Anglo Piano Help

What is Anglo Piano?

If you play the Anglo concertina, you know that every tune is a new puzzle. I made Anglo Piano for several reasons...

• To explore tradeoffs between different layouts.
• To make discussing layouts easier.
• To make learning tunes easier. Hunting and pecking on a bisonoric keyboard is maddening!

How do I use it?

The Composer

The composer is a way for you to store selections of buttons in "frames" which you can then manually step through. To create a composition, click "create composition" and give your composition a title. Then, select some concertina buttons and click "create new frame" (or use Shift + S on your keyboard to create the frame). Then, select some other buttons, and create a new frame. Do this until your composition is finished.

Anglo Piano behaves slightly differently when the composer is open. Selecting a concertina button when the composer is open will select only that button and will not select all buttons that play the same note. You can still select all buttons that play a note by using the piano keyboard, if you want.

As you save frames to your composition's timeline, you might notice that they're blue, red, or half blue and half red. Blue frames contain only push notes. Red frames contain only pull notes. Half red/half blue frames contain both—in other words, they're unplayable on a real concertina.

Note that compositions can only be edited when their keyboard layout is selected. If you create your first frame on a 30-button Wheatstone layout, you can't switch to a 38-button Jeffries layout and create more frames in the same composition.

To "play" your composition, click the frame you'd like to start from, and then manually advance to the next frame by clicking the "next" button on the right of the timeline, or using the K key on your keyboard (J will take you to the previous frame).

You may be wondering why there's no "play" button that will keep automatically advancing to the next frame. The reason for this is: that would make the composer really complicated. There'd have to be a way to indicate how long a frame lasts, whether a note starts in one frame and ends in another... I don't really have any interest in reinventing music notation, or the General MIDI spec! Trust me, it's easier this way.

Once you've finished your composition, I strongly recommend exporting it to a file ("more" menu button beside the composition dropdown). Anglo Piano stores compositions in your browser's storage, so if you clear your cache, all your work will be wiped out. Exporting your compositions will allow you to recover them later in that event, and will also let you share them with other people.

More soon.