have made. I apologise if my ignorance has led to my spreading misinformation.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I've never tried to play any bagpipe, but would have thought that playing a bellows-pipe would set one's instincts up quite well for the dual business of playing a tune on the button-box / melodeon while opening and closing the bellows, hopefully in happy coordination.
My own take on the latter is that that the button that matters most on the instrument's left-hand side is the air-button. This enables you to get out of situations in tunes where the bellows have nearly gone in till they've shut or gone out till they're at maximum extent, thus cutting off the flow of the tune.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
No, Nicholas, probably not. I know very little about the box but is it not the case that the opening and closing of the bellows effects the notes coming out of the instrument? With the pipes, the bellows operation has to be completely independent from the note coming out of the thing and if it isn't -- as in you are driving with the bellows -- you're playing it wrong.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
then there's the problem of trying to play tunes on the pipes that don't sit easily on the pipes, because they sit more easily on a fiddle (or a banjo), probably because they were made up by fiddlers.
Don't they say you need 7 and 7 and 7 years to be a piper? Don't leave it too late to start. Otherwise, take up a fiddle if you can stand it, or a banjo. If you're really over it, take up the bodhran perhaps.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
DD, it's more of a challenge than a problem. I enjoy trying (with varying degrees of success) to play non piping tunes on the pipes. With a liberal interpretation of octaves all sorts of things are possible, even if they are a bit awkward.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
It's a challenge all right.... Trying to play something like Martin Wynne's Number 2 without it sounding like a pile of... well... Martin Wynne's Number 2...
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
In a survey taken privately in a pub some years ago 99.9% of the customers asked preferred to listen to a box than to the pipes. I think the only one ifn favour of the pipes was the piper. Anyway 'La Cumpasita' sounds much better on a box.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Hey come on Free Reed, this thread isn't about which instrument is better, just which is easier to play. Surveys like that mean nothing because there are so many subjective circumstances.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I think Tasia ,Free Reed is making this up ,as some one who may be biased if you read his personal information.
However if I had been sold into slavery as a little drummer boy and forced to listen to GHB all day I may have the same view too.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
After about ten months now of learning the tenor banjo from scratch - and learning the tunes by ear rather to the total exclusion of the dots this time round - the progress I've made (which is moderate anyway for the time I have to practice), seems to be a cake walk compared to the difficulty of learning the pipes (and grappling with all the mechanical vagaries at the time - like, but not limited to, friggin' reeds!
The majority of tunes seem to me to fall totally naturally for finger position on the banjo, and obviously the fiddle as well, rather than the pipes. I have often wondered whether or to what extent that is a seriously limiting factor in trying to become very proficient with fiddle tunes on the pipes.
Learning the music on the banjo seems to be a lot lot easier than trying to learn it on the pipes, and given the lack of mechanical problems I think it is a more pleasant experience.
Then again, if I was trying to learn this music on the fiddle, I'd have to grapple with the irritability factor that I seem to have with playing fiddles - that's being really subjective of course. Each to their own, I'm just glad mine isn't the fiddle, I think I'd rather the pipes to that when all's said and done.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
no, no, I should be fair - I think I'd rather just listen to this music if the only option to play it was on fiddle - for me anyway. Don't mind hearing it on well played fiddle, just can't stand playing the alien things.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
The siren song of the Box.....
It does have certain elegance which you no doubt have discovered which prompted your post. But there is much more to 'playing it'. I started the box later in life having played some other instruments. It seemed like the proverbial 'piece of cake'.
But uncharactersitically, I started taking lessens from someone who actually knows how to "Play" the Box. A much steeper hill.
Some time ago, I wanted to learn the pipes. Herself grimaced a bit.
But a freind said 7 years to learn 7 years to practice, 7 years to play. I am a bit too old for that.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
As a banjo player who took up csharpd box earlier this year, I've been pleasantly surprised by how intuitive this system is for Irish music. It seems to me like the ideal instrument for anyone with a basic familiarity with the tin-whistle-scale nature of most irish music. So much fun to play around with too.
Of course having played irish music on one instrument for a number of years does give you a head start on a second instrument, but the box strikes me as in many respects ideal for irish music. Sure it does have limitations in terms of intonation, but instruments with more leaway in terms of intonation have other "limitations".
Of course i'm biased by the fact that over the years button box has become my favourite intrument for listening to Irish music on.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
After being a piper of one sort or another for my entire musical life, about four years ago I tried to become a concertina player (using a pretty decent concertina). I gave up after about three years. It never became any more natural than the first time I picked it up. I figured it was just because I was a piper and would never be comfortable playing anything but pipes. But in January I began to play the fiddle (my fiddling girlfriend is in law school and her fiddle looked so lonely). What a Joy! I immediately took to the "alien thing". Even after so short a time I find the fiddle an easier instrument than the pipes. It just makes sense to me.
I don't think this means that the fiddle is easier than the concertina, but that we all have different brains, and making music on anything other than our vocal chords is a very "alien" thing to do, but for my brain, the fiddle works better than the concertina. Other brains might like the box best. I think that's one of the great things about ITM, that there are so many choices of instruments to play it on.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
The box is a mechanical instrument - open it up and have a look at all the levers and valves etc. - you press a button and you get a note. Surely that's the main factor in apparent ease. Playing it well though in a variety of keys might be a different matter and require many years work as well.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Tasia - (many subjective circumstances)
Surely the opinions of twenty drunks in a pub after hours must hold some Credibility.
B D - I still have the whip marks on my back.........
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
That great zoologist and writer the late Gerald Durrell described it in one of his books - except that the octopus was evidently very pleased by the attention it was getting
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
it's just that scratching a whole lot of horse hairs across a piece of wire to get a sound out of it seems extreme, difficult and weird and abrasive. (I'm talking about the fiddle, not the octopus by the way).
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I think some people are better at certain instruments than others. Everyone has one instrument that they excel in. The flute was easiest for me to play over a few different instruments. I could never get the hang of guitar. My friend is a great fiddler, and she has extreme difficulty playing the flute. If you like the accordion better, and if you play better, then you should stick with that one.
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
The button box is more like writing with a typewriter, while the pipes and fiddles are more like writing with a quill pen. The challenge with a button box is to make it sound more flexible, the challenge with fiddles and pipes is to give the sounds structure.
Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I've been learning the Irish pipes for a couple of years with lots of frustration because of the usual reed problems, then I learned reed-making and today I have perfect reeds in my great chanters. I was quite happy with my progress in learning the pipes since then, until I gave a try to learn the button accordion (B/C). I was/am much faster in learning the button box, and I like much better playing the box than the pipes. The pipes have terrific sound but the amount of work required to make any progress is enormous. On the pipes when you want to make a sound you should lift your fingers, often more fingers at a time. On the box you press a button with one of your finger, and for me this is far more natural and easier. I'd like to read other pipers experience.
Miki
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by nemethmik
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I'm not an uilleann piper or box playewr, but I have tinkered around on Scottish smallpipes and melodeon, and what you say makes perfect sense.
With the pipes, it is a complex process even to just produce a single note - working out where to put the many components, getting the bellows speed right, keeping the bag pressure constant. Then you've got to do all that whilst playing *different* notes. There's getting the hang of closed fingering, opening and closing the bottom of the chanter, changing octave (which to me, as a listener, appears to be the most difficult part of playing the u. pipes), grace notes (which are a more essential to piping than they are to playing most other instruments).
With the box, all you have to do is press the right buttons and know when to push or pull the bellows. Of course, I'm being flippant - it's earsier said than done, but the point is, you press a button and move the bellows, and you get a note. You move the bellows faster and you get a louder note. And it's perfectly possible and acceptable to play a tune on the box without any grace notes. So the complexity of technique required to play a tune in it's most basic form is far less.
However, once you have overcome the initial technical obstacles with either instrument, you begin to face different challenges. The pipes allow you considerable manipulation of a note - you can shade the pitch microtonally, you can produce the same note in more than one way, giving different timbres, it is relatively easy to play lots of fast grace notes. With the box, on the other hand, a single note offers considerably more physical resistance, which makes playing fast grace notes much more difficult. It also requires the whole hand to move relative to the instrument, so big jumps in pitch are more difficult. The box also does not allow much manipulation of an individual note, besides varying its loudness. Of course, with enough skill, variation in loudness can be used to great and subtle effect.
No doubt, pipers and box players will jump down my throat over some of the points I have made. I apologise if my ignorance has led to my spreading misinformation.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by OrganicPeatCreature
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Gee.... I wish someone had told me this like five years ago.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Stay on the side of darkness ,silver and leather Emily,
( just off for a cold shower )
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by bazouki dave
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I've never tried to play any bagpipe, but would have thought that playing a bellows-pipe would set one's instincts up quite well for the dual business of playing a tune on the button-box / melodeon while opening and closing the bellows, hopefully in happy coordination.
My own take on the latter is that that the button that matters most on the instrument's left-hand side is the air-button. This enables you to get out of situations in tunes where the bellows have nearly gone in till they've shut or gone out till they're at maximum extent, thus cutting off the flow of the tune.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by nicholas
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Ever since Willie Week (when I saw/met some great box players) I've been sort of half-contemplating selling my pipes and buying a box instead...
Hmmm... decisions... decisions...
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Craic Addict
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
No, Nicholas, probably not. I know very little about the box but is it not the case that the opening and closing of the bellows effects the notes coming out of the instrument? With the pipes, the bellows operation has to be completely independent from the note coming out of the thing and if it isn't -- as in you are driving with the bellows -- you're playing it wrong.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Try a working set of pipes first.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
A working set of pipes? Does such a thing exist? My bag leaks air faster than the bellows can fill it...
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Craic Addict
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
"Does such a thing exist?" More or less.
Mine do their job. They shouldn't suck air like jet engines! When they play well they can be wicked fun.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
then there's the problem of trying to play tunes on the pipes that don't sit easily on the pipes, because they sit more easily on a fiddle (or a banjo), probably because they were made up by fiddlers.
Don't they say you need 7 and 7 and 7 years to be a piper? Don't leave it too late to start. Otherwise, take up a fiddle if you can stand it, or a banjo. If you're really over it, take up the bodhran perhaps.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I take your point, Spear, I'm sure you're right.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by nicholas
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
DD, it's more of a challenge than a problem. I enjoy trying (with varying degrees of success) to play non piping tunes on the pipes. With a liberal interpretation of octaves all sorts of things are possible, even if they are a bit awkward.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
It's a challenge all right.... Trying to play something like Martin Wynne's Number 2 without it sounding like a pile of... well... Martin Wynne's Number 2...
And G#s are the enemy...
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Craic Addict
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Tee hee. Aye.
Gsharps are fine with a friendly Gsharp key (that doesn't take weird acrobatics at all to be able to play stuff like this: http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/3440....er...).
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
In a survey taken privately in a pub some years ago 99.9% of the customers asked preferred to listen to a box than to the pipes. I think the only one ifn favour of the pipes was the piper. Anyway 'La Cumpasita' sounds much better on a box.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRz3CNwHkA
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Free Reed
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Hey come on Free Reed, this thread isn't about which instrument is better, just which is easier to play. Surveys like that mean nothing because there are so many subjective circumstances.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Tasia
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I think Tasia ,Free Reed is making this up ,as some one who may be biased if you read his personal information.
However if I had been sold into slavery as a little drummer boy and forced to listen to GHB all day I may have the same view too.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by bazouki dave
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
After about ten months now of learning the tenor banjo from scratch - and learning the tunes by ear rather to the total exclusion of the dots this time round - the progress I've made (which is moderate anyway for the time I have to practice), seems to be a cake walk compared to the difficulty of learning the pipes (and grappling with all the mechanical vagaries at the time - like, but not limited to, friggin' reeds!
The majority of tunes seem to me to fall totally naturally for finger position on the banjo, and obviously the fiddle as well, rather than the pipes. I have often wondered whether or to what extent that is a seriously limiting factor in trying to become very proficient with fiddle tunes on the pipes.
Learning the music on the banjo seems to be a lot lot easier than trying to learn it on the pipes, and given the lack of mechanical problems I think it is a more pleasant experience.
Then again, if I was trying to learn this music on the fiddle, I'd have to grapple with the irritability factor that I seem to have with playing fiddles - that's being really subjective of course. Each to their own, I'm just glad mine isn't the fiddle, I think I'd rather the pipes to that when all's said and done.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
no, no, I should be fair - I think I'd rather just listen to this music if the only option to play it was on fiddle - for me anyway. Don't mind hearing it on well played fiddle, just can't stand playing the alien things.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
The siren song of the Box.....
It does have certain elegance which you no doubt have discovered which prompted your post. But there is much more to 'playing it'. I started the box later in life having played some other instruments. It seemed like the proverbial 'piece of cake'.
But uncharactersitically, I started taking lessens from someone who actually knows how to "Play" the Box. A much steeper hill.
Some time ago, I wanted to learn the pipes. Herself grimaced a bit.
But a freind said 7 years to learn 7 years to practice, 7 years to play. I am a bit too old for that.
Sounds like you have just reached a plateau.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by zippydw
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
As a banjo player who took up csharpd box earlier this year, I've been pleasantly surprised by how intuitive this system is for Irish music. It seems to me like the ideal instrument for anyone with a basic familiarity with the tin-whistle-scale nature of most irish music. So much fun to play around with too.
Of course having played irish music on one instrument for a number of years does give you a head start on a second instrument, but the box strikes me as in many respects ideal for irish music. Sure it does have limitations in terms of intonation, but instruments with more leaway in terms of intonation have other "limitations".
Of course i'm biased by the fact that over the years button box has become my favourite intrument for listening to Irish music on.
- Chris
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by ramblingpitchfork
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
After being a piper of one sort or another for my entire musical life, about four years ago I tried to become a concertina player (using a pretty decent concertina). I gave up after about three years. It never became any more natural than the first time I picked it up. I figured it was just because I was a piper and would never be comfortable playing anything but pipes. But in January I began to play the fiddle (my fiddling girlfriend is in law school and her fiddle looked so lonely). What a Joy! I immediately took to the "alien thing". Even after so short a time I find the fiddle an easier instrument than the pipes. It just makes sense to me.
I don't think this means that the fiddle is easier than the concertina, but that we all have different brains, and making music on anything other than our vocal chords is a very "alien" thing to do, but for my brain, the fiddle works better than the concertina. Other brains might like the box best. I think that's one of the great things about ITM, that there are so many choices of instruments to play it on.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by elbowmusic
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
So, is a jig the easiest thing in the world for you pipers?
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by the wicked hacker
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
The box is a mechanical instrument - open it up and have a look at all the levers and valves etc. - you press a button and you get a note. Surely that's the main factor in apparent ease. Playing it well though in a variety of keys might be a different matter and require many years work as well.
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by the wounded hussar
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Tasia - (many subjective circumstances)
Surely the opinions of twenty drunks in a pub after hours must hold some Credibility.
B D - I still have the whip marks on my back.........
# Posted on July 21st 2009 by Free Reed
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
Getting a decent tune out of the pipes is like tickling an orgasm out of an angry octopus.
# Posted on July 22nd 2009 by Robert Ryan
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
jeez and how did you find that out? ... Ah no dont answer that one. LOL . great comparison.
# Posted on July 22nd 2009 by the wicked hacker
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
That great zoologist and writer the late Gerald Durrell described it in one of his books - except that the octopus was evidently very pleased by the attention it was getting
# Posted on July 22nd 2009 by lazyhound
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
… strange how memories pop up from many years ago.
# Posted on July 22nd 2009 by lazyhound
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
it's just that scratching a whole lot of horse hairs across a piece of wire to get a sound out of it seems extreme, difficult and weird and abrasive. (I'm talking about the fiddle, not the octopus by the way).
# Posted on July 22nd 2009 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
I think some people are better at certain instruments than others. Everyone has one instrument that they excel in. The flute was easiest for me to play over a few different instruments. I could never get the hang of guitar. My friend is a great fiddler, and she has extreme difficulty playing the flute. If you like the accordion better, and if you play better, then you should stick with that one.
# Posted on July 22nd 2009 by The Whistle Collector
Re: Much faster progress in learning Button Accordion than the Irish Pipes?
The button box is more like writing with a typewriter, while the pipes and fiddles are more like writing with a quill pen. The challenge with a button box is to make it sound more flexible, the challenge with fiddles and pipes is to give the sounds structure.
# Posted on July 25th 2009 by AlBrown