Larry Stout

I looked up partridge wood and found a site with fairly good pictures at http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woo...rtridgewood.htm It does look to me like the concertina in question might well be in partridge wood.

One of the things I like about concertinas is that they do not have two reeds tuned a bit off each other the way two reed accordions do. For many kinds of music the resulting accordion sound strikes me as sloppy and out of place. I suppose that depends a bit on how wet the tuning is and how pure you want the tone in your playing. Certainly the cajun and norteño sounds seem to call for multiple reeds. I certainly wouldn't say that it fits "any music" though I also wouldn't make that claim for the purer tone of the concertina.

A couple of the reeds on my concertinas stopped working recently (I think they tried to inhale a cat hair, though it may just have been dust). I opened up the instrument, Identified the relevant reed, slid it out of its mortice, cleaned it up a bit, vacuumed off the dust with a very small hand held vacuum, slipped a clean thin piece of paper under the reed toung to clean it, put the instrument back together again. If that didn't work the first time, I repeated the cleaning. All reeds recovered their voices. For one of the reeds I found that a new $1 bill worked well. Interestingly I lost my own voice within minutes of one of the reeds choking. I got my voice back after a drink of water-- I didn't try that with the reeds (they're steel and might rust!)

All of thew tunes I listed are in Barnes Book of English Country Dance Tunes, Vol. 1. (self published, I think, by Peter Barnes---it's the main source for ECD tunes for musicians in the USA and it is available from CDSS or from Button Box, though I don't know about sources in Australia). His web site is at http://www.canispublishing.com/ I checked and quite a lot of them can be found using JC's tunefinder at http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/tunefind Once you've found them there you can download a pdf of the sheetmusic, or you can get the abc source to tweek as you wish. I tend to use abc plus myself, but many here swear by the Tune-P-tron converter here at concertina.net. Since all of those tunes are from 1800 or before there should be no copyright issues for the tune, though the arrangements are a different story.

Looks like the twin to mine (# 2667).

Sounds like you need pieces in the key of A major (F# c# and g# all use the third finger of the right hand). Some examples I've played from the ECD repertoire include: Long Odds, Lord How's Jig, The Bishop, The Dressed Ship, Elverton Grove, The First of April, Gathering Peascods, Geud Man of Ballangigh, Grimstock, Prince William, The Rakes of Rochester, Sun Assembly. I remember one gig where nearly the whole dance list was in A. There is variety in this list from the fairly straightforward to the finger twisters.

My wife stopped in to my study as the bouree was playing and commented on how much she liked it. Any chance of an abc file or a link to where the music can be found? I'd like to give it a try and I'm not good at picking things up by ear. I thought all three were lovely.

I tried looking the serial number up in the Horiman archives (there's an ap for that at http://www.concertina.com/ledgers/lookup/index.htm ) and it doesn't show up. My early Wheatstone treble is number 2667. It dates from 1851 (it is in the ledgers). These very early Wheatstones tend to have brass reeds and Lachenal style action rather than the later Wheatstone riveted action. This makes them less valuable than you might expect given the age. They go for a modest price compared to other vintage models and often need restoration to make them playable, so condition is important in determining value. Pictures would help those who know more about these than I say more about the individual instrument you have. Still, I'm very fond of mine. It has a sweet tone aand is quiet enough to play late at night without bothering the neighbors. It isn't loud enough to play in a session in a crowded bar, though. It was my first vintage Wheatstone and I now have others to play in noisier environments. I still play it several times a week.

Yes. I assume that means both, which is what my advice would be. Some ornaments are almost part of the tune (Mrs. McLeod doesn't sound right to me without its grace note, for instance). Recognizing where you might want harmony might affect how you do the fingering. My own playing is rather unornamented, perhaps because I don't tend to think about ornament options as I'm learning the tune.

Couldn't that be made into a standard tenor just by swapping the B and Bb reeds? I'd imagine that they would be in the same size reed shoes and should fit without much trouble.

Tenors (48 button) and Tenor-Trebles (56 button) typically add one row below a treble. My Aeola T-T has four octaves starting at the C below middle C. The middle two columns are still the white keys on the piano, so it plays just like the treble or baritone if you ignore that bottom row. It has the range of a viola, with the top notes of a violin as well. I suppose that a 64 button extended tenor treble would also include the piccolo range. English concertinas are chromatic rather than having a "home" key. I'm not sure that the instrument in question (advertised by a member of this forum posting simultaneously) is actually tuned down rather than extending down. Were any of the keys in the middle two columns sharps or flats?

I made the blocks in the case I made for my Wheatstone model 21 out of several layers of corrugated cardboard glued together and then cut to size using a band saw. I added a little quilt batting and then covered them with velvet. They are softer than wood, but still provide the support for the bellows. So far this has worked fine. The case is about 5 years old now. The case from 1921 that came with my Aeola has leather blocks. Is that about when Wheatstone started shipping concertinas with blocked cases?

My reference to the need to learn bass clef came from my attempt to learn Crane Duet from the Wilton-Bulstrode tutor. David Cornell's arrangements for duet (admittedly for MacCann but also useful for Crane) use bass clef as well. The Brian Hayden workshop for all duet systems uses the two treble clefs system that Jim refers to. G. Carrere also has some arrangements for duet that use bass clef for the left hand (at least most of the time). When I've typeset things for my own use I've also used two staffs (bass and treble). Many of the folks who played Cranes used them for hymns. The Salvation Army tutor for the Triumph aims to have the student learn to play four part harmony from a hymnal I think-- certainly it uses a standard grand staff. It ends with an arrangement of Beethoven's Minuet in G. Closest I've come so far was a rendition of "Follow the Fold" from Guys and Dolls. I think that all of the music sources I've referred to here came from http://www.concertina.com

Most of the time I play EC, but I also have a Crane. I've played EC for about 6 years and I've only had the Crane about 1 1/2 so I had a head start on learning EC. I've played fiddle for somewhat over 50 years, so I'm comfortable with melody. I've never been any good at chords (never played piano, dabbled in guitar and lute, but not any real skill) so the idea of bass or chords on left hand and melody largely on right is a little foreign. Music for the Crane also tends to use bass clef, which I've had to learn, for the left hand. The Crane strikes me as quite logical and as a primarily EC player I found learning my way around the keyboard reasonably straight forward. Finding a Crane might be a bit of a trick. I got mine on the buy-sell forum here. That said, they don't come up often.

Thats gorgeous. Thanks Danny.

It worked on my mac using the Flip for Mac plugin making Quicktime capable of playing Windows media files. I noticed that it is the same set of variations that tallship posted in the "Something for the weekend" thread. I'd been working on them and almost had a postable version on my baritone--until I heard this clip and found out how far I am from the requisite speed!

My band is Flatland Consort. It's named after the topography around here.

I think I remember a baritone EC from the 1850's that was on Concertina Connection's web site for a while that was in "German low pitch"-- the 435 HZ A sounds familiar. The instrument had appeared on e-Bay a couple of times as well. I was interested in a baritone at the time, but was a bit scared off by the price and pitch.

I noticed this effect on returning to Normal Avenue, Normal, Illinois, from Pinewoods camp. I was at the English-Scottish dance week. There was another English concertina player in the band class. Great fun. The town got its name from the Illinois State Normal University (now called Illinois State University), which has had the education of teachers as its main mission since 1857.

My favorites to play in public now are Bigg Market Lasses, O'Carolan's Draught, and Le Canal en Octobre. The first shows off how chromatic an EC is, the second shows how sweet it can sound, and the third I like to decorate a bit.

I got the dots for "News of the Victory" from this post: http://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php...ost&p=80084

I've gotten concertinas packaged that way from both Button Box and Wim Wakker. It looked a bit like overkill, but the instruments were well protected. In both cases the cost for shipping was not exorbitant.

I notice that there are a couple of tenors (48 key) on the Concertina Connection vintage instrument page. A tenor-treble will have one row of buttons below the usual treble buttons. As long as you start on the right row the fingering will be the same as a treble, but another fifth will be available below. It's easy to switch between different EC's be they treble, baritone, or tenor-treble. I'm not a singer, so I'm not experiences with what accompanies voice well, but I don't think I'd rule out brass reeds. They can be quite sweet.

I think that's possible. On occasion this past week as I was playing my brass reeded very early Wheatstone (for my own enjoyment, but so as not to bother other people, so I had deliberately taken my quietest instrument) people commented on its beauty and the gentle music I was making with it. One or two asked where to get one and expressed interest in taking up EC.

My wife says "no sea slugs: We live in the midwest." She also says no to 1930's era club accordions, not that I was tempted to try to find one.