alex_holden

I recently made a pair of marionettes a la planchette (dancing puppets that a musician can operate with a string tied to their leg) depicting Queen Victoria and a Highland soldier. Here is a video that I made to show them off, including a rather clumsy performance of Scotland the Brave on my Lachenal English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABGOK8mYYbw And here is the full write up on my blog with photos and description of the puppets: http://alex-holden.livejournal.com/277198.html

I heard one of them say, I could have used a little more cowbell.

I was sawing up some wood in the garden just now when I noticed I had an audience: the herd of twenty or so cows in the next field were peering over the gate at me. So I grabbed my 'tina and treated them to a couple of tunes. They got a bit worried and ran up the field when I stepped up an octave, but they gradually wandered back and listened attentively for the remainder of the set. Wonder if they noticed I got a few notes wrong. I'm still waiting for the applause.

Fantastic stuff.

There's some ABC over here: http://thesession.org/tunes/7116 I'm guessing the temp page you found was the result of somebody pasting the ABC into this page: http://www.concertina.net/tunes_convert.html

Liam Robinson did a lovely version of this song on his second album, Muddy Banks. It's streamable on Spotify as well as for sale in the usual places.

I've also read that new traditional pads have a 'bedding in' period (a few days?) over which the seal gradually improves as the leather and felt conform to the shape of the hole.

With the traditional leather/felt/card composite pads, I'd be interested in experimenting with different types and thicknesses of leather and felt, and different glues. I bought some commercially made pads and the glue used to hold the layers together was very weak - several of them fell apart before or during installation. I tried gluing them back together with hide glue and found that although it stuck well, it soaked into the felt and made it very stiff, which caused those pads to not seal properly.

Loads of useful information there. Thank you Terry and David!

I'm pretty sure Swedish steel was more expensive in Britain; it was used in some applications because it was regarded as better quality than the native stuff. For the small quantity that went into a concertina, it may have been worth the extra cost just to be able to say to customers they were using the best available materials (regardless of whether there really was any detectable difference). If the Victorian reed profilers were wearing out files that quickly it must have been quite a significant expense. I wonder whether the files were supplied to outworkers by the company or if the workers had to buy them out of the payment received for completed work.

I held off on mentioning Young's Modulus of elasticity because I'm a bit fuzzy on the details myself. From what I've just read it only varies by a small amount with the carbon content and heat treatment of the steel. It does vary with temperature, though perhaps not enough to matter in our application. Yield strength is a different property, which does vary with the carbon content and heat treatment of the steel. Those reeds that Greg found took more force to change the set of will have had a higher yield strength. Harder materials have a greater yield strength. I would imagine that a reed with a higher yield strength might be less likely to lose its set over time; the disadvantage though of increasing the hardness is that also makes the material more brittle and hence more likely to break.

It was probably a high carbon spring steel, much like the stuff that clockmakers used for centuries in mainsprings, though the final characteristics depend to a large extent upon the hardening and tempering process. BTW you can file recycled old file steel (known to blacksmiths as OFS) if you anneal it in the forge first. Very interesting about Lachenal reeds being softer; perhaps they used a lower carbon steel to reduce the time their workers spent on profiling and make their files last longer (good fine-tooth files were extremely labour intensive to make because the teeth had to be cut by hand with a fine chisel!). Presumably Wheatstone and Jeffries had good reasons for using harder steel despite it being more difficult to work. Is it generally accepted that they have a 'better' tone or are louder or stay in tune longer or break less often?

OK. It has occurred to me that we're ignoring a variable: the stiffness of the steel used. This would vary depending on the exact alloy used (the percentage of carbon and other elements), how it was heat-treated, and it might even change during profiling and when the reed is played because of the work hardening effect. Before modern production techniques the alloy and heat treatment would have varied over a wider range than modern mass-produced stuff. That's not to say it was poorer quality, but it may have required some kind of sorting and selection process if you wanted to get consistent results. (On a side note, historically Swedish steel was reputedly 'better' than British steel because it was produced using charcoal rather than coke, which led to a lower sulphur content - the truth of this is somewhat debatable). Unfortunately I can't think of a non-destructive way to measure the stiffness of the steel used to make an existing reed! Do we even know if all the tongues in a given instrument were made from the exact same steel? Might there be some advantage to, for example, deliberately using a more or less stiff material for the reeds in a particular range of pitches?

Though I don't have much to contribute, I am following the thread with interest.

Very useful insights Dana, thanks a lot.

Assuming you aren't resting the instrument on your knee(s), the EC thumb straps place quite a bit of weight on muscles that don't normally get much use. When I first started they hurt after only a few minutes playing. After replacing the straps with ones that fit better and months of regular practice I can play for longer periods without thumb pain (though my practice sessions rarely last longer than half an hour without a break because my brain gets tired too!).

Excellent, thanks for that.

Mine is a very similar instrument, except I need to get around to making new ends for it because at some point the original wooden ends were replaced with ugly aluminium plates. I'll be studying your photos very closely when I do! The buttons are hollow with little nickel-silver caps soldered on. Quite a few of my button caps had fallen off, and several more came loose when I polished the buttons. I developed a couple of different techniques for replacing them. The easiest way seems to be to cut out oversize discs from thin nickel silver sheet with a jewellers' saw, solder them on, then carefully file off the excess, round off the corner on fine emery paper, and finally polish. Looking at your pictures, it looks like several of your buttons have suffered the same fault and have had metal plugs inserted into the holes instead of new caps.

What information are you looking for? The point at which a concertina becomes so leaky it's unplayable? I have a restoration project English here with extremely leaky bellows that only takes a second or two to close with no buttons pressed, but I am just about able to squeeze a (quiet) tune out of it by constantly pumping it in and out.

Can't do older and wiser, but with my slightly leaky 5-fold antique Lachenal bellows I got 23 seconds.

Firm of lawyers? No, bankers. "With your bonuses and expenses You shovelled down your throat Now you bit the hand that fed you Dear God I hope you choke"

Would that be the 1983 abridged edition that includes the controversial Whitsunday exemption clause in volume 19 appendix 23.7c?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I've never noticed a problem with exported MIDI files, it's playback within EasyABC that I've had trouble with. Looking forward to seeing the new version!

I'm using EasyABC on Mac (Lion) too. There are a couple of niggling problems with the MIDI output: it sometimes skips the first note of the tune (adding a single rest before the first bar works around this), and the output volume is really low. I keep meaning to dive into the Python source code to try to fix it.

Sorry, local vernacular leaked through, not pejorative... I was curious as to what it meant. This 'rooster' is planning to sell a range of cast brass concertina reed frames?