This year marks 50 years since ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with the song Waterloo. I don’t remember watching, though would have seen it with my parents. But I was extremely young, born only two years earlier. However in the following years I quickly adored ABBA music, though much else in the 1970s passed me by! As we got into the early 1980s, the last years of ABBA, I especially appreciated their later songs. And that love continued to the present day.
I thought I’d draw up a list of my top 10 favourite songs. Prompted by recent ABBA favourites lists, such as this one from the BBC’s Radio 2 and its listeners. It is incredibly hard to pin down just 10 favourite ABBA songs. But here are the 10 I’ve chosen. Not in order of preference, but in chronological order of release:
Thank You For The Music
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Angeleyes
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
The Winner Takes It All
Andante, Andante
The Way Old Friends Do
Head Over Heels
I Let the Music Speak
One Of Us
I can’t order the full top 10 by preference, but here are my top 3 favourite ABBA songs of all time that I can confidently pull out:
1st. Andante Andante
2nd. The Winner Takes It All
3rd. Knowing Me, Knowing You
Five years ago I was lucky to be able to visit the ABBA Museum in Stockholm. I would thoroughly recommend this to any fellow ABBA fans out there. Though allow plenty of time for your visit! There is so much to enjoy.
I’ve been working on an arrangement of this lovely tune for my accordion. Recording now up on SoundCloud with a link there to the sheet music PDF on my website. My neurological illness hands weren’t cooperating very well this afternoon but I managed to record it. Lovely tune.
I’ve played the accordion for 45 years, since age 4. But I haven’t been able to play it so much for the last 27 years, since my progressive neurological disease struck at age 22. But I do still play as I can, and it still gives me much pleasure. I’ve blogged here before about how I recently started arranging music for the accordion, using computer sheet music notation software.
One of the drawbacks of only playing intermittently is that it can be difficult to practice pieces enough, or to improve technique. But this year I want to make a conscious effort to work on my technique, using some of the Palmer-Hughes series of accordion tuition books. This is a series of books that gradually teaches accordion technique, increasing in difficulty as the series progresses. At the moment I am at roughly book 5 playing level in the Palmer-Hughes series. However there are skills developed in book 4 that I need to improve, and I hope to move ultimately on to book 6. So my plan is to carefully and systematically work through books 4, 5 and 6, allowing sufficient time for each tune/exercise, and repeating often enough to improve and consolidate my playing technique. When I got copies of the Palmer-Hughes books 4, 5 and 6 I was pleased to see that the tunes used for exercises are nicely arranged and fun to play, so this should be an enjoyable experience, as well as a useful exercise.
I’ve also bought a metronome, a wind-up mechanical one, very traditional in design, but unusually compact. I have a tendency in my playing to play erratically, playing easier parts faster and harder parts slower! The metronome should help me find a more regular tempo, not just in my music exercises, but also in my own arrangements.
The other recent purchase that will help a lot is a more compact second accordion that I bought over the Christmas period. This 48-bass German model is extremely lightweight, and will be easier for me to play sometimes when I’m weaker. It doesn’t have as wide a range of notes as my Italian 72-bass accordion that I’ve had since 1981. In particular it can’t play B chords or treble notes lower than bottom B. So it is a compromise. But it can play most of my tunes, including most of the exercises in the Palmer-Hughes books 4, 5 and 6 I am focusing on next.
So yes, fun times ahead, and hopefully some improvements in technique, which should also feed into my wider playing.
As a slight change of subject from my usual history musings I thought I’d write about something I’ve been trying recently for fun, relating to my musical side.
I’ve played the piano accordion for nearly 45 years, since I was 4. Later I learned violin at school, and taught myself piano, classical guitar, and most recently the concertina. Here is a picture of my accordion, that I’ve had since 1981.
Often I’d like to do different musical arrangements for the accordion, or have sheet music for something I play only by ear. But being useless at writing sheet music by hand I’ve never tried creating my own sheet music. Until now!
I realised I might be able to use sheet music notation software to enter music into the computer. So I tried various packages, in demo mode. The extremely popular package Sibelius didn’t work well for me. I just didn’t find it intuitive to use from a user interface viewpoint at all. However I got on very well with the also well-established software program Notion, which is available for Windows, Mac and iOS devices. Very quickly I was working well with it, so bought a full licence (one-off purchase for this version), for my Mac and also my iPad.
I’m pleased to say it’s going very well, and is helping me create some great new arrangements for my accordion. Sometimes I’m starting from existing sheet music, often a published piano/vocal/guitar (PVG) book. I want to tweak this for the accordion, changing the arrangement, but also giving a more compact form for me to have on my music stand. With accordion music you often only need the melody line with a note of accompanying chords, e.g. C, Am, D7 etc. This can be presented far more compactly than in a PVG-book. At other times I am transcribing music totally by ear, e.g. from memory, or by listening to an audio recording as on an album, where I have no existing sheet music.
In the Notion software music can be entered by keyboard, mouse/trackpad, or by playing on a linked MIDI keyboard (MIDI is a computer/audio interface system, that links computers to musical instruments). I bought a low cost mini MIDI keyboard controller, that I can play music on, into the software, or experiment on as I am trying to figure out the right notes when transcribing by ear. With this compact keyboard I can even hold it up vertically as I play, as in a piano accordion posture! The picture shows it with my 13” laptop for scale.
Much of my arranging work involves developing the harmonies on the right hand, and adjusting the chords on the left hand. Ideally I’d try every change out on my accordion, but because of my neurological illness I’m too weak to play that often. Thankfully the Notion software can play back sheet music to show what it will sound like, including chords. This often reveals problems with the current arrangement, which I can then tweak, and gives me a good impression of what it will sound like played on my squeezebox. I’ve even been able to set the software up with an Italian accordion sound, so it sounds even more like my own Italian accordion. Here is a recording of part of one of my arrangements, played back in the Notion sheet music software, using that sound effect. The tune is “Once Upon A December” from the film and stage musical Anastasia.
Arranging sheet music, whether totally by ear or tweaking an existing set of sheet music, feels very much like a gigantic logic puzzle. It’s something that I find tremendously satisfying to work on. It also, importantly, stretches my musical side. In this way I can improve the range of sheet music I have available when I am able to play my accordion. And have musical fun even when I’m not strong enough to play it. Long may it continue!
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