Customer Reviews

Mel Bay 100 Tunes For Piano Accordion

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If you're at the beginner/intermediate level, this is a good book to pick up on after you finish your Mel Bay Deluxe Accordion Method book. ;)

I've only mastered (well, learned, anyway) a couple of the songs, but 100 songs for this price ain't bad.

This book is a wonderful collection: cover-to-cover old-timey tunes that (some) people still like to dance to. Most of them are reels for square dancing and jigs, with a few hornpipes and strathspeys thrown into the mix. Key signatures range from C (no sharps or flats) to E (four sharps) on one end to B-flat (two flats) on the other. The tunes are not complicated, but several of them have chord sequences that can surprise you. There are no troublesome two-note harmonies to worry about--just the straight melodies. I like to flip through the pages to practice sight reading. If I find one I really like, I'll add in the left hand and work on it.

So this book is good in more than one way. You can learn tunes from it. You can practice sight reading. If you enjoy playing folk music, or if you have a friend who plays in a string band at square dances, you can probably find some familiar tunes in it. Learn those and practice with the band. I guarantee that your squeeze box sound will add something unusual to what would otherwise be just another square dance band.