A colleague at work has an old Hohner 5-row with like 80-something bass keys that she dug up and lent me to noodle around on. It’s in excellent shape, and the tuning sounds dry. I’m having a blast just trying to play scales across all those rows. I don’t have the good fortune to play with many box players, and I’ve certainly never seen one of these big chromatics at a session. Can Irish be played on them? Can it be played well?
So far, I’ve manged to play Hector the Hero. Painfully slow. Hats off to box players. This thing is so cool, if not authentic for Irish.
Sticking to flute, Mike
Hi Mike,
can you tell us what keys the rows are?
My understanding of a 5-row is that you’d have every note on there somewhere, because the rows would be something like: D G C F B.
It doesn’t work like that Martin - a “continental chromatic” isn’t a melodeon with 5 rows. Think of it as a piano accordion with buttons instead of piano keys. Here’s a diagram of one of the more common systems.
Mike, it’s rare to see these boxes in Irish music. But given that Irish music can (“can” in big bold letters) be played well on a piano accordion (“PA”), there’s no reason why the same can’t be done on a box like your friend’s. Once you have the keyboard figured out, I think it’s a better system than a PA in several respects (not so much hand travel, easy transposition…). More info at http://www.accordionpage.com/diskant.html
You’d face the same challenges that a PA player does - not overpowering the other instruments, and getting a good swing going.
One person who plays one is John Chambers, he of the famous ABC tune finder website. I think he plays a lot of stuff besides Irish though.
Steve
Eek! That thing gives me a headache!
Having seen 3 row melodeons, I thought a 5 row was just two more rows on top, to complete the circle of fifths, or something… 
Happily 2 rows are enough for me for now.
IIRC Anders Trabjerg started out playing CBA but took up C#/D when he started playing Irish music.
The keyboard layout is as Steve posted, a system called C-Griff I believe (as opposed to B-Griff). I think it has something to do with where the scale starts on the inside and outside rows. Until I found that same keyboard layout on-line last night, it was very difficult to get my bearings on the thing. The inside two rows are redundant, so just allow easier fingering for certain passages. It’s really cool how intuitively the keys are arranged, despite how insane it all looks. And transposing is “easy”, because you play the same shape, just starting out in different places.
OK, I realize that this is not news to box players, but wow, this is fun.
Best, Mike
Actually someone brought a 5-row CBA into a session I was at a few weeks ago. After he played a couple of solo tunes I leaned over and whispered into the ear of another C#/D player, “It’s good to be reminded of why we struggle with our diatonics..”
You know, in body piercing circles, a PA is something quite different. I have to snicker every time I see that abbreviation used to mean an accordion.
Continental chromatic boxes are way cool. Someday I want to get one and learn my way around it. With a free bass converter, you have the range of a piano right there on your lap – you can play Debussy on the thing if you want.
The only time i’ve ever actually seen one played in person was a solo concert by the Malagasy musician Regis Gizavo. I mean completely solo, the whole concert was just him. He played all of this complex polyrhythmic stuff on this big box and sang over it at the same time. Very cool.
Maria Kalaniemi, from Finland, plays one too. She plays some of the most beautiful accordion music I’ve heard.
Definitely unusual, but then again, other than fiddle, harp and pipes, there was a point in time when pretty much every instrument was foreign to the tradition. Instruments like CBAs while not common in the Tradition, are close enough to instruments in the tradition that you are more likely to get flack from the B/C and C#/D accordion players, not the other musicians. This of course depends on you play it. Just remember, 60 years ago, players like Paddy O’Brien and Sonny Brogan were being shut out of sessions because they played the B/C accordion… Now they are legends. Not saying you will be a legend, but you can always give it a try. Though one thing, if you ever show up at one of the sessions I play at with a midi accordion.. well that I think is stretching things too far 
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Bill