alex_holden

I'm keen to do Zelda too.

Love the carving and inlays on the ends.

The commercial electronic concertina that I'm designing will be built around a Raspberry Pi (at least in the first prototype), combined with some custom electronics to do the keyboard scanning, pressure sensing, MIDI out and high quality analogue audio out (the built in audio out jack on the Pi is pretty low-fi). I also have an idea that it might be possible to plug a USB WiFi dongle into the Pi and use it to send MIDI data wirelessly to a PC using something like JACK.

Good point. There is such variation in tone and other factors (e.g. action noise) between different concertinas that it would be nice (eventually) to have a selection of different fonts to choose from. I think we should aim for the best quality samples we can manage though, regardless of the quality of the instrument being sampled. I wonder if SoundFont velocity layers are sufficient to accurately represent concertina dynamics. My understanding is that their intended function is to play different samples depending on how hard you hit a key. What happens with a MIDI concertina if you press a button when the bellows are still (so the velocity is 0 and the synthesiser chooses the sample for the lowest velocity available if it does anything at all), then while holding the button down you gradually increase the bellows pressure up to the maximum level and the concertina generates a series of channel pressure messages telling the synthesiser about the increasing pressure. Can software synthesisers switch between velocity layers in response to channel pressure messages or do they simply control the amplitude?

Great summary, Don. The default SoundFont that comes with Quicktime on the Mac isn't great either. What I've been doing to get better sound out of something that I've composed in EasyABC is to export it to a MIDI file and then either play it back in VLC (somewhere in the preferences you can tell it what SoundFont to use - under the hood it uses the Open Source FluidSynth synthesiser) or using FluidSynth on the command line to render it to a Wav file then Lame to compress it to mp3.

Exactly, if the samples need tweaking a bit before use then 24 bits gives us more headroom to do so without losing too much quality. I suppose recording at higher sample rates would have the same benefit, particularly if we have to change the pitch of any out-of-tune samples, even if we decide to downsample them to CD quality before putting them into the SoundFont. My understanding is that the samples in SoundFonts aren't compressed at all - they are just PCM data. Not all synthesisers support 24 bit samples, but 16 bit synths should just ignore the extra data. My ideal would be to use an Open Source editor that supports Mac/Linux/Windows. There are a couple that look promising, Polyphone and Swami Project. I've yet to get either working on my Mac yet though - I'll have another play this evening after I get back from work.

AIUI you need a sound file (typically wav) per sample, though the person recording the instrument need not be the one to spend hours clipping the recording session up into individual samples. I would suggest recording and working with the samples at 24 bits if we can. Most SoundFont editors and the latest version of the SoundFont file format support 24 bit samples, which gives much greater dynamic range (whether your synthesiser can do anything useful with the extra 8 bits is another question!). I'm not so sure about the optimal sample rate, though I would say CD quality at a minimum.

I'm very interested in collaborating on the concertina Soundfont project, providing the result is licensed such that it can be included with a future commercial product I'm designing. Something like Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike would be ideal. I haven't made a sound font before but am very keen to learn. It seems to me that a really good sound font is going to be crucial to the success of any electronic concertina. I've already done a little bit of reading about how they are created and the software that is available to do it, but I lack either a high-end instrument or professional quality recording equipment to record the samples.

Have you experimented with different reed switches? They come in a range of sensitivities.

Looks pretty cool. It must have cost a fortune to develop; hope it's a success in the market.

Very interesting article, thanks for that Jordan. I am at the design stage in a similar project and have been planning to use a very similar arrangement of reed switches under the action board with magnets attached to the pads. From what I have read they are very reliable, reasonably cheap, low power and easier to interface to than either hall effect or optos.

Look under the General tab in the preferences.

Thanks Terry, that system sounds really interesting, for a rough first pass at least. You hit on another issue I've found with trying to both sound the instrument and note down the errors myself - the tendency to subconsciously adjust the bellows pressure slightly to bend the error closer to 0. To stop myself doing this I had been considering sounding all the notes blind into a recorder, then playing back the recording into the tuning software. As you say, unisonoric instruments would be a bit of an issue. Perhaps a foot pedal input that you use to switch between two 'banks' of notes whenever you change bellows direction?

By "auto" do you mean the type of meter that guesses what note is being played (with controls for reference pitch and temperament) and tells you the error? FWIW the tuning work I've done so far is with a cheap but good Mac program called Katsura Strobe Tuner. It seems to work very well, though I think I'm now going to have to add the intervals for 1/5 comma Meantone to its temperament list! The thing that for me would speed up the process the most is a way to note down the error value for each reed without having to put the concertina down and pick it up again between each note. I tried recording the process and speaking the errors out loud, then playing back the recording and transcribing them, but it wasn't really much faster overall. How do others deal with that issue? Recruit an assistant?

What is the opposite of 'sweet' when referring to how well two notes harmonise? Bitter?

I love the interplay of fiddle and concertina tone in this recording by Blyde Lasses: https://soundcloud.com/blyde-lasses/spencies-tunes?in=blyde-lasses/sets/frances-wilkins-and-claire

ABC: X:1 L:1/8 M:C K:C ^DE c2 z2 FE | ^D>B-B2 z4 | ^DE/c/-c z z It sounds vaguely familiar but I can't place it.

I stand corrected. Not encountered blue painter's tape before.

If this is the same stuff we call 'masking tape' in the UK, watch out for it becoming difficult to remove after it has been in place for more than a few days.

Did she have Seven Sisters?

No problem, I agree it is a very misleading ad. Hopefully Google will review it if enough people block it.

When you see a Google banner ad you don't like, mouse over the top right corner of it and you should see an 'X' button with "Don't show this ad again" under it. Click on the button and you should stop seeing that particular ad (presumably you need to have cookies enabled for this to work).

I was wandering around absent-mindedly humming Jim's tune and thinking, "what is that from?" when the lyrics suddenly popped into my head. Regarding the age test, it's from something that was made about a decade before I was born…

I was teasing a bit, but actually it would be really cool.

Have you recorded it? I'd like to hear that.