mdarnton

Are you talking about snuffing only the one reed, or toning down the whole instrument? I lined the grill of my metal-end Lachanel with dense foam supported by foam tape, and the tone of the whole thing was considerably improved, especially fat, close chords. If you are talking about a single reed, it seems like the closer you get to it with a damping material, the better. Perhaps even within the reed chamber.

I have been using phpBB (free) for about 10 years, and it's worked fine, but the availability old threads is an incredible resource, and I'd hate to lose that through the migration to some other forum platform! If there is a membership offered for $$, I will buy one.

https://reverb.com/news/new-cites-regulations-for-all-rosewood-species This is a noose that I think will continue to tighten.

The outer layer looks like Brazilian Rosewood of a quality that hasn't been available for quite some time. One sees it occasionally in old guitars. It is very regular in grain, and doesn't have the black streaks that are now inevitable. These days it's essentially illegal. The inside appears to be mahogany, but I'm not certain of that. If it's not, it might be sycamore, a British version of maple which is quite common and would be good for that job.In the photo I can't really get a fix on what I'm looking at. If I were doing this, I'd strip the rest of the veneer from both sides, glue on some currently-legal flashy wood, and go from there.

My piano teacher suggested that I forget playing and clap the rhythm when I was having problems. There's a whole book based on that method, but maybe you should try it on the tunes until you figure them out. It's always best to strip problems down to their essentials rather than having to do other things (fingering notes) at the same time. https://www.amazon.com/Studying-Rhythm-Anne-Carothers-Hall/dp/0136145205/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524577292&sr=1-2&keywords=studying+rhythm+hall

Is this a perception problem, like you don't know what to play from the notation, or a playing problem? If it's a playing problem, be sure to keep the metronome slow enough that you can keep up with it flawlessly. Speed comes with practice, once you get the notes and rhythm ground deeply into your head and fingers.

We are, of course, burning to know what the question was, nevermind the answer.

I was looking for a tune on YouTube, and stumbled on this page. https://www.musiclessons.com/youtube/watch?v=-svY5SjkVBk#about-youtube I haven't spent a lot of time on it, but it appears that you can search in the box at the top for a particular tune on YouTube, then a list of the possibilities is displayed on the resulting page. When you click on one, it's inserted into their player software. Find the beginning and end of a phrase you are working on, and it will loop it over and over for you to figure out, then you can set new limits and move to the next phrase.

I doubt it cost more to have a bunch of buttons, works, and reeds left out!

I don't think that button-pushers necessarily realize that wind instruments have the same flexibility in pitch as violins. Bending notes around to match what else is happening is standard and nearly unconscious.

I think that if you are interested in theory, you should treat it as a separate subject and dig into that independent of your concertina playing. It's an interesting subject, but can get deep and irrelevant quickly, unless you are composing. Playing, a lot of the theory has been done for you already, and whether or not you understand what's going on can be relatively irrelevant, and as Late says above, you'll stumble into what you really do need to know. That said, understanding what lies beneath what you're doing definitely helps appreciating what you are doing. Some things are as clear as glass, but you don't appreciate them until they're pointed out. I started concertina with a long background in music, and I started learning directly from written music. Now I am glad I did--it's opened some doors for me, both in terms of what I can do on my own now without having to hear things played first, and for playing opportunities, like the year or two I spend playing early music with a viol player, and quartets with some string players (both of which I never anticipated when I started concertina!)

Several of the photo forums I participate in (Leica and Large Format in particular) have special sections for regional coffee meetings, an informal meet on a Saturday morning every month or so. I suppose that we are all spread out too far to have critical mass in many locations, but thinking that this is not a bad idea, I wonder if there are any people in the Chicago area who'd be interested in such a thing, and where they might be. I live near LSD and Addison, and work in the Loop.

I just came back from a 20 year hiatus, and running through some scales, which I used to do, put me quickly back into shape remembering where the keys are. I often run a scale before playing a tune in a key I haven't used recently, too. So they're good to know. But that's not why I'm commenting. Back on the first page adrian said something solid gold that got blown over: what you should be practicing is the one bit that gives you trouble, over and over until you get it right, then blending it into the surrounding measures that aren't a problem until you gain the full line. Further, I learned from my professional classical musician friends, do a problem measure in different timings and speeds until you know it in your sleep. Then it's yours. If you practice a whole line 15 times and make the same mistake at the same spot every time, you aren't training yourself to play the tune: you're training yourself to make the mistake.