Hi there Barry, great to see you at NEFFA last month. What you have sounds like the Hohner Corona III that I used to play for several years before getting my Salterelle about 15 years ago. These three-row instruments are the usual choice of Tex-Mex players like Flaco Jimenez et al, and are sometimes been used in Zydeco as well. In either of those cases the players find their scales and riffs by zig-zagging across all three rows instead of going along a single row in the way the instrument was originally designed to be played. This cross-row style of playing means that you don't have work the bellows in and out nearly as much as you do in the along-the-row style. For the English music that I generally play - which does involve a lot of bellows reversals - I eventually found the three-row a bit cumbersome and slow to respond. It's great for rock'n'roll, though!

However, since a three-row is what you have, there is no reason at all why you shouldn't be able to pick out the kind of tunes you want to learn. Or were you thinking about song accompaniment? The only book I know of catering for beginners on English-style 'melodeon' is Roger Watson's "Handbook for Melodeon", which still seems to be available from various music shops and Amazon. This is for G/D instruments, but if you forget about the 'A' row for the time being it will at least get you started. The other thing to do (what I did in the first place) is to try and pick out a few tunes that you already have in your head, using one row only, purely by a process of trial and error.

You can get to grips with row-crossing when you've got the basics of along-the-row playing. John Kirkpatrick's tutorial DVDs start with the first lesson demonstrated exclusively on a one-row instrument before branching out on to a two-row.

I suppose since no-one else seems to have brought out a diatonic accordion / melodeon tutor that goes beyond the Watson entry-level guide, I should think about it myself sometime. Hmmmm......