A New Design of Handle for The Concertina

I first saw and heard a concertina when I might have been 8 at a demonstration of folk dancing at a country fair. I even remember one of the dances, it was Dargason. Even then it seemed to me that the way the instrument was held was crazy, an ergonomic nightmare. And when I look around now at my fellow players and see what a variety of thumb and wrist problems they have, and the wrist supports they wear and straps they put onto their instruments, I see that there is indeed a problem. My first thoughts of something better were of the palm of the hand resting on a wooden mushroom, but when I actually got an instrument and started playing it half a century later, that didn't seem very sensible.

I went through all sorts of trial shapes, found them wrong and groped my way to better, I won't bore you with my blind alleys - sometimes what I thought was a mistake turned out to be a good thing. One unexpected thing I found was that my hands seemed to have a life of their own. I may have planned a shape to work in a particular way, but I soon found that my hands worked out for themselves the best way of playing the instrument given that handle shape, completely disregarding the way I had planned to use it. In the end I made use of this phenomenon by carving a shape, seeing what my hands made of it, and used that as the test of whether my idea was a good one. The handle I describe here is about mark VI. Previous versions which you may have seen at Kilve, Swaledale '98, and the 1999 AGM were different in small ways which nevertheless make a considerable difference.

In the end I came back to what I should have thought of in the first place. The starting points are very simple.

If you pull the instrument open by either the traditional thumb straps or the thumb-holes of my design, then natural forces keep the two end-plates near-enough parallel. But when you push shut by just the thumb supports, the instrument folds as much as the bellows allow. Therefore it is only on the push stroke that you need any support, and here in a way, I have come back to my original idea of a mushroom. On the push-stroke zones D & E of Fig. 3/4 fit into the centre of the palm of the hand.

I wanted to be able to play the instrument while standing, as players for Morris do, though now I realise that most players actually rest the concertina on their knees. But I also want to be able to play standing up, or sitting down without resting it on my knees. I play with the instrument hanging from a strap round my neck and just brushing my front or 2 or 3 centimetres clear of me, and my forearms horizontal, as in PicA. My instrument weighs 1.5 Kgs with the handles, and 1.2 Kgs by itself.

The crosspiece A (Fig1/2 and Fig 3/4) was created by glueing in a separate bit of wood with the grain at right angles to the main handle and I had orginally planned it to carry the weight of the instrument on the web of flesh between the thumb and the palm of the hand. But now that I hang the instrument from my neck, the weight of the forearms is carried by the thumb in its hole and the main value of the crosspiece A is now giving the thumb something to pull against to hold the instrument steady. Contrary to what you might think there is no problem of the thumb getting in the way of the fingers.

On the push stroke only some weight is also carried on zone E, which pushes and squeeezes the concertina forwards and upwards. This is good because human flesh does not like unvarying forces, it prefers to have a rest, a break, to let the blood flow.

And this sets the scene for how play standing up or sitting in an upright posture without resting it on my knees. Steve Dickinson suggested I should carry the weight on a camera-type neck strap (I found an elastic strap was harder to play with than a fixed-length one because with the instrument bouncing up and down, I was never quite sure where to put my fingers to hit the notes I wanted) and so I hang the concertina by the attachments shown in the drawings (Fig1/2, Fig2. I have adjusted the length of the neck strap so the concertina hangs at elbow height, and the concertina naturally tends to swing in towards my front. I put out my arms and the resulting force seats the handle in the palm of my hands.

The location of the attachment point is surprisingly critical. By trial and error I found that the positions shown gives a good balance between putting the weight at the thumb side of the hand and the little finger side. Looked at from the left side it is between 1 and 2 o'clock. Only afterwards did I realise that this was the rational engineering solution: One of the problems of the concertina is that the traditional thumb straps are behind the centre of gravity of the instrument, which is on the centre-line of the instrument, and my handle is even further back from the centre-line. When the instrument is held up at these places it naturally tends to roll or droop forwards. To hang the concertina at this point is to hang it on a line which passes through the centre of gravity and so creates no rolling force.

Looking at Fig1/2, "1) General view", the cross-piece A rests on the web of flesh between the palm and the thumb. The thumb goes through the thumb-hole B and the end of the thumb is bent at about 60 degrees to hold onto the thumb-rest C. This is comfortable. (About 50% of the population can bend the middle joint of their thumb and 50% can't. I can't.)

Looking at Fig1/2, "2) Side view of handle" shows the handle as it would be seen by a person standing at the player's left. The first knuckles are beyond the front edge of the handle, so the fingers have complete freedom to move and play any note.

Looking at Fig3/4, "3 Elbow view of handle" shows the handle as it would be seen looking along the player's forearm from his left elbow. The crosssections are all turned to the left and show how deeply zone D must be carved away to make space for the fleshy part of the thumb - see PicD. The "crest line" is shown dotted, it marks the boundary between the concave zone D and the convex zone E. It is important to carve or sand away so that all parts of the hand touch the handle firmly without either slack or point loads. The resulting friction gives a firm feel to the handle.

Fig3/4, "4 Handle attachment" show how brass sheet (available from hardware shops as "Brass door finger plate") can be used to attach the handle to the concertina. You may have to design something different for your concertina; for my Wheatstone treble I cut the brass sheet as shown (not to scale) and bent it up. The brass support is about as thick as the fittings for the thumb-loop and the little finger slide and I used the same screws in the same holes to screw the supports to the frontboard. I had to be carefull, some of these holes go right down into the body of the concertina and can take strain and some screw just into the concertina frontboard and can't take strain: it would be easy to put a force onto the brass plate which it could not take, forgetting that the frontboard is much weaker. The back screw goes down into one of the bolt holes along the flat of the hexagon which holds the instrument together. PicB gives a general view.

My handle is very comfortable to hold, and it has a very natural feel to play. I think this is a worthwhile advantage, we shouldn't wear hair shirts needlessly. No matter what we may say about suffering for our art, I am sure we will all do more practice and playing with an instrument which is more comfortable to hold. I am only a learner, but I think I play better with this handle. The obvious musical advantage is that it frees the little finger. We can then have one finger for one row of buttons, how wonderfully simple and rational! And for many pieces it works out just like that. But in real life, it is more complicated, - and better! The little finger, being so much shorter, is often useful when two neighbouring notes on row 3, ie a fifth apart, have to be played in quick succession, so that in the opening of "We wish you a merry Christmas", the little finger naturally takes the nearer note. I have not tried to set up the handle so that the little fingers can reach the top of the keyboard, they are short fingers and that has to be accepted, but they do reach those crucial notes, upper F# and C# on the left hand and C# and G# on the right, and the right little finger can reach right across the bottom of the keyboard, so I can play the violin tuning-up sequence G-D-a-e" using the little finger for the G and using each other finger in turn for the other buttons.

I have not felt a need for a strap round the back of the hand, though I see no obstacle to fitting one if wanted. The thumb can pull more strongly enough near its root than it can near its tip with the traditional thumbloops, and of course on the push stroke the palm of the hand can push better than the thumb and little finger. So I have better control of the bellows and I can play more rhythmically than players who rely on thumbloops.

One of the features of the human hand, which makes it different from the hands of monkeys and apes, is that it has an "opposable thumb". This means that things can be grasped between thumb and fingers. We want the fingers to work the buttons when we play the concertina, but we can get a thumb-grip of another kind by having the thumb close towards the palm, pulling the palm of the hand onto the handle and pulling crosspiece A onto the web of flesh between thumb and palm. Grip is very good.

I can only play simple chords so far, but that is because I am a new player and that is all I have learned to do yet, I think this handle makes it easier to play chords. PicC gives a view of the playing position.

All this has obviously been designed around the needs of an English treble, but the ideas should be useful for other types. Part of my reason for writing this is the hope that people will see my argument, question what they had previously just accepted, put their own minds to it, improve it further , which I am sure is possible. For myself I'm well pleased with what I've got and even though improvement is possible, I've decided I prefer playing to woodcarving and I've settled for what I've got. I have carved my handle by hand to meet my own needs (I take a metric size 10 glove). Few could take that trouble. About 6 standard shoes sizes cover the range of human foot sizes, and I suppose 6 handle sizes would cover the range of hand sizes. If standard brass supports are used, then the need to vary forward-to-back position could be met by putting packing of varying thickness between the support and the handle and the need to vary height could be met by putting the screws into the handle at different heights. And only the surfaces which touch flesh and take load are actually doing work, the rest could be cut away like a Henry Moore statue to save weight. I leave these things to others. I can supply plaster casts if wanted.