Owen Anderson

Kimric Smythe at Smythe’s Accordion Center in California was able to replace a reed for me in a Marcus concertina. He had a wide range of donor reeds from various instruments to choose from, and was able to do some hand tweaking to get the tone as matched to the other reeds of the instrument as possible.

Amazing work!

I would dearly love to find a MIDI Anglo concertina, for exactly the reasons listed above. I live in a small space with my spouse and children, which does not afford me a lot of opportunities to practice without irritating somebody. The ability to practice with headphones would be an enormous benefit in and of itself.

I think you could do interesting things with one or more "programming" keys. Reassign a drone key to any other note. Toggle between key layouts (of which octave or key shifting is a special case). Sharpen or flatten a particular virtual reed.

Thanks! Thanks! For what it's worth, it looks like "86 Swiss & German Folksongs for Anglo Concertina" and "75 More Irish Session Tunes for Anglo Concertina" still aren't available in Kindle format.

Kindle version reminder 😉

Will there be a kindle version?

Spotted this good-sounding playback of an old Edison cylinder of an Alexander Prince medley called Forgotten Melodies.

Just saw this auction: https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/gildings-auctioneers/catalogue-id-srgil10336/lot-2dfd0fc2-40d9-4904-a598-afb900e25baf?queryId=db378407cbeaecd3dc51843d32328b3d Does anyone know anything about a "TW Upcott" branded round (!) 20b Anglo?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the book specifically addresses notation systems. I came to it with essentially zero musical knowledge (but a lot of math background), and it helped me understand things like why keys even exist, which then helped justify to me why you’d want a notation system that was key-oriented.

Volume 1. Volume 2 is really only if you want to learn DSP algorithms.

I will just add that, as a mathematically-minded person, the book "Musimathics" by Gareth Loy did a great job of explaining why a lot of things that seem arbitrary in music are the way they are (or at least fesses up on which ones really are historical accidents). I credit that feeling of arbitrariness with being the leading cause of my consistently showing zero interest in music classes as a child.

I just added title extraction to the output, when present. I do dream of being able to automatically generate fingerings for complex harmonic arrangements. The model is actually able to do so, but the input is the hard part. Taking input from ABC means recreating a lot of the timing logic from abc2midi, which would be a pain. Taking input from MIDI means losing the looping structure of the score, and being stuck with whatever chord rendering abc2midi picked.

Chords shouldn’t automatically kill it, but ones generated by abc2midi often contain chords too deep for the Anglo’s range. If you send me the file I can see what’s wrong with it. I can look into adding a title, but I don’t think MIDI files are guaranteed to contain one?

Maybe some day, but ABC is easy for humans and hard for computers. In the mean time, you can convert your ABC to MIDI and then upload it. Let me know if you hit any problems.