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.

Whoa! Learn something new every day.

Ahh, man, the idea that cnet would ever allow a thread to be tidily concluded...

Oh, I see. Yes, all affected tabs are in the background (unfocused, in my parlance). As I understand push alerts, they're specifically to send OS-level alerts to your device, and they don't require any polling to be done (hence "push"), but I'm not an expert here. Anyway, the only notifications I have enabled are email and "notification list," which shows a count of unread messages on the bell icon in the site header and will occasionally display toasts like "DaveRo has replied" on a thread page. I'm assuming it's the notification list that's doing the polling. There's no explicit setting labeled "automatic polling," and I haven't changed any of the default settings. I suppose I could turn off the notification list notifications, but I actually like them. My script above lets me keep that but prevents the pause icon from showing up. I see now why they added it: when you have notification list enabled, and you receive a notification, it adds the unread count to the page title. So I think the well-intentioned devs wanted to communicate "this count may be inaccurate," but unfortunately without following any established conventions or offering any explanation, folks like me are going to wonder why the site is attempting to play media.

Any browser, according to Invision. And nope, I don't have push or browser alerts enabled. It only happens on tabs that have been inactive for a while, but I'm not manually backgrounding anything; perhaps Firefox is more aggressive about this by default. I can't be the only Firefox user in all cnet, can I?

It's confounding! But on the off chance others are seeing it, and are annoyed and savvy enough to want to do something about it, I made a Greasemonkey script to keep the page titles from changing.

No relevant options in the context menu. And, when I switch to a tab that has the pause icon on it, the pause icon goes away. It's like cnet begins an audiostream (which it can apparently do when the tab doesn't have focus) but can't end it until I focus the tab. It doesn't seem to be anything to do with my OS, version of FF, or cache, because this happens consistently between my macbooks (plural, Monterey and Big Sur) and my Win10 PC. Possibly could have something to do with an extension I've installed; I'll open a few cnet pages in private tabs and see if that does anything. To be honest, I'm not even sure this is related to audio. YouTube and other sites that play a/v content get the word "playing" under the title, and give me the option to mute the tab, but I've never seen pause anywhere else, not even when I open an mp3 file directly in the browser. I suspect it has something in common with what's being described here, and as that was 2019, I've little hope it'll be resolved. Seems like one of those "lol, who uses Firefox anymore, anyway?"-type bugs. I was hoping someone knew of an account setting buried somewhere that would prevent cnet from trying to play notification sounds, but that didn't work on the thread linked above, and anyway, the option seems to be missing from the current version of the forum software we're running. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Edit: the plot thickens! I noticed that if I hover over the (unfocused) tab, the full page title displays in a tooltip. The icon, if it even is an icon (seems kind of chunky to be a pause icon, now that I look closer; maybe it's a pair of unicode characters not rendering correctly?), appears in that tooltip, indicating that it's somehow part of the actual page title. Edit 2: so, the forum software is definitely prepending this to the page title for some reason. If I right-click the unfocused tab and bookmark it, I have the opportunity to copy the page title without focusing the tab, and this is what I get: ❚❚ Why not more "expressive" bellows changes on the English? - Page 3 - General Concertina Discussion - Concertina.net Discussion Forums So... problem diagnosed! But why would it be doing this? * * * Edit 3 (SOLVED): apparently this is something the invision devs implemented on purpose to indicate that the page is no longer polling in the background. I think this is an extremely odd choice, but... okay! (And yes, I edited the title of this thread so you all can see how it looks to me)

On cnet tabs that I've had open for a while, a "pause" icon will inevitably show up next to the title. I gather the site is telling my browser—Firefox—that it's playing a sound (new post notifications, maybe?), but I've never heard a peep. I don't want to block cnet from playing sounds at the browser level because I'll often play embedded videos, but I wonder if anyone knows how to get it to stop this behavior. Edit to add: cnet is the only site I regularly visit that does this. It happens on my other computer too. I generally know what I'm doing and have already turned it off and back on again. Shibboleet! Edit 2: this is likely the same issue as this one—and, zounds, it's interfering with people's bluetooth hearing aids! Edit 3: it's nothing to do with sound. It's the forum software, apparently working as intended. See my next post.

Wim Wakker once posted a detailed explanation of how raised ends are not purely aesthetic, but result in a purer sound due to less acoustic reflection:

Well done, both! @TehRazorBack, if you haven't seen the cartoon, I highly recommend checking it out. It's an autumn tradition for me now. You won't find a better Dante adaptation.

Dave Weinstein here on cnet has a G/D "drop d" concertina. I'd be interested to hear him weigh in on this. Here's a C/G layout with the G row shifted down an octave. It's true that playing the "standard" chord shapes results in inversions, but a lot of the un-inverted chords are still playable (albeit with different fingerings) on the left hand. Personally, I think having had some experience with Anglo made it easier to get up and running with melodeon, but the two are pretty much entirely separate in my brain. If I pick up my Anglo intending to play a tune I usually play on melodeon, I have a moment of "wait, how does this go again? why isn't it in my fingers?" before I realize what's wrong.