Mally's Traditional Music Store

Irish Music on the D/G Melodeon

At first sight, it would appear that the D/G melodeon is unsuitable for Irish music. The instrument doesn't have all musical notes and there are barely any serious players using the system. Only the notes of the scale of C, minus F natural, plus F# and C# are available (ignoring optional accidental buttons). This facet of the instrument renders most keys unplayable. Fortunately, the unplayable keys hardly ever crop up, neither do many awkward accidentals. In actual fact the melodeon is very suited to Irish music because its limited range falls naturally into that of the tradition. It has a similar range to the tin whistle, unkeyed wooden flute and uilleann pipes.

The melodeon lends itself extremely well to the keys commonly used in Irish music which, in some sort of order of popularity, are:

The above is an extremely rough guide; because of the existence of duplicated notes, row crossing for smoother bellows operation is often employed.

The notes tend to be "squeezed inwards" in the circle of fifths. The note F natural rarely occurs. The key of Am is almost always dorian mode where F is sharp rather than natural, as in mainstream music. Em occurs in both dorian and aeolian modes, no trouble, both C and C# are found on the melodeon. Many A tunes are mixolydian mode making use of the flattened seventh G natural. Bm tunes almost always occur in the aeolian mode meaning once again G is natural. The keys of C and Dm hardly ever occur. Often G#s occurring in the key of A are often unimportant enough to be left out.