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Hooves

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Everything posted by Hooves

  1. it looks remarkably similiar to my first junko concertina purchased from lark in the morning. Expect the usual: accordion wax mounted reeds, aluminum action, paper bellows. did you purchase it? I see it was won by some lucky bloke...
  2. Excuse me but, HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH! HAHAHAHAHA!! HAHAHAHA! HAH! hum... well, that was a good laugh. Oh wait, HAHAHAHha! HAHAHAHAHA! HAhaha! HAHAH! Cough HAHAHaH! ok, ok, that was a good one.
  3. when first I read this several weeks ago, for some reason my first thought was The Clancy Brothers, they had a reunion about 1992 (Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy) this clip is from much earlier, but may be illustrative of a live concert from the Clancys. (it may have been a recording earlier than the 1980's she heard even though it was played at that time) Links:
  4. a better appraoch might be instructional DVDs, and a list of things to buy to get set up. At those prices, I could almost fund an M.S. Degree, seems like it would actaully be cheaper to buy your equipment and just teach yourself (isn't that what most of our fine independent builders did?) I had considerd at one time going to aluthiery school, but concluded I would be better off spending the money on tools, parts, books.
  5. how bout this one? http://www.metacafe.com/watch/206727/maryl...y_mr_president/
  6. I have 2 small duets, Crane 48K and MacCaan 46K. On both the 3 note chord has the described affect on the single melody line - However - I put it to you duet players : Its called a "Duet" not a "Chordette", the intent was to play two melody lines simultaenously, not an oompa chord accopnianment with melody. I find I mostly use the bass side for simple bass lines and drones, not so much chords unless I'm not playing melody. also, if you chord on the right instead of the left, it doesn't take as much air and youc an play a bass line to chords asoppsoed to chords to melody line. I can see though why bigger would be better, for more air.
  7. Less, I am sure - but I may be disqualified for cheating This one took about 10: I never managed, though, to get the "cool inside-edges-roll-off" as Bob mentions. But I think we should silently bow in the direction of Geoff Crabb who does the same...in stainless steel! /Henrik nice looking ends. I have a CNC Router (not a CNC Milling Machine), unfortunately since I am a gypsy at heart and in the labor force, I keep moving and haven't been able to get my machine back up in over a year now. Last year I did talk alot about making Concertinas, and its still a possibility, but my focus for instrument building is Octave mandolins. Maybe someday I will attempt building a concertina.
  8. I like the duet: I have a MacCaan and a Crane, I like them both, though I prefer the Crane and have shifted focus to that system away from the Maccaan (which I really liked by the way, until I got my Crane, perhaps if I ever get a Hayden I will like that even more). At first, coming from an anglo, it was hard to not switch bellows when not needed. English, you must remember to alternate left/right hands to get a scale (after struggling with anglo that really was difficult to manage, that may be alot of the discussion on "harder", losing that push/pull habit for each note) In my mind anglo and english are harder than the duets - it took weeks to get anywhere with an anglo other than basic chords, and only hours to play a tune with the Crane. Though with the anglo you can get that nice scale run in one row, and if you ignore your accidental row, you have the benefit of being diatonic (yes, diatonic is an advantage in many tunes/songs). Though I am still an amatuer, and likely will aspire to only an intermediate level with any box as its my third instrument, unlike many who only play concertina.
  9. Since I don't play the English, I don't know, that was just me looking over the key arrangements and realizing I never gave the English a fair shake, the symetry it was impresse me, although the thought occurred to me that maybe English players don't actually finger the chords that way, and actaully split the chord between sides. As to M3838's suggestion: yes I thougth about that too, half English half Crane, but Cranes are so rare that you would have to build one from scratch or at least temporarily use a Crane half. In my case coincidently the halves fit. I think most duets players would frown upon such an arrangement, as it means one side is dedicated to chords which I believe goes agianst the duet concept. Half anglo, I think could work, but maybe a better way of saying it is "Half-bisonoric" as you may need a different arrangement to maximize the use of notes. Maybe with half a 40 button anglo as opposed to a 30. This weekend I'll get my junky boxes out of storage and re-assemble the beast.
  10. I was recently looking over the English 48K layout again, and noticed how there are very many elegantly simple triads on the left side (on right side too, but I was focusing on the left). I had not noticed before just how well layed out the system works for basic triads, switching from major/minor looks straight forward (I am not an English player), the traingular fingering seems designed for making those chords, I could not see a basic triad I could not make easily on the left side. the 7ths, 9ths, suspensions I haven't investigated yet. I never got very far with the English as I was focusing more on trying to play melody and less on chording at that time. I may reconstitute my "Half-english, Half-anglo" box I made out of two Cheapo boxes I bought a few years ago (which happened to be the same size and actaully have matching screw holes as well) and have since shoved in my storage room after setting each half back to its proper counterpart. Kind of makes it like an Organetto Abruzzese or button accordion with that arrangement.
  11. Mike This is basically why I went from Anglo to Duet. The 'tina pictured is my very own. I would like to use bass drones but they're quite loud and overwhelm the melody. I need to experiment with using them on their own. Richard I have found that the bass drones do that for me as well, I plan to install at least one baffle for my Crane duet (for the left side), but may go so far as to do both sides and use some of that soundcloth suggested in the long article on Baffles for MacCaan duets. The single note drone can be very efective if you are playign Celtic style songs, for example, the song "Scotland the Brave" really doesn't sound quite right without that drone, but thats bagpipe music where drones are pretty much expected.
  12. Glad you liked it. Video. Well, it is a visual report....had to be, since there is no audio! No recordings of old players. Irish, Morris and Australians have much better luck than sailors in this regard. I put in all the information I had on types of concertinas used...see Table 2. It is dominated by anglos, and I suspect that was the case at sea. What really surprised me was that some higher quality anglo instruments made it to sea, even quite early....they weren't all German ones. The Jones anglo that made it to sea in the 1860s is a very well made instrument, and Jones himself spoke about having traded with sailors for years. Just goes to show, we need to watch our assumptions, and keep them separate from facts! The Jeffries anglo examples appear later, in the early 1900s, as did the two English system instruments. By this time, I would assume that either there were lots of used instruments on the market (especially English system, as the bloom was well off the rose on their use by the aristocracy), or sailors were earning more money, or both. No duets yet seen...but I'm keeping an eye out... oops sorry! missed that table, searched 3 times too, oh well thanks for letting me know. Still, I think a narrated documentary, with the photos (which you could pan and zoom), interviews with current players/builders/restorers, and of course a sound track of nautical themed music would be fantastic.
  13. your article is really well done, I like the way you provided so many examples that had been missed in the past verifying the use of the concertina by sailors. When reading it, I could imagine a video documentary, that would be great: maybe you can shop it around as a potential manuscript. Its too bad however that for the most part the observers have no idea what kind of concertina is being played: you do have some examples of the actaul instruments which helps, but a break down of type of concertina would be a nice chart too. maybe there isn't enough data to make such a chart. So, armed with new knowledge I can return to the Celtic festival and if anybody says cocnertinas were'nt used on ships, I can smugly interject that the urban myth of the concertina at sea is actaully that it wasn't there, not that it was. I also feel safer about taking my concertina around the horn.
  14. thats a good suggestion, your not supposed to be looking at the ends of the concertina anyway while you play. Now you need to sell that idea to singers as well :0
  15. If its a large pro sound booth, then the concertina could be cheaper. I priced ready made booths, and for the size I wanted they were quite expensive. However, voice over booths are much smaller and thus cheaper, though you may find your self a bit cramped. If you only need a little quieting (a 10db reduction equates to a human perception of half as loud) you might be able to get away with a rubber maid garden shed or as M3838 suggetsed some nice heavy curtains. I will be be starting a seperate thread on the booth I'm building once I have a few more pictures. For Concertina I had thought of building a small plexiglass rectangular box with arm inserts on each end, like a chemists isolation chamber, you could see the concertina inside, there would be plenty of air internally to push/pull, plus you would have movement room of the box. (You could possibly use clear flexible vinyl and make a see through bag) You might look and feel a bit foolish with an aquarium on your lap, but then again if youve gone this far and actaully own a concertina....
  16. well, seeing as that was asked 2 years ago, and he said he would reply with details "soon", I'm going to guess he won't. He may not own the box anymore, and may not remember the details of the concertina.
  17. was anybody ever able to determine what kind of box Mike Cole was playing? When I saw it (again through my concertina eyes, first time I saw the movie was over 20 years ago) I thought it might be an anglo, due to the strap and I thought I saw three rows of buttons, however that was from seeing a low res scan. It was mentioned on another thread it may be a Jeffries Duet, or even a prop.
  18. yes, I didn't mean to hijack the thread, sorry about that. I will start a new thread, its just we were talkign about sound isloation and I just wanted to talk about my sound booth. I will start a new thread and remove references from this one to the new one once I have some pictures to post. an entire sound booth might be a bit much if all you want is to silence your PC.
  19. Yes you are correct. lead is one of the best sound blockers around, unfortunately its very impractical to work with, thats why I didn't mention it all, but I did alot of reading before deciding on my design. The air gap provides a measure of isolation between the two wall surfaces, for example, if you double any material you only gain about 3 STC points (using the STC system), so for example you added another peice of drywall directly to your existign wall, you will not gain an additional 28 STC which a single piece is rated for, but rather only 3 STC. So, you need a gap, this gap effectively gives you a "room within a room", its very common design for sound booths, and the kind you can buy are very similiar to my design, the difference being usually the inclusion of loose insulation between the panels to help act to absorb sound waves reverberating in the air gap. For the air /cord inlet - thats what a baffle box is for - its a series of interleaved walls, with loose insulation inside, this breaks up the direct path of the sound, you find them on proffessional sound booths, but any entry in/out adds seams, and seams are where air and thus sound leak out. The foam I should have stated on the inside for reverb control, is not everywhere, and yes it is intended to be a recording booth, but I believe I will still be able to practice inside and by adjusting the amount of foam be O.K. acoustically, but, we will see , it may be as you mentioned best for recording, which is still O.K. I chose the vinyl siding based on reading of MLV, although I am using the same weight as MLV per square foot (in this case 1 pound which is usally over rated at 28-30 STC), the MLV is a limp mass as opposed to a rigid mass, which alters the sound blocking properties, I don't believe the vinyl will add as much as MLV would for the same weight. The foam on the frames provides isolation and an air seal for the panels. I priced using 1/4" plexiglas (keep in mind that doubling it to 1/2" only increases the stc by about 3) a 1/4" piece of plexi has an STC of about 25, almost as good as drywall, plus you can see through it. It is quite heavy, very strong, but also price prohibitive. A better design than 1/2" plexi is 2 single 1/4" pieces seprated by an air gap, this gives you more than the 3 STC for doubling the thickness. If you look around on line for sound room designs, you will almost always see this mentioned - better off having two thin layers with a gap then one thick one. I also had considered one of your suggestions- hanging heavy curtains around a frame, that wouldbe an easily moveable structure. I looked at the price for the industrial sound curtain panels, and they were very expensive. Regular curtains will block some sound, but the really good sound absorbing curatins, which will get you up into that 30STC range, are expensive. I will post some measurements when I have it all the way up, right now I'm still fixing my window and adding vinyl to some of the panels. I will tery to get soem pics and post in a seperate thread. Altogether my booth budget thus far is about 600$, compared to a pro built booth, using very similar materials and the same size, and STC value those booths cost $6000-$8000+. So it may not be the best design, but certainly cheaper than buying a pre-made one, plus I can use it as a lock up cabinet for my tina and guitar.
  20. careful, if you stare at it too long you might understand why they call it a "cyclops"... that ended last week, so somebody is very happy - and always: beauty is in the eye of the beholder
  21. To quiet mine, I just bought a power supply marketed as being very quiet. This helped alot. The CPU fan's heatsink will get clogged with dust, on mine I pulled it out and washed out all the dust, then, let it dry and put it back on. Both these measures quieted my PC very much. I have read of people using sound foam inside the case, and I considered an isolation box. If you use a dynamic mic to record your concertina, you can usally avoid alot of noise with its small pickup field, its why dynamics are used on stage, helps isolate noise from monitors and other instruments. --------------- a bit off topic, but related to sound isolation. Currently I am building a small recording/practising booth: I will place the computrer outisde the booth and only run cords for the monitor (LCD flat panel) and keyboard/mouse inside. My booth is designed to be 6Lx4Wx7.5ftTall, this gives me plenty of room for my acoustic guitar and headroom as well. I'm building mine out of a variety of easy to obtain materials - I live in an apartment, so it must be easy to dissasemble and take with me. At first I was going to build the wall panels, then decided to use an aready made panel - a pre-built door 2x7.5ft. although a hollow core door is considered bad for sound isolation, my doors will be covered with vinyl on both sides (vinyl floor tiles which are self sticking, these are 1/16" thick, both sides = 1/8" of vinyl). The hollow core itself provides an air space often sited as being neccessary in a sound isolation enclosure, the door's themselves are a type of HDF (same as I had planned for the panels I was going to build) on a particle board frame, 1 3/8" thick total. The floor and roof panels I made: (each is 2x 4ft). the floor is 1/2" plywood, with a 1/2" piece of sound stop LD Fiberboard on a 1 and 3/4" tall frame. On the other side is a 1/8" piece of HDF so whole thing is sealed. Floor rests on a rubber based carpet, and an aditional carpet will be inside to stand on. The roof uses only a 1/4" piece of plywood, same other components except the top of the roof gets a coating of vinyl as well. there are 3 floor and 3 roof panels. The entire box is built on a rectangular frame, I have aluminum angle, 84"x 1.5" which forms the corner joint (its facing with the apex towards the gap where the panels meet). This provides a surface to bolt to the panels. The lower and upper frames use another peice of angle so as to form a lip for the panel to sit against. The rails are covered with a 1/8" sound damping foam so the panels sit on the foam and not directly on the frame. the inner dimensions are preserved this way, 4x6, this was important to me as I wanted alot of room without it being gigantic. The lower and upper frame is composed of 1 3/8" square wooden planks (with the foam on them), and are attached via a steel corner brace so as to leave a gap for the vertical aluminum bars (the aluminum angle). The inner panels are joined on the inside by another aluminum flat bar which covers the seam, it also has the sound foam on one side. Initially, the foam was to go between the panels, and its does for the roof and floor, but the wall panels were so perfectly straight, I could join them with virtually no gap, so, inside they are joined by the flat bars with screws into the door panels edging. One panel has a window, will be using 1/8" thick lexan on each side, inside gap bewteen both sides of the door now exposed after cutting the window hole, was filled with sound stop then sealed over with aluminum tape. The door is also a pre-made hollow core door, same treatment as the other panels. On the hinge side, a 1 and 3/4" rail runs up verticlaly to provide a hinging surface. aluminum flat bar on outside of door with foam provides agap cover around the edge of the door, it also keeps the door from swinging to far in when closing. I expect to light it with LED light to keep the temperature down even though there is a window. I will be creating a"Baffle Box" for the air system which is typical on pro-booths. Currently, its not complete as I just moved into a new aprtment, I was able to move my parts as easily as I expected, in 2 trips in my Honda Civic hatchback. I looked at reinforcing a ready made shed, or buying a pre-made booth - the sheds looked to me like too much work to re-inforce, most of the cheaper ones were plastic and curved making applying other materials difficult, though I think that is still a viable route. pre-made booths of the size I wanted, and the isolation I was going for, cost thousands of dollars, 4-6K, and only provided 28-32 STC. I estimate my panels will provide this same range, about 30 STC. I based this off of values for materials used, such as known values for MDF/HDF, Plexiglas, aluminum, MLV, plywood, design considerations, comparing to ready made booths, etc. I made an experimental door panel using the hollow core door and 1/8" thick composite vinyl tile on one side, it was very quiet, and weighed a lot. It was like the monolith from 2001 in my apartment... I decided to go with solid vinyl tile and use half as much on each side (1/16" on each side, but I may forgo the inner layer in favor of carpet tile, cloth, or leave it uncovered.) The glue for the composte tile was a real mess, and tiles were very brittle. I added screws to that panel on the corners of the tiles to help them stay up vertically (no need witht he lighter self stickign solid vinyl tiles). the experimental door was later dissassembled, which proved amessy and time consuming task. I also have 2" sound absorbing wedge foam for the inside, this is to control reverb. Another possibility was all plexiglas, or actaully usign the cheapest best sound blocker: dry wall. Plexiglas was quite heavy and expensive for the size I wanted, Drywall I thought would be too diffcult to move around, crumbling easily without a good backing, plus very heavy.
  22. I know that Wim Wakker offers this option. Pls scroll down to the bottom on this site. Greetings Christian thanks for the link. Those are some fine looking boxes. I was just curious if any company was offering them as standard or an option, so that answers my question.
  23. I was wondering if anybody knew off hand if any builders were making new concertina's with Brass reeds?
  24. good show Inventor! I don't think people are appreciating just how much effort you put into the system, your promoting of the system, and the pitfalls you delt with in your detective work. Hindsight is always 20-20: the fact you developed the system on your own is a credit to you and your work. all this talk has actaully got me thinking about button arrangements again, though I doubt I could ever be so clever as to imagine the myriad systems on paper and in practice.
  25. edited: wrong thread for response. I found some more info on another thread where the Chromatone Janko Synth was mentioned.
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