Richard Mellish

Unwatchable, as far as I am concerned, because of the extraneous clicking on the soundtrack.

I think we need to pursue the nature of the slowness. Does it take too much force to push a button down? Once a button is down, does it take longer than you expect for the sound to start? Are some notes slower than others?

Those reed frames look a bit wider than normal ones and are certainly much longer, longer even than necessary for their fixing screws. They must contribute a lot of weight. But there are marks in the wood which look like normal slots that have been filled in. Any ideas how that came about?

On the face of it, adding buttons that (with ET) would be duplicates is wasteful; but that is exactly what happens on an Anglo, maintaining the pattern of notes on both rows; and on a 39- or 40-key instrument there are many duplications. I don't play English, but I presume a player expects to find the sharps and flats adjacent to the naturals.

That would be difficult wIth my system, which sends an analogue control voltage to an off-the-shelf MIDI controller; but if you have a microprocessor doing the clever stuff a simple look-up table should do the job.

And all done without CAD.

I assume that the original and fundamental reason for a (conventional English-style construction) concertina to have reed chambers at all is that there has to be some way of providing a path for the air between the pad hole and the reed that keeps it separate from the air flow to/from all the other reeds. But once you've got chambers at all, their volume will inevitably have some influence on the sound. Although the Helmholtz resonance of a typical reed chamber must be much higher than the fundamental frequency of the reed, it could have a progressively greater effect on the higher harmonics. Makers would not have gone to the additional complexity of building and installing angled reed pans, thus allowing the lower reeds to have larger chambers than would be possible with parallel reed pans, if that did not provide a significant benefit. All of that could apply to either radial or parallel reed layouts. It is hard to see how those different layouts in themselves would make much difference to the sound, though arranging the reeds to have chambers according to their pitches might be easier with radial. However there are several other factors that certainly do influence the sound and I wonder whether those may explain the OP's preferences.

One of the Anglos that was built to my order has what would be the last top button on the right-hand end moved to the innermost row for that very reason. I have been meaning to post the layout and I may get round to it eventually.

I have a hexagonal horizontal case, which I was using for a while for my Wheatstone G-D Anglo. I eventually stopped using it because it is bulkier and much heavier than the cubical steel case that came with that concertina. I forget whether I have told its story here before. A young woman had made it for her concertina but found she had made it too small and needed to start again. At a concertina weekend she offered it for the cost of materials, which I think was £30, and I bought it. I couldn't refer anyone interested to her because I immediately lost her details. An additional reason for preferring the original steel case is that it has blocks, which are absent from the wooden one: see pictures. It is disappointing that the only responses to the OP were praise, with no-one saying "Yes please, make one for me". His website https://www.alladd.com/index.html seems to be still current.

FWIW here are the measurements of my Anglos (excluding one that is away for an overhaul). Lachenal c1903 72 mm Dipper 2009 73 mm Wheatstone 1920 74 mm Wheatstone 1965 75 mm Wheatstone 1984 75 mm Wakker 2020 77 mm Koot Brits date? 78 mm

In a real concertina the loudness, and with an Anglo the note, depend on the air pressure difference. The pulling or pushing force you exert on the ends is mainly proportional to that pressure. There is also a component of the force proportional to the masses of the ends and their acceleration when you change direction, but I would expect that to be small. In a MIDI concertina, if you have a transducer of some sort to sense the force between the ends (as I do in mine) that should very closely mimic the pressure in the real concertina. Such additional force as is needed to accelerate the ends exists in both cases, but I would expect it to be lower in the MIDI one because of the missing mass of reeds and reed frames.

How does the button spacing compare with that on a real concertina?

I'm tickled by the reference to "the old-fashioned concertina" in 1879.

Aye! As the song says, twa heids are ay better than yin.

It is reassuring that new concertina-reeded Haydens are available, and from more than one maker, even if only with a long wait. They do say that patience is a virtue. I have had three concertinas made for me (all Anglos, from three different makers) and my shortest wait was four years.