Hi. I'm looking for a Bb lachenal or Jones concetina. It doesn't have to be anything special as long as the reeds are ok. Does anyone know of any for sale or where i might find one? Any help would be great. Thanks
Sean

By Bb do you mean an Ab/Eb instrument?


Theo's got one here http://theboxplace.co.uk/boxshop-concertinas.htm

I would think he's more likely to mean Bb/F

Yep sorry. I mean Ab/Eb. I saw that one alright. Lovely. Kind of looking for something that might need a bit of work.

The owner (I'm selling it on consignment) is keen to sell so feel free to make me an offer.

Em well at the moment i've only about 450 pounds to spare. What would be the lowest price, without case or anything like that?

Ah, so it's an Ab Eb Bb?

In Irish music terms, a C/G Anglo is "concert pitch", i.e. it plays across the rows in D. If you play an Ab/Eb in that D fingering, it plays in Bb, hence "a Bb concertina".

It's all Irish to me

Dave

So the Irish would call a C/G a D?

They would also call a "E"-"B" sequence on English concertina "Tricky" and ask "What is the correct cross row fingering in D?".

Yes...

My fiddle is also in D unless I tune it down to B or up to Eb. Conversations with non-Irish players can be confusing at best.

To anyone with some experience tuning/repairing, if one had a set of reeds in say A/E or Ab/Eb, would it require much retuning to have the concertina play in the same tuning as a set of pipes? If I had a B box, Id be playing primarily with a piper with a B set, but there would be differences in tuning on some notes. Has anyone tuned a concertina to the pipes?

I think Irish-English musical terms are wonderful. Its the only language where triplets can have two, three or four notes.

Eg a "four note-triplet" which in other versions of English isn't a triplet at all but a four-note ornament. Even a three note triplet (Irish-English usage) is not a triplet in the sense commonly understood in other versions of English, of three notes played in the time that would normally be occupied by two notes, but it is a three-note ornament.


Reminds me of Humpty-Dumpty

Like I said, they'd usually describe it as "concert pitch", which signifies the key of D. For that matter, a certain well-known concertina player, now deceased, who used to teach at the Willie Clancy Summer School, was wont to tell those who asked him that his C/G concertina was in G and D, as that's what he played it in! You can imagine the confusion that that caused...

Mind you, the correct English name of the old 8-keyed timber flute, still used by Irish musicians, is "concert flute", and the six-finger note of that is D.


Yes, it can and has been done, and isn't such a huge job once you've got the measure of the tuning of the pipes. But the concertina might not be much use for anything else...


I'm reminded of how, in the Irish language, the word "cúpla" means "a few", rather than just "a couple" (= two), so if you ask an Irish person for "a couple" of something (in English), they're likely to ask how many you want because of this...

A few months ago I had an email debate with a member of thesession.org about the keys of the instruments used on certain concertina recordings. To help settle the matter, I corresponded with Tim Collins, who confirmed that the borrowed instrument Edel Fox calls an Eb concertina on her recording is the very same instrument Tim calls a C#/G# on his own recording.

Just the other day I noticed that the concertina Michelle Mulcahy plays on Notes from the Heart is described as an Eb instrument ... it's obviously another C#/G#. Her dad plays a D/D# accordion (using C#/D fingering, of course ).

I can understand this if I think about it enough ... but it is confusing!

And a certain extremely well-known player has been known to play an Ab/Eb in Eb...


Whilst some of the old players were quite adept at playing them in D on occasion, and others might play one in F.

Stephen,
Amazing how much Ulster English is influenced by Irish! (Or is Irish influenced by Ulster English?)
For me, "a couple" is also an indefinite, small quantity. My father (from Co. Derry) would sometimes even expand the vagueness to "a couple or three". This would always be less than "a wheen" of something.

But what really gets me is the American musician's vocabulary. Searching the Internet for information on what trombone to buy for my son - should it have an F-attachment (a thumb valve that lowers the basic pitch to make some slide movements easier) or not, I corresponded with a US forum contributor who recomended a "straight horn" (meaning a trombone with no F-attachment).
I couldn't help wondering how this guy would have designated and English post-horn ... which IS a horn and IS straight ...

Cheers,
John