Luke Hillman

Thanks Geoff, this is a great resource, especially the comprehensive diagram showing tunings relative to each other.

Hi John, at the moment, Anglo Piano is only set up to support the tunings in the treble range (lowest supported note is D2). I do plan to add support for lower tunings eventually. For the time being, if you're finding Anglo Piano useful, you could transpose your layout up an octave as you work on it. The technical reason for the current limitation is that I wanted to support encoding a layout in a URL so it would be shareable without a database. I had just enough characters to do that for the treble range (A-Z, a-z, 0-9). I have a workaround that I'm planning to implement later this year. Thanks for mentioning this—always nice to know how people are using it!

I, too, would be interested to hear from folks in the know. I'm on Mr. Wakker's list and hoping my name will come up sometime this year. Most of his concertinas I've seen in the wild or on YouTube are either English or Haydens.

Honestly, I don't think she's arguing that Morris *is* slightly racist, old and white. If the perception—however inaccurate—exists, it should be okay to talk about it, especially to draw attention to the ways it's evolved in the past hundred years. Any tradition that's been around hundreds of years is going to have a fairly intricate history. My own team found it necessary to publish an anti-racism statement a couple years ago. I thought it was a good article. Admittedly, Boss Morris is maybe a bit on one end of the avant-garde Morris spectrum (if you've seen the mockumentary Morris: A Life With Bells On, you know what a serious accusation that can be)!

Oh hey! If you play Anglo, I made a tutorial for Orange in Bloom, based on @adrian brown's arrangement: The origins of Morris are shrouded in the mists of time, and traditionally it was a men's dance, but there are plenty of women's or mixed teams today. The team in the article at the top of this thread is an amazing women's team.

And if you haven't seen the team profiled in the article, here they are in the well-publicized Wet Leg music video: I'm embarrassed that my own team, Berkeley Morris, is so fusty and traditional by comparison.

I love organic, leafy scrollwork for bellows paper and for fretwork. Hard to get a sense of the scale from that pic, though; I agree it might be on the large side for bellows papers. Check out this design from @Jake Middleton-Metcalfe: https://wolvertonconcertinas.com/advanced-model/#jp-carousel-429

My thinking exactly, but that was in the OP. Theo's corrections make much more sense to me.

I don't know anything about flutina tuning, but it's interesting that the G# in the upper octaves would be left out. Here's your layout on Anglo Piano—maybe helpful to have some audio feedback. I took a guess at the octaves. You can also edit the layout and transpose it if necessary.

Hi Bob, I started out with Anglo Concertina in Harmonic Style and it was a wonderful introduction. What works for me might not work for everyone, but @gcoover and his books are very well respected on this forum. I treat myself to a new one every year or so!

When I broke my right wrist and was wearing a cast, I had to improvise a strap system for Morris performances. What ended up working for me was using the Anglo hand strap screws to pierce a smaller piece of fabric to serve as an attachment point for a banjo strap I had lying around (you could use anything; even a yard of nylon webbing from your local fabric store would be fine). In my case, I also had to remove one of the hand straps and replace it with a more complicated piece of webbing to fit around the cast and stabilize my hold. I wish I had a better picture to illustrate, but this is all I've got:

The Beaumont is an accordion-reeded hybrid. All the Morse-branded instruments sound something like that, and the lower the tuning, the more accordion-like they sound. Depending what sort of concertina you want to start with, you can probably find a used Morse Ceili (their Anglo) pretty easily, and I know there are some Beaumonts floating around out there too. The intermediate-level Concertina Connection instruments are also hybrids and sound similar. They make a 42-key Hayden in addition to their Anglo and English models. Here's a sample:

Last time I was in his shop, @Kimric had a Wakker tutor or two. You might check with him: https://www.smythesaccordioncenter.com/

I'm sure the same can be said of many, if not most of us I certainly am not planning to compromise on the finer details in my next purchase. YOLO, as they say!

Late to the party, but I also recommend the Clover. When I got mine in 2015, it was the only intermediate option made by the Concertina Connection. I just got the standard one; only choices of wood I had were "natural" or "ebonized". General consensus (I won't speak for everyone) seems to be that wood choice is mainly aesthetic and doesn't affect the sound. I've found this to be the case when trying out other concertinas, myself. The main differences I can detect are between wooden-ended and metal-ended concertinas, though there are a lot of factors that go into the tone. I've tried a Minstrel, and while it's light-years better than the Rochelle, it's still very noticeably not as nice of an instrument to play as the Clover—which is exactly as expected, for the price. I can't speak to the actual internals because I haven't had a chance to open one up, but the action feels quicker and more solid on the Clover, and to my ear the Clover has a more traditional concertina-like sound, though it's got accordion reeds as well.

This part sounds like the "Striso" duet prototype (I think its manuals are fixed, but it's easy to see how the design could accommodate a rocking hinge for Anglo players):

Oops. Welp, I'm informed now. Thanks David!

Backpacks designed for camera equipment work well. They are rigid and have reconfigurable dividers and padding, which, with some care, can allow you to ditch the hard case entirely. I use a Lowepro Flipside 200 backpack (the predecessor of this one), and it will fit a concertina sans case and a few other small items. For longer trips, or ones where I'm carrying a concertina and a small melodeon, I use this one, which also has a dedicated laptop sleeve. Of course, my goal has always been ease of carrying. If your goal is stealth, your mileage may vary. Nothing says "expensive stuff!!!" like a nice camera backpack.

At the risk of going off-topic, it is extremely fascinating to me to read through the US Harmonized Tariff docs for musical instruments. I would love to have some insight into the history that causes piano accordions to be duty free, vs., for example, the 2.9% levied on brass instruments. The general pattern seems to be that any specific instrument they list in the code gets to be duty free, but anything not listed gets a tax (the amount of the tax seeming incredibly arbitrary to the layman). But the really interesting cases are where there are specific instruments that get a tax. Makes me wonder if there are less-than-savory social reasons for taxing certain instruments—cymbals are free, but drums are 4.8%? What?! If there are any trade historians here, or anyone who works at US Customs, I'm all ears.

Having traveled internationally a number of times with my concertina, nobody's ever asked me about it, other than airport security sometimes wanting a closer look. If you don't volunteer any information, I doubt anyone will think to question you.

Thanks to everyone who's responded so far, particularly @Little John for the easily comprehensible explanations. It seems like the best practice is to either use A = 440 as the reference note for the whole keyboard, or to shift everything so A is 440 Hz whatever the reference note. @Steve Schulteis, the temperament calculation video is a great explanation, thanks for the link. Aha, I was wondering how folks were handling the different enharmonics! And, Adrian, some time ago, I actually downloaded your video and chopped it up so I could overlay your examples onto each other and hear the two temperaments simultaneously—it was the only way my untrained ear could hear the difference! I didn't save it, alas, but it definitely helped me understand what was going on.

Good question -- I don't know! I suppose, if so, that you'd want the whole keyboard tuned that way, instead of using different reference tones for each row...? I had assumed that the playing styles most likely to benefit from meantone temperament are ones that make heavy use of harmonies and chords, which is not something I think of when I think of Irish music, though I've heard—can't remember where—that quarter-comma is popular among Irish concertinists. Irish isn't my scene, though, so I'll wait for someone more knowledgeable to explain.

I just ran into some fascinating questions on another forum as I was trying to get my head around how to calculate frequencies for a 1/4-comma meantone scale given a reference note. Since Anglos have two "home" keys... Which reference note would I use? on a C/G Anglo, would I use C as the reference for the whole thing? OR, would I use C for the C row, and G for the G row? OR would I use C for the C row and THEN use the C row's G as the reference note for the G row? Or something else? and what about the accidental row? Is there some standard way of tuning an Anglo to 1/4-comma? Or does everyone have their own preferred way?

After a more-or-less careful analysis of my own playing, I think I've mostly figured out a workable system. I figured it was a good idea to start with the tried-and-true Jeffries 38b layout and make slight adjustments. Coming from the Wheatstone layout, the things on the right-hand side I'd really miss if I migrated to a Jeffries system are the pull Bb5-A5-G5-F5 run the push C#5 the push A5 The first two are present on Jeffries, but they're shifted to the right by one button relative to Wheatstone, which is maddening. So my solution is to simply shift the accidental row left by one button space, which should be possible since the standard 38b layout has a gap on the top row of both hands. I've also moved the right-most button on the second row of the right-hand side (F5/E5) up to the accidental row to keep it in closer proximity to everything else. I'm calling it the "Jeffstone" layout, and the only thing that will take some getting used to is the lack of a push A5. Adding in Adrian's obviously good modifications yields the "Brownified Jeffstone" layout: I'm not 100% sure this is what I'm going with, but it's a strong contender.

I'll add to this thread that I also use MuseScore for learning tunes. It allows you to import PDF sheet music, with varying degrees of success, which it can then play back for you, or which you can save as a midi or mp3 file (it'll also work in reverse, generating sheet music from a midi file). The interface is more geared toward people who read and write music, but it's well worth checking out if this is a feature that would be useful for you. And it's free! I used to use Finale for a similar purpose, but it's expensive and I've completely switched over to MuseScore in recent years.