The Five by Five Button Rectangle

An Approach to Practice

Five rows across, five buttons down for an octave, and five fingers.

As you progress from using three fingers on the outside three rows of button, you add the additional two fingers.  Then you begin using buttons to the left of the outside three rows. Eventually you get to play across all of the rows without an emphasis on the outside rows.

You achieve this by trying different fingering positions and discovering some combinations that make a section of music easier to play. The six-row CBA, dugmetara or Serbian accordion, duplicates the outside three rows as the inside three rows. So your practice can expand left from the outside rows as well as expand right from the inside rows.

The Music

The Folk Dance Musings is a wonderful and extensive collection of dance instruction that also include dance videos and often links to sheet music.

The following link is their page for the Moldavian dance Ostropat.

http://folkdancemusings.blogspot.com/2015/09/ostropat-moldova.html

The music: Ostropat, a Moldavian folk dance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmxCui7lSOE

The sheet music: Ostropat, a Moldavian folk dance
http://ifdo.ca/~seymour/midipage/ostropat.pdf

The dance: Ostropat, a Moldavian folk dance by Dunav

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHhvHEZ6iE

The Practice

Within the first eight measures you come across accidentals on five of the seven notes in the scale: E, F, A, B, and C. The piece is in D-minor with four repeated sections, of which the second is in F-Major.

As you work through the piece, several keyboard rules come to mind as you try to stay on track with the notes.

• Minor thirds are along a vertical row.
• Half-steps are one button away to one side, but two buttons away on the other side.
• Whole-steps are two buttons away on one side, but one button away on the other side.
• Some notes serve as anchor notes as you play other notes around this anchor note. I found that the note "A" often served as a useful anchor button.
• Often the notes of a chord shape serve as a collection of anchor buttons. Using the chord symbol to play the chord shape for each measure helps to settle the finger positions for a measure and set up the finger position for the next measure.

The Result

Gradually you become more confident playing across the rows as well as down the rows.