Richard Mellish

I have decided to give this concertina a home. I will aim to report further once it has arrived and I have made further investigations of the reed swaps.

In my teens I dabbled with various instruments. When I was about 23 and living in a university hall of residence, I was rummaging in a store room and (just like Luke) came across a "very cheap 20-button GDR-produced thing". One of the intruments I had dabbled with was a mouth organ, so the suck/blow business made sense, and I was quickly able to get a rudimentary tune out of it. I made enquiries and found that one of the other chaps on that floor had bought it for £2, hadn't got on with it, and was happy to let me have it for the same price. My second concertina (a 30-key Lachenal) cost me nothing at all, as it was in a sorry state and the fellow member of the university folk club who owned it gave it to me for free. My subsequent concertinas have cost me (let's say) rather more than that.

Thanks for the confirmation about the mounting of the inboard (good word!) reeds. The positions of the buttons are exactly as on a normal Wheatstone 40-key box, so there's no doubt that it started life thus. But the note charts worked out by the seller show that many notes are different. I haven't actually counted how many there are of each note, but it appears that at least some of the changes, possibly all of them, were achieved by moving reeds from their normal positions to new positions, where some of them don't fit, as seen in the picture that I posted in this thread. Without pictures showing the action I can't tell which reed positions should be which, and the markings of the original pitches (which may or may not have been changed) are hard to read. I suppose what I am looking for in this thread is any words of wisdom as to how much work (at how much cost) might be needed to bring this concertina back into top condition and just how good it can become. None of the pictures show the action, but the valves look fairly new and the pads may also be new. So it may not need much more than moving all the reeds back to their correct positions, re-tuning, and sorting out odd bits of damage to the chamois(?) seals.

I am very much in two minds whether to buy the 40 key G-D Lachenal that is currently on offer in the Buy & Sell section and would welcome any sage advice from the forum. If someone on the American side of the Pond feels inclined to give this concertina a home I won't mind, but if there are no takers I am half inclined to add it to my collection. Potentially it could be a very good one, but it seems to have had an "interesting" life and to need a lot of work to undo some of the harm that has been perpetrated upon it (by person or persons unknown before it came to the present seller). See for instance this picture (which the seller has kindly sent me to supplement those in his original post): Two reeds around the 4 o'clock position are clearly too long for their slots (and will have done some mischief to the inside of the end), and the adjacent two around the 5 o'clock position are too short. This is consistent with the discussion on the original thread about many notes having been moved around from their normal positions. Also some reeds look a little rusty whereas others look bright, suggesting possibly a lot of rubbing-down in the course of retuning. Some of the clamping screws have badly chewed-up heads. Why on earth should those have ever been disturbed since the day it was made? And then there are the two reeds near the middle, with the reed frames held in place by screws at both ends. It seems unlikely that those notes were added after the instrument was first made, but is that method of fixing known from other Lachenals? I eagerly await any words of wisdom.

With any luck the web pages will remain available on the Internet Archive.

Same here. Having been accustomed to 40-key Wheatstone-layout instruments for 40 years, I would find the missing buttons frustrating. But it should be a great acquisition for anyone who's used to 30.

I currently own nine. I think I have previously owned and then passed on only another four.

Did you mean C/D? Edit: That's was what it said, hence my query. Now corrected.

The more I look at the charts of the notes, the stranger they seem. I mentioned the two D4s in the same direction on the LH end. In fact the standard Wheatstone 40-key layout would have two, but this concertina has three in the same direction on the LH end (plus one on pull as normal, but no pull D4 on the RH end). I am posting this partly to make that correction to my earlier post but also to bump this thread in the hope of prompting someone across the Pond (from me) to take it on.

FWIW my 1965 Wheatstone D-A, which I bought on here from a chap in South Africa, has black baffles.

Playing an English concertina surely requires the brain hemispheres to talk to each other even more intensely.

Kevin, Although you said you'd like it to go to a museum, many of us believe that musical instruments deserve to be played. So I am hoping that someone on here will offer it a home, and preferably someone in North America, to save the hassle and expense of overseas shipping. If however no-one comes along, I will seriously consider adding it to my collection. I justify buying concertinas even though I don't play them as much as they deserve, because they retain their value and can be sold if necessary to support me in my dotage. If it does come here I will certainly want all the notes restored to the standard Wheatstone 40-key pattern, but that is a manageable job for a competent concertina maker/repairer.

That seems very plausible, and might explain the Xs against some of pad holes. It would be helpful for the OP to post pictures of the reeds, both to show their condition and possibly to reveal their original pitches. I hope this instrument finds a home with someone on here who can give us a full report on its condition and, preferably, get all the notes restored to the usual Wheatstone ones. As I said, I am half tempted to buy it myself. However I do already have a Wheatstone (Dickinson) G/D which has served me very well for nearly 40 years ...

As the owner of two variants on Wheatstone 40-key layout I could contribute those, but how do I do that?

I encountered it for the first time only a year or three ago, and I don't think I'd seen that name for it until now. I wasn't aware of it when I specified some changes from standard Wheatstone on two concertinas that were built to my specifications.

The "Wheatstone (ish!) layout" description is spot-on. The extra buttons beyond the standard 30 are in the same positions as standard Wheatstone, but the two D4s in the same direction on the LH end and the two D#5s in the same direction on the RH end seem a very strange waste of buttons unless someone had a strong wish to use particular fingerings. Possibly it was built as a special or someone had these notes changed for their particular requirements, or perhaps some reeds have drifted badly. But some notes seem much too different to have drifted so far, e.g. on the RH end, middle row, first button push D#5 instead of C5, and G#6 instead of A4. If I were to buy it (which I am half tempted to do) I would certainly want it re-tuned and/or reeds replaced as necessary to convert it back to standard. Questions for the OP. How did you identify the notes? Were they close to those you have marked or were some of them many cents out? If it is to be shipped to the UK or Europe, import tax is likely to be a much bigger deal than the cost of shipping.

While we're being pedantic about terminology, it's perhaps worth pointing out that what the OP called "an old English style font" is a style that was normal for most purposes in Germany until around the time of WWII, well after it went out of fashion in most other places.

I'm wondering whether the OP forgot to include a smiley.

Irrespective of the ease or difficulty of the transition to a different system, might the load on your thumbs be a problem if you already have some arthritis?

If someone wishes to sell a concertina, by all means advertise it on Facebook or anywhere else but why not on here too?

I have no connection with this, but it was mentioned on the Anglo Wizard thread and seems worth a mention here. https://detroit.craigslist.org/mcb/msg/d/washington-40-button-anglo-concertina/7655943887.html It could be useful for someone to see how they get on with the extra buttons without spending much money.

I had clear priorities when playing for morris. Top priority: play loud enough to be heard above the sound of the dancers' clogs and sticks and general street noise. (Rationale: if they can't hear you, you might as well not be playing at all.) Middle priority: keep the rhythm. Bottom priority: play the right notes.

That chart is mind-boggling, with all those different chords just for A. I have been playing for over 50 years and have never felt the need for very many chords. When I was a child my grandfather showed me a few chords on the piano, which I now recognise as what guitarists call the "three chord trick". Those are essentially what I use on the Anglo, though usually not all the possible notes of a chord at the same time. A one-row melodion has just two chords, one on pull and one on push, and those serve well enough. I'm not saying no-one ever needs some of those chords, but I think I am saying Walk before you run.

Are you able to visit somewhere where you can try out various concertinas - either a dealer or a meeting of players?

Clarification: "accordion" to me implies piano accordion or 3- or 5-row chromatic. What some call a diatonic accordion I think of as a melodion. If an accordion repairer deals with the latter, then a reed plate with different notes should be no problem.