App Detail » ButtonBox - Button Accordion as an English Concertina

What's New

Found and fixed possible iOS4 crash.

App Description

ButtonBox is an easy to play, authentic-sounding, 3-reed bank Irish button accordion, commonly called a "button box", that is played using simple English Concertina fingerings. It has a fully chromatic range from D4 to C#6.

Based on extremely high quality individual audio samples of each note of the three banks of a top quality Irish button accordion. Each note sample is 3.5 seconds long.

The individual reed banks may be enabled or disabled, and combined for dry vs. wet tuning. The volume of each reed bank may be set independently.

Please visit the app website to see a live demonstration video that shows how the app is played and the sound of the three reed banks.

Touch the "?" icon to show all the button notes names while playing.

Touch the "i" icon to bring up the settings page. All settings saved when the app exits and restored next time it is run.

When Charles Wheatsone designed the English concertina, he set it up to match sheet music, one side is the notes between the lines and the other is the notes on the lines.

Because English concertinas play the same note both on a push or a pull of the bellows, it is a very easy instrument to play on the iPhone or iPod Touch. You simply touch the buttons on the screen to play the notes.

To play, hold the iPhone or iPod Touch between your thumb and little fingers of both hands, exactly like a real English concertina, and press the buttons with your index and middle fingers. Scale patterns alternate between the fingers of the right and left hands. Notes are higher in pitch as you move from the outside to the middle of the screen.

Multiple buttons may be pressed at the same time to play chords.

You may play along with the tunes on your iPhone or iPod Touch, just start the music before running ButtonBox. Using Apple's Settings app, you may configure your device to bring up the iPod music controls by double clicking the home button to change tracks within an album.

Audio samples graciously provided from an instrument owned by my friend John O'Hara.

App Changes

• June 24, 2011 New version 1.3
• November 28, 2012 Price decrease: $1.99 -> $0.99