Combination Of Steel/brass Reeds

[scott fineran]

There is a Bb/F Lachenal concertina on ebay at the moment and it says that it has a combination of steel and brass reeds. Has anybody come across this before? I was lead to believe that they are usually one or the other and that steel is generally the better sounding/proforming material.

 

Would this mean that some of the reeds have been replaced over time with different materials? How would the different materials combine together? I would have thought that they would sound a little different.

[stuart estell]

Earlier this year I borrowed a very elderly (and slightly dilapidated) Wheatstone treble English, which had originally had a complete set of brass reeds, but through time a few of the reeds had been replaced with steel.

 

I have no other experience of this sort of "combination setup" that I can draw on, but in this instance, the steel spoke very noticeably more loudly than the brass, meaning that the instrument was really quite hard to control.

 

Cheers

Stuart

[Alan Day]

Unfortunately Brass reeds age harden ,become brittle and snap off,these are usually replaced with steel ones ,which is obviously the case with this one.

As Scott says the reeds do play differently and I would suspect if a number of reeds have already broken you could expect more to go.This must be taken into consideration on your bidding price.

Brass reeds are considerably softer in tone to steel and are better for singing with , if you had that in mind.

Regards

Alan