Hi my name is Aron Radford and I'm a Weissenborn player from the UK who has been playing the weissenborn for just over two years and in that time I have recorded and released a Weissenborn relaxation EP "Elemental Weissenborn" and an album full of original Weissenborn instrumentals called "My Weissenborn Journey - The Singles". I also happen to be the creator and administrator of the dedicated Weissenborn Facebook page "The Weissenborn Information Exchange". One of the reasons I started the weissenborn information exchange was to create a hub of weissenborn related material and information to share with like minded people and newcomers to the instrument. When I first started to learn this wonderful instrument I was suddenly aware of the lack of tablature for weissenborn. This Is a subject I have discussed many times since with beginners and here is what I tell them, forget it :-( weissenborn tabs are the rarest of things, why so? Well a few reasons firstly every tab ever written is breaking copyright laws (unless you wrote the tune yourself), it is simply against the law to tab someone's else's song without permission. This is why you don't find any tabs on line for popular Weissenborn artists and their songs. You will however find many classic and old time tunes tabbed because the copyright has lapsed over many many years. Troy Brenningmeyer's wonderful lessons are a great example of this, his lessons focus on mainly copyright free tunes which inevitably are traditional songs many years old. For him to get the copyright permissions to tab current people's work is neigh on impossibly and ultimately not cost effective to do as a business. There are however a few exceptions out there. One is for the original artist to tab his own tune and put it out there to share. The best example of this is Thomas Oliver who has tabbed two of his songs ("The Moment" & more recently "Let It Not Be Lost") and shared then freely with whom ever asks for them. Another thing you don't realise is just how difficult and time consuming it is to accurately tab an entire tune, believe me I have done this many many times for private use and perhaps this is why many busy artists haven't the time or inclination to do so. 

 

Learning someone else's tune is a very rewarding thing to do, it helps you understand the mechanics of the instrument and how the writer thinks. It opens you up to new sounds and styles that begin to form and underpin your whole technique and future style. When you've learned several tunes you start seeing patterns and combinations that work well together and then you start improvising around them and before you know it you've written your own tune. 

 

So for what's it's worth I am throwing my hat in the ring and offering up an original  weissenborn tab and lesson on how to play my favourite piece of music that I have written and recorded, "Autumn Reprise" (formerly "Autumn Smile"). This song was recorded about a year ago and included on my CD "My Weissenborn Journey - The Singles" and was a moment of clarity when everything just came together at once. It was a piece I always wanted to rerecord in the studio one day (as it had its sonic flaws) and earlier this year I did just that and released in on ITunes. However I didn't have anything written down from the original as it was totally improvised. So I faithfully tabbed the whole piece from start to finish which took many hours. This tab I used in the studio as a guide and now it is something I can pass on for whom ever may be interested in learning it. The single "Autumn Reprise" by Aron Radford is available on iTunes as I mentioned so have a listen and if you like it join me on my upcoming video lessons where I will be showing you how to play it. Thanks for watching 👍