Luke Hillman

A clothespin would probably do the trick...

Congrats! It seems, as with the stock market, once you've heard of a new thing, it's already too late 😬

@Morgana you didn't mention how many buttons you were looking for or how many your current Lachenal has. If you've got a 30-button Lachenal and just prefer the Jeffries accidental layout, you might be able to take your current instrument to a repair person and have its layout altered.

I have admired the "art deco" model ever since I learned about Carroll Concertinas. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I just want to eat it. 🤨 ...I mean play it! Brains are so weird, ha ha!

Hi Joachim, Thanks for your message. I'm glad the tutorials are helpful! To generate the graphics, I'm actually using some custom software I've written. It still needs some work, but I intend to release it publicly in the near future. I'll respond to your private message shortly. -Luke

Sir, I'll remind you this forum is full of concertinists.

I'm not Gary, but I can take a crack at helping him out with some customer support There are more numbers than notes on the staff because the staff usually shows the melody only. The other numbers shown are the buttons for the accompanying chords and harmonies. This will become clearer if you listen to one of the examples on YouTube that correspond to the tune you're looking at. The dashes you see do indicate that a note should be held. Those dashes are applied to harmonic notes not shown on the staff. They terminate under the melody note where you should stop holding them, similar to the way lyrics are often notated. Not sure what you mean about numbers above and below the horizontal line (which indicates a pull). If you're talking about the numbers below the staff itself, that means those buttons are on the left-hand side. If you mean the chord symbols (e.g., Dm and G7 in his graphic above), those are just the names of the chords you're playing; they're there for convenience. They're useful when you start recognizing them, but you can ignore them for now.

I think it would be rad if there were a thumb wheel on each side that would allow you to bend the pitch up or down. They would probably need to be spring-loaded to return themselves to the neutral position when not in use. I do hope you or one of the other talented engineers here produces a viable midi concertina one of these days. Such a device would seriously simplify my tutorial production workflow. To say nothing of being able to practice with headphones

And it's just arrived! My PC can read it just fine. It's a fascinating piece of web history — the html pages were created long before we had any accessibility standards; the typeface is tiny and the videos are low-res and open in a separate window (remember how amazing it was when we started being able to embed videos in pages?) — but the content hasn't aged a bit, and is a great intro to the Irish style of playing. I'm looking forward to spending a lot more time with it. Thank you, @Joe G.! And Leah for the writeup. Indeed, I performed the arcane ritual magick of "copying the files to a flash drive" to view on my macbook Yeah, it's a shame that madfortrad dot com now belongs to some boring marketing company that doesn't seem to understand that their domain name ought to have something to do with their business... I dunno, maybe I'm missing something. 🤷‍♂️

Assuming the extra six buttons are one button placed on the inside of each row, which is what I think I've seen, then yes. It would likely be the same placement as on a 40-button Wheatstone layout.

I'd be thrilled to take it off your hands. I've neglected learning anything about ornamentation, and this sounds like a good resource. I even have an external CD drive AND a USB-C adapter!

Hi Hilda, As David said, if you transcribe your layout, you can get a link to paste here. The layout should stay in your layout dropdown menu without you needing to do anything (if you ever clear your cookies/cache, it will be deleted, so it's a good idea to save the link either here or in your bookmarks). If you're asking about including it in the big list of Anglo layouts, I actually included several non-Anglo layouts in the "just for fun" section, so by all means, send it on over!

Welcome to the forum! Copying-and-pasting (and lightly editing) my response from the other site for posterity: I'll add the disclaimer that I don't play a ton of Irish trad music, so others here will have better advice. Also, this recent thread will be of interest.

Looks like a Scholer. But to be honest there isn't much difference between mid-20th c. German-made concertinas of this general type. I haven't seen the snipped corner design on a hexagonal one before, though.

Reading back through the thread, I do feel, as a total layman, that Mr Wakker's explanation was dismissed rather quickly. I can fully believe that the "lowered rims" approach does affect sound and also that there are multiple ways of achieving raised ends which don't actually lower rims. As he's an academic as well as a rather prolific maker, I'm inclined to trust him when he says of his own creations that there's a difference measurable on a sound analyzer, and that untrained ears aren't likely to hear a difference. Next time I talk to him I'll ask if he's published anything on the topic. Nothing wrong with purely aesthetic ones, though, and no argument that they look cool. But even fretwork serves a functional purpose in allowing more or less sound to escape, and if the choice is between an acoustically optimal utilitarian design and a slightly-less-optimal design that's also a work of visual art, I know which one I'd choose.