Richard Mellish

Thanks for all the info. One or other of those should suit.

The (hard) case that came with one of my concertinas is falling apart. Who can sell me a new one suitable for a concertina 7½in, 19 cm across the flats?

The Hayden system makes the fingering the same in multiple keys. One with enough buttons allows the same fingering in all keys. The disadvantage of that system is poor availability. Only you can decide how many keys you actually need.

You could try subscribing to and then asking on the SCAND mailing list scand@yahoogroups.com

Until I did a search just now I had never noticed the existence of the Events section of this website. So it seems worth a post here to inform anyone else who has never noticed that section. I suspect that applies to quite a few of us, as a search for events in the rest of this year from today brings up only one; the event that I was searching for when I found that section.

There are indeed threads covering both aspects, but I thought a recap thread should cover both.

Alan's advice is sound but doesn't address the choice of system. English concertinas, Anglos, and the several sorts of Duets all have their pros and cons, including price and availability for a given level of quality. My advice would be to go somewhere (concertina event, dealer, maker, whatever) if possible where you can have a quick twiddle on as many different systems as possible, because one of them may just make more sense than the others, according to any previous experience of other instruments and how your brain works.

For me, the very reason for wanting to build a MIDI concertina was to have alternative sounds available from a familiar configuration of buttons (which one might or might not choose to call a "keyboard"). I would expect any MIDI concertina, including Steve's design, to likewise offer a range of sounds.

As for 1, someone might have thought that, but surely not the people who made concertinas, who should have understood how they work. In a stringed instrument, energy is put into the strings by bowing or plucking, some of that energy passes to the soundboard, and the soundboard couples some of it to the air. But in a free reed instrument the movement of a reed into and out of its slot produces pressure variations in the air, i.e. sound, directly. The baffle can then only reduce the sound. It may reduce some frequencies more than others, and that may be desirable, but it surely cannot help to send sound out. The only somewhat analogous thing on a stringed instrument would be a mute.

I bought a Wheatstone Hayden because it seemed a perfect system. But I didn't get on with it and stuck to my Anglo and, to a very small degree, my Maccann. After a few years of not playing it I leant it to a player who had a cheap and cheerful hybrid Hayden and wanted something better. After a few more years I sold it to her. I can't imagine that she will be offering it for sale for a long while.

So it moves up and down with the lever, and whatever it is there to support likewise moves up and down. Please ignore this one too. I was confused.

Please excuse thread drift. In the upper picture, the block at the half-past-nine position seems to sit above the lever for the air button. How is it attached to the action board? Edit: Please ignore. I was getting confused as to what I was looking at. All now sorted.

FWIW I don't have Photoshop but my computer managed to find an application that could display the picture. However I endorse the recommendation to use jpg. Photoshop and any other photo-processing application should be able to export in that format.

Apropos the Wheatstone website; why do much advertising when you already have more demand for your work than you can deal with? I usually take my concertinas to Steve for overhauls but have occasionally gone to someone else because Steve has been so busy.

Surely that depends on whether the leaks are caused by gaskets that have become too badly compressed or by one or more of the blocks having come loose.