English Concertina Course by Simon Thoumire. Fee $48 (approx £25). Buy this teaching course.

This is a 4 week intermediate course. It is aimed at players who have been playing for more than one year or feel confident in their handling of their concertina and don't need to look at their fingers when playing.

Course objectives:

• You will feel confident using your bellows
• You will be able to play different techniques including vibrato and advanced fingering
• You will be able to accompany yourself.
• Introduction to chord theory and modes.

Each lesson lasts approx 30 minutes (lesson details below) and the teaching videos and materials are available in our secure section. Access to the teaching streams will unlimited for 1 year. When you pay we will send you a link (with username and password) to our secure area of the site. We will contact you regularly with dates for the live text chats where you can chat to Simon and ask any questions.

Listen to FREE sample of Simon playing.

An acknowledged concertina virtuoso, Simon Thoumire has dazzled audiences with his playing all over his native country, Europe and the North America. A musician always keen to explore different genres, Simon has released many records over the years including 2 Simon Thoumire Orchestra CDs delving into jazz, folk and composition.

Lesson Plan
Lesson 1: We will look at Simon's tune My Love is Like a Red Red Rose and talk about techniques of vibrato, fingering and chords. We will also talk about different ways of hold the concertina. Here also is a pdf of the circle of 5ths which we will talk about for chords and a copy of My Love is Like a Red Red Rose with chords.

Lesson 2: We will look at the Scottish reel The St Kilda Wedding and concentrate on playing triplets using two fingers on the same button. We will also look at using the bellows to create triplets while playing a chords and bellows control.

Lesson 3: We will look at the Simon's tune Charliewarlie and extend what we were doing in lesson 2 working with 2 fingers to 1 note. We will then move on to playing in octaves, then harmonising the tune, and then doing a bellows accompaniment with chords. You can download the sheet of exercises here.

Lesson 4: We will look at a jig Simon wrote called The Bee Sting. It was written in the F lydian mode. We are going to accompany ourselves playing the tune and look at the fingering required to do this.

The 4 week course cost is Fee $48 (approx £25). Buy this teaching course.

Enter the concertina course secure area. If you have lost your password to get into the secure area please click here.

Simon is also offering one to one lessons via skype. Contact us for more details.

Download Simon's albums and books.

For our online teaching to work you will have to have Windows Media Player installed on your computer. This comes with Windows. If you are a Mac user you can download it here. You will also need a fast internet connection (adsl, broadband), and speakers connected to your computer so you can hear it (these can take the form of computer speakers (connected from your sound card) or headphones). These lessons are not downloaded to your computer - they are streamed from our internet servers. If you have any questions please contact us.