Accordion Page

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!!!!!! THERE IS NOW A LIVE PUBLIC CHAT ROOM AVAILABLE SCROWL DOWN !!!!!!

!!!!! NEW NEW NEW NEW !!!!!

There is now a Student MP3 page. You will find recordings made by students. Some are lessons some other songs. Click the Student MP3's link in the left panel.

Free Accordion Lessons:

That's right they are free, don't cost nuttin. I have taught accordion for over 40 years time to give something back. The accordion has lost popularity in the last 25 years. The electric guitar just about made the accordion disappear. But; it is still here. Some say the accordion teachers were partially responsible for it's decent. It is said the teachers would not teach rock on the accordion. Maybe so but; rock on the accordion just not cool. The accordion is very well suited to jazz - classical - cajun - european - musette (wet tuning) - and of course the old standby polkas. The accordion is one of those instruments that can stand alone. With the bass buttons you can be your own rhythm section. Now comes the Midi this has done more for the accordion than any other single event. Full blown midi accordions can sound like a complete band and I do mean complete. Myself I don't have midi although when I bought my last new accordion this year (2008) I seriously thought about it. I finally went with a double musette tuned accordion. I bought the Excelsior 911 one of the top of the line instruments. It all depends on what sound you like best.

!!!!!!!! NEW IDEA !!!!!!!!

HOW ABOUT A RECITAL BY YOU STUDENTS.

I would like to put together an audio mp3 of your playing. It does not matter if you are on lesson one or higher. If you record your song in mp3 - wav - wmv or whatever format and send it to me I will start to make a collection of your songs. Once I have at least three I will put them up here on the Free Accordion Page. Anyone can listen to them or download them just as you can on the selections I play and have up here. Hopefully you agree. You certainly do not have to play a song from the lessons; play any song you want. I think it would be interesting for all of us to hear the talents of the other students, especially me. It would be feedback for me to see how effective the lessons are. So far one student has put a YouTube vid up playing Wild Irish Eyes. It was well done.

If you want to be involved please send the following:

Your Name: The lesson you are on: The name of your song: The audio file of your song: and yes/no if I can put your name as the accordion player. If no I will simply put your audio in the collection without any name or info. I hope to see many songs also you can send more than one song if you wish.

WHAT DO YOU THINK: Send your song and info in an email and attach the song as an attachment to the email. HOPE TO HEAR FROM YOU. Duane

send to: w8eej@centurytel.net

What you will need for the Free Lessons:

The lessons consist of 2 files. A mp3 file and a .pdf file. I have them zipped up with Winzip. You will need Winzip ( to unzip them) and Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the .pdf file. The mp3 file is an explanation of each lesson that I recorded. The .pdf file is the lesson. The best way to use these lessons is to have a computer where you are going to practice the lesson. I found a laptop/notebook is ideal. If you do not have Acrobat Reader you can download it from my Download page (left side panel). Also you will find Winzip if you need to download that program. Any computer mp3 player will do just fine. Winamp is a very good one and is also on my Download page.

A little word about accordions to use. It is assumed you are going to use a piano key accordion. I know nothing about button accordions. You could use one but where the notes I have no idea. If you have a 12 bass (the smallest accordion) you can get by for about 15 - 17 lessons. At that point you will need an accordion with minor and seventh rows of bass buttons. I recommend a used 120 bass accordion to start. Be careful; if it smells musty then it was stored in a basement walk away immediately. Best to buy a used accordion from a reputable dealer; Accordion Heaven - Accordion O Rama just to name a few.

Below you will find the download buttons for the lessons. If you are new to the accordion be sure to start with Lesson One etc. I will be adding lessons as I get them recorded. Takes about 1 1/2 hours to get a lesson ready. So Good Luck and email if you have any questions.

NEW

This is a Live Chat Room. This is a Public Chat Room so everyone sees everyone else. This is a good place to meet others who are interested in the Accordion and/or taking the Free Accordion Lessons. You can setup schedules with others and meet in the chatroom. As stated this is a Public Chat Room so anyone in the room will be available. I will try to be available on Sundays at my local time 3 - 4 PM ESDT/EST U.S.A Eastern Time. This is brand new with software from Coffee Cup Software. It isn't fancy looking just gets the job done.

Hope to see you in the Chat Room - Duane

On the Download Page is a Free Metronome. Download tpsetup.exe and install it. You will have a Metronome that you can use as a timing guide when you are practicing/learning a new piece of music. Very easy to use and set for whatever tempo you want.

Also: Here is a link to an online metronome sent to me by a person in Ireland taking the lessons. I tried it out and it works just fine. The Link: http://www.metronomeonline.com/

Music Downloads. One of the best places I have found for sheet music downloads is the site Music For Accordions . This site has many songs some originals by their composers, some old standards. The music is graded from 1 to 10 in degree of difficulty. Grade 1 - 2 would be for students new to the accordion about 1year of lessons or at Lesson 25 (below lessons). The nice part of this site is if you click on one of the titles you will see a pdf file open with the first page of the music. You can print this out and try the song out (first page) and decide if you want to buy the song. They are default in Euro's but; you can click on USD if you are from the United States. Once you buy the song within 24 hours they send the song as a pdf to your email address. I have bought a dozen songs from them and they are 100% honest. Worth a try if you are looking for music other than those in your lessons.

Glossary: A new download is available. It is a 3 page Glossary of music and accordion terms and descriptions. Just click --- Glossary --- to down load the zipped up pdf file. There is a picture of the bass buttons with note names on them. Well worth the download for the information.

Music MP3 Downloads: I have added another feature to this page. I have had a few emails asking me to record some of my favorite songs and put them up for download. I have started this with one of my favorites the Italian song Anema e Core. Just below the Lesson links you will find a new download section for my recorded music. All songs have been recorded on a Roland Boss BR-600 (a digital recording studio). The rhythm (drums) are also from the BR-600 or from my Yamaha ESR E413 keyboard. The advantage of recording on the BR-600 is that each track (a max of 8) can be modified my adding Pan (sending the sound to either speaker or both) Equalizer (actually it compresses the sound so it doesn't have abnormal highs and lows) and Reverb (echo chamber effect from 0 - 100) plus many special effects. The BR-600 then masters all the recorded tracks into 2 stereo tracks that can be exported as a WAV file. I then convert the WAV file to a MP3 file (for size reduction of the file) and that is what you download.

PLAYING--DOWNLOADING INSTRUCTIONS: Just left click the song you want and your browser player will play the song. If you Right Click the song you will be able Save Link As to your computer. One last suggestion if you have a Surround Sound control on your speakers it would be best to turn this down or on at about a 9 o'clock position. Some speaker surround sound contorls can add distortion if turned up to high. I hope you find these songs (as I add them) enjoyable.

EXTRA MATERIAL: This is a new section to the web page. This will be for songs to download in .pdf and mp3 format. They will follow the lesson plan in as much as their presentation. These songs are not in the lesson books and are extra study material. The songs will be explained and demonstrated in the mp3 file. You will see suggested level in the lessons before you download one of these songs. New concepts will be discussed in these songs ie: added triplets - grace notes - adding harmony to the melody note etc. The idea is to have fun and add a bit of variety to your studies.

VIDEO PAGE :

""""""""" A SECOND VIDEO HAS BEEN UPLOADED --- MAINTENANCE """"""""

A Video Page has been added to the website (10-12-09). You will see in the left hand Link Panel a new link under Music it is Video Tutorial/Info. Click this link and you will be at the video page. As of this date I have one video of about 23mins on an introduction to the accordion. Hopefully this will help with the understanding of the accordion and it's workings. As I have time to complete further vids I will post them and make a note of it here. Hope you will enjoy the vids.

VIDEO DOWNLOADS:

I received emails stating that in some countries the bandwidth for a month is very limited. Watching one of my YouTube videos actually coming from YouTube uses up a considerable portion of their bandwidth allocation. I have taken the raw video of the YouTube videos and the raw video of the Tutorial videos and compressed them into Flash Video format (.flv). This greatly reduced the size of the files. The tutorial videos are still large due to the fact they are upwards of 25 mins. but; you can download them to your computer in this format. The hitch is you will need a flash video player installed in your computer. There is a FREE Flash Player available on the web from Applian Technologies. The url is below for the player:

http://www.applian.com/flvplayer/download_flv_player.php

Just download this program (2mb) install it then you can view .flv files directly on your computer. I downloaded this file and installed it and it works great. The video quality is a bit lower due to the high degree of compression of the .flv files but still very acceptable. I still had to zip up the .flv files so you could download them from this page. So as usual unzip them and you will end up with a flash file (.flv). Below is links to the current videos I have available. Hope this helps those with bandwidth limitations.

Email: w8eej@centurytel.net

!!!!! NEW NEW NEW NEW !!!!!

There is now a Student MP3 page. You will find recordings made by students. Some are lessons some other songs. Click the Student MP3's link in the left panel.