Steve Schulteis

For my previous attempt at a MIDI concertina, I used a load cell as the bellows sensor. I found that it responded too slowly compared to an acoustic instrument. I know that the "right" way to do it would be to use an actual bellows with a pressure or air flow sensor, but I'd like to find something a little more budget friendly. So after a lot of brainstorming and testing, I have the wacky device shown in the video bellow. It's still at a pretty early stage, but I haven't run into any show-stopper problems yet.

Yes, you can treat D# and Eb as the same note. If you ever choose to get an instrument that's not in equal temperament, then they're different, but that's a whole other can of worms. Seeing the options is exactly why it's worthwhile to do this sort of thing yourself. Besides finding the easiest path, it's also good to look for ways to play each scale just on the draw and just on the push to the extent that that's possible. It's useful for phrasing as well as enabling different harmonies. Personally, I'd focus more on playing an octave higher (so, that right hand). But it certainly won't hurt to know what you're doing with the low notes too, so have fun either way!

What's your recording setup? It sounds like you have mics on either side of the concertina and they're panned all the way to opposite sides of the stereo mix. I imagine that works pretty well when listening with close-spaced speakers, but today I'm using headphones and it's a little odd. Great playing though, and a pleasure to listen to even with the headphones.

I'd encourage you to work out the fingering for other scales yourself. It's not too hard to look up the notes in the scale you want to play and cross-reference them with anglopiano.com. F, Bb, and A would be good major scales to try next.

Typically you'll want the melody mostly on the right hand for harmonic-style pieces. There are exceptions, but an entirely left hand melody limits your options for harmony. It's definitely worthwhile to learn the basics of staff notation and music theory. If you search YouTube, there are loads of half hour videos that introduce both.

I'm no expert or teacher - this is just how I got started, as best as I can remember. Just focus on hitting all the right buttons together. Forget about which ones are melody and which are harmony. Forget about rhythm. Pause on each group of notes for as long as it takes to find the next group. You're just trying to get the feel for moving between those groups of buttons. After you start to get comfortable with that, then begin thinking about the rhythm. Aim for steady playing, and go as slow as necessary to achieve this. With practice, you'll pick up speed. It can also help to work on the left hand by itself. Pay attention to the repeated chord and rhythm patterns (3-45, 3-45, ..., oom-pah, oom-pah) and when they change. Thinking about things in bigger units like that can help lighten the mental load. It's also a path to begin thinking about melody and harmony more independently. Give yourself time. I recall spending at least two or three weeks working on some of those early harmonic-style tunes, and I probably still wasn't as good at them as I'd be after an hour now.

I think they need to rig up some amp distortion a la Musik Böhmer!

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.

If you really want to get pedantic about it, there are very few people playing instruments that are truly period-correct for the Renaissance. Ren faires tend to be pretty heavy on anachronisms anyway. You do have to draw a line somewhere if you want to preserve the character of the event, and I can sympathize with that. But to claim that the line is genuine historical authenticity strikes me as a bit suspect. Ah well. Randy, this seems like a good opportunity to say thanks for your contributions here. You (and many others on this forum) have certainly helped move my story forward.

Everything David said is spot on. As a more specific answer to your final question about a better learner instrument, my advice is to watch the buy/sell section of this forum. You'll need to do some research ahead of time (and try some instruments in person if you can) to know what you're looking for, but every now and then a really good deal comes around. I'd still look to spend over $1000 to get a proper upgrade, but you can get a lot more for your money if you're patient.

I really like mandolin with concertina for some tunes. Its percussive attack and rapid decay is a nice addition to the concertina's more steady sound.

For another comparison along those lines, look at the history of video game consoles. Within each generation the most successful console rarely, if ever, has the best specs. Other factors, like cost, being first to market, or having a popular exclusive game, are generally more important. And sometimes specs do matter, but not the ones you think: the Gameboy dominated the portable market for over a decade, in part because it had significantly longer battery life than its numerous "better" competitors with higher resolution backlit color screens and faster processors.

I'm guessing the prime offenders for you are D#/Eb and G#/Ab, which don't exist at all on the Elise. The Elise is a starter instrument, and these gaps in its range aren't present on other Hayden concertinas. It's unlikely that you'll find much music arranged with the specific idiosyncrasies of the Elise in mind. So one option is just to upgrade. Aside from that, there are some workarounds. If you're playing solo, transposing the entire piece to a different key where you do have all of the correct notes is usually the best solution. For notes that do exist, but only in the wrong octave, simply shifting that note (and perhaps the entire phrase that contains it) by an octave is a solid option. Sometimes you can just leave the problem note out entirely, although it sounds like that won't work well for the specific case you have in mind. You can also try replacing the missing note with something else, but what works best is going to be situational, so try different things and see what you like.

Absolutely true. When I switched from C/G Anglo to G/D, I spent some time practicing with this app: https://completemusicreadingtrainer.com I quickly became more competent reading music for G/D than I ever was on the C/G. That's not to say I'm great now, but I am better!

Are you asking if the USB output could be connected to a device with the 5 pin DIN connector? If so, the answer is no. If you're asking about having a second output that drives the old school serial midi connector, I didn't do that, but there's no reason you couldn't as long as you have another I/O pin to allocate for it.

I'm pretty sure the board I'm using has enough I/O to support up to 42 buttons, even with the display and setup button taking three pins. The RX and TX pins can be configured as regular digital I/O, since the serial device for debugging is over USB. Using USB for midi frees up another pin as well. What have you arrived at for your compression curve? Mine is ok, but it could probably be better. Thanks, I'll mess with my offset blocks and see if I can improve the feel. The Pro Micro that I'm using does everything over the same USB port, and I haven't found it to be a problem. To the contrary, it's actually quite convenient. I can keep Garage Band open in the background while reprogramming the device, and I only need the one cable.

Howard, thanks again for sharing your work - it made it a cinch to slap together my own version. My source code and other design files are shared in kind at https://github.com/schult/anglo-midi. I opted for USB-MIDI, since it provides a convenient power source and I don't have anything with the old DIN connector anyway. I realized I had enough I/O pins to drop the demuxer chip. I've only included thirty buttons, but there's room for more, especially if I drop one or both of my toggle switches. I also dropped the OLED display, which I may yet regret. I figured I could do things like transposing and such on the receiving side, but a lot of software lacks those features and setting up a chain of apps to process the data stream is an extra hassle. We'll see how much of a stumbling block that is. Now I'm thinking about how to do a slightly nicer version while keeping it budget-friendly...

Pretty much. Since I'm reading for G/D, I keep the top staff in actual pitch and adjust the bottom staff, but that's just details. I also make use of Gary Coover tabs, since the best fingering pattern for a note may not be obvious until you get to a later note and realize you need to make an awkward leap or bellows change. When I tab out a song with two staves, I arrange the tabs around the top staff, right hand above and left below (i.e. between the staves) without regard for which staff the notes are on. In the standard notation, top staff gets the melody, and bottom staff gets all harmony voices.

I play G/D, so this is more theoretical, but for C/G Anglo, I like the idea of treble and bass clef, both an octave low. That puts the range for each hand pretty neatly on its own staff with minimal ledger lines. On G/D, I often use a treble and octave treble staff. I can learn from anything you listed, but I can't sight read very well. Slow melodies in familiar keys are fine, but much more than that will require some practice for me to play nicely.

If you look under the ignored username, there should be a list of content types that are blocked (posts, messages, signature, and/or mentions). You can also click the gear icon under their name to adjust this setting. So the answer to your question is "it depends". I just checked, and it does work correctly for me, at least for posts.

It's still there. Click on your username in the top-right, then click on the "Ignored Users" entry in the menu that pops up. That should take you to a page where you can enter usernames to ignore.

I was also wondering about the orientation of the load cell. You have it arranged vertically (when holding the concertina normally), but I'm wondering if it makes more sense to turn it 90 degrees so it lays parallel to the ground. It looks like things are flexing a bit in that direction in your video.

Howard, I love the simplicity of your build. It looks like a very budget-friendly setup, and my impression is that it strikes a good balance between cost and function. Obviously it doesn't perfectly replicate the feel of an acoustic concertina, but in my opinion that's a nice-to-have feature and not essential to the purpose of a midi instrument. Would you be willing to share details of your design, like source code or links to specific electronic components?

Multiple ways to go with this. Typically either contact cement or hot hide glue would be used, but there are other options. The glue you choose will determine the process and tools that you use. There are plenty of good tutorials on YouTube. No matter what, the surface needs to be flat. You may find that the corners of the ends are slightly rounded over, and it will take a lot of (careful!) sanding to make everything even. My approach to the holes is to ignore them while veneering, then drill through the veneer with a sharp brad point bit that's close to the final size, using the original hole on the back as a guide. Make sure you have a sacrificial piece firmly secured to the face to prevent tearout. Then follow up with small files or a dremel to get all the way back to the original hole size. Again, be careful! It's very easy to take a hole out of round this way. Plan out the order you're going to veneer the faces in. For example, you should do the hexagonal faces of the ends last, so that you don't see the edge of the veneer on the sides. Do some veneering on practice pieces before you attempt it on your concertina. You want to be confident that it will go right before you have to get it right.

That is what I was suggesting. I'd also recommend the same change elsewhere. Play around with different options and let your ears be your guide. If spelling the chord differently isn't working, try a different chord, starting with the I, V, IV, and vi (G, D, C, and Bm in the key of G major). Since you asked, I'll keep going with my suggestions, but first I want to say that I think it's awesome that you worked this up on your own and that you're listening to feedback. I know that the review process can be really focussed on the negative, and that can get discouraging, but I think that what you're doing here is great. Also, I'm just fumbling around here myself, and what I'm aiming at may be different from what you want to accomplish with your arrangement - there's more than one way to skin this cat. The arrangement of the D7 chord in the last line has some rocky spots for me. For the most part I'd probably drop the seventh and just play a D chord. Where you use LH-pull 9 and 5 (particularly in the second measure of that line), I'd pick buttons 5 and 7 instead. The push notes are tricky, because you're missing most of the notes for a D chord on the push. They're mostly on the "pah" beats, and for those you could stick with LH buttons 5 and 7 on the push, which sounds ok to my ears. That could be problematic if you have other instruments playing harmony, though. At this point, a lot of my changes have led to a more boring harmony. I'd probably follow up by trying different things to add some spice. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, maybe just a different chord spelling here or there, or a minor chord at a key moment. Maybe a few more chord changes in general. Or a different rhythmic style for a few bars. Or maybe it's fine as is. Sometimes a basic harmony is a good thing. Unrelated to the music, you use left-hand buttons 8 and 7 on the push in the harmony a lot. I find 5 and 7 to be an easier combination to hit in most cases. Your mileage may vary.