inventor
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Sorry I got it wrong Owen's "Imiliput" is a modified Liliput not a Preciosa, (they are very similar). It does have a 12 button Hayden bass but the right hand side of this instrument is a B/C/half C#, British Chromatic Accordion layout.
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For a Bisonoric system related to the Hayden system see the "Looms Chromatic" system for the Melodeon. You will find this described on Owen Woods' website "melodeonmusic.com" . Jon Looms can be found at the Music Room, he had one on display at Sidmouth a few years back. I believe Owen Woods had one of these on a converted Hohner Preciosa melodeon, which is as small as melodeons come
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You would need to add Eb/Bb buttons to left end of each row to make the instrument chromatic.
The biggest flaw that I can see immediately is that it is not possible to play fourths fifths or minor thirds.
Whilst moving the hand along a button would give the same fingering in another key; you would need two different fingerings to play any couple of related keys.
Some years ago a person thought that it would be a good idea to contract the Hayden system by putting two flats bisonoricly on one button and two sharps bisonoricly on another to reduce the size of the instrument; and actually persuaded Colin Dipper to make such an instrument for him. It obviously didn't work as the instrument was returned to Colin after a short period of time. With some difficulty Colin eventually managed to convert the instrument to a proper unisonoric Hayden system for a Hayden system player who desperately needed a quality Hayden instrument.
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Thank-you for the picture of the left hand action. I think it would not be too difficult with a little realignment of the centre reedplates, to put the extra 2 reedplates on each side of a Peacock like instrument. Reducing it from 7" to 6 5/8" might be difficult but not impossible.
As described above both Wheatstone and Crabb managed to get 46/45 buttons on the even smaller sized instruments. How the sizes of the DIX "concertina" reeds compare with the equivalent-pitch traditional concertina reeds is open to question.
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The left hand side of a A 62 Maccann normally runs from an A below tenor c to an octave above middle c. Yours should go from a G up to a b flat. This G is the same as the lowest note as a Baritone English concertina. I doubt if you will ever miss the top two semitones on the LHS (they are on the right hand side anyway), but a baritone G is very useful indeed.
The right hand side will have the b & b flat below middle c' and run up to a very high g"', Music with notes above the high e"' (i.e. two tones below your highest) is quite uncommon and I doubt if you will ever need the missing (on your instrument) very high g#"' and a"'; but any notes below middle c' on the RHS are a big bonus.
Maccann duet players often go for the somewhat larger 67 button instrument to get that baritone G on the LHS, or even the somewhat cumbersome 72 button instrument to get the extra b flat and b on the right hand side.
Bb instruments were made to play along with Brass bands and for singers who mostly seem to prefer to sing in flat keys.
Personally if the instrument is as good as you say it is, I would say leave it alone.
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Just found the answer to my question on the "interior of a cc concertina connection Peacock" thread. I can see how it would be possible to add an extra 2 to the RHS. But need to see a picture of the LHS action for the extra 2 on the left.
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Are there only 19 reedplates on the other side ?.
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I can't imagine why the 7" Peacock has so few reeds. I designed the Russian made Hayden Duet that Samantha has. It is a 7" Concertina with no less than 65 buttons ! The reeds were all laid out flat parallel to the ends. I will look out my old designs to see how I did this and how a 44 button Hayden fitted into the 6.25" size.
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To Don regarding design for a 46 button Hayden Duet.
The 46 button Wheatstone Hayden Duet is the standard 6.25". It of course uses traditional concertina reeds set radially, with 21 buttons on the left and 25 on the right.
The Crabb 45 button Salvation Army Crane duet is only 6" across. The traditional concertina reeds are set up and down as is common on Crabb concertinas. Left hand side - 20 buttons, 8 up, 8 down, and 4 in the middle; but there is enough space to put an extra pair of reeds on the right hand side of the left hand reedpan. Right hand side - 25 buttons, 9 up, 9 down, 5 in the middle, and 2 sideways (one at each end of the reedpan). I tried one of these which had been very much used and did not notice any difference in the timbre of the edge and centre pan notes.
I have had concertinas from new which have some reeds on the centre of the reed pan. The difference in timbre was quite noticeable when brand new, but this has settled down to be unnoticeable after a good time of playing. These concertinas all had the centre reeds properly routed into the centre of the reed pan, not screwed in.
With rectangular accordion reedplates all screwed onto the equivalent of a reedpan, I cannot see why there should be any difference in timbre at all.
Concertina Makers do not usually publish concertina designs. It takes a lot of time to design a new type of concertina, and the makers consider that the design is their copyright.
Now let us consider how many buttons we might be able to get into a small size concertina.
Accordion reedplates are a pretty standard 16mm across and lengths according to the pitch - see Harmonikas CZ charts. Some years ago I designed one using the well established spacing for a 6.25" concertina. 8 X 16mm (128mm): plus 2mm between the plates (to allow them to be waxed in), and 2mm at each side (18mm): plus two 6mm bellows frame sides (12mm); gives 158mm: which is 6.25" as near as makes no difference. I designed one such Hayden Duet but was only able to get 23 reedplates in the right hand side, but the loss of the highest c#"' & d"' was I felt no great loss.
However if you went wall to wall with screwed on reedplates, it might be possible to get 9 reedplates across on a 6.25" concertina. With the slightly larger 6 5/8" size bellows, 9 reedplates across should be no problem; and that should easily take all 46 buttons of the common small Hayden Duet
Well best of luck with your venture, I eagerly await to see the result.
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Had you considered going to see Marcus just over the bridge in Wales ? He imports quality accordion reeds for his hybrid concertinas, direct from Castelfidado in Italy on a regular basis. He is an excellent fellow and may be able to help you.
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English Airs and Laments are quite uncommon, with one notable exception, which is tunes for the Northumberland Small-pipes. Several books of Northumberland Small-pipes tunes have been published by the "Northumbrian Pipers Society". Two tunes I particularly enjoy playing are "Noble Squire Dacre" and "Derwentwaters Farewell".
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This may be a very long shot. Back in the fifties I remember a Piano and music shop in Chatham Kent called Murdoch, could have been John C. A man from Murdoch's used to come and tune my sisters piano. I seem to remember that the Chatham shop was part of a chain of Murdoch music shops.
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When I first saw the picture before I read the article for a split second I thought it was a picture of myself taken 30 or more years ago, with the same coloured curly hair, and fatish face, with my eyes closed whilst playing. So naturally it would be a Hayden duet!
Incidentally the 46 button Hayden Duet has a lot in common with the Irish Uillean pipes. The top note (d"') is the same note as the top of the IUP and all the other notes of the chanter (except the very lowest d'#) are entirely on the right hand side. This leaves the left hand free to play the equivalent of drones and regulators. There is a tenor d (both push and pull) on the left hand side which is missing from the standard C/G Anglo, So an instrument this huge is not needed. It only needs to be an octave lower than the standard instrument - should fit comfortably into an 8" concertina.
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Yes !
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My personal recommendation for a "few" extra buttons added to the 46 button array is as follows:-
Add low Bbs to the left of the lowest Cs on both sides, and add low and high Ebs to the left of the Fs on both sides. OK that's 3 extra buttons on each side not 2, so leave out the D#s .
That (50 buttons) is precisely the concertina that I would have liked when Steve Dickinson first offered to make a batch of concertinas over 30 years ago. The small Hayden duet was intended specifically for English folk players, but also to play Scottish, Irish and New England tunes. The most used keys being the ubiquitous G & D together with A, Bb & C, with occasional use of E, F & Eb.
I had calculated that it would be possible to shoehorn all this into a standard 6.25" sized instrument. However when it came to the final details of the design this proved not possible. My idea of putting one or two reed chambers into the centre of the reed pan was firmly rejected. So the key of Bb as an easypeasy key was dropped in favour of an easy key of E.
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To Chris T: "a custom made set of reed-pans - COULD ". But I have yet to find a good concertina maker who WOULD. If there is any concertina maker out there who is willing to do this I would be very pleased to hear from them. Unfortunately good concertina repairers I know who are willing to do a job within a short time scale do not have custom routing machines,
Regards different types of concertina for different types of music: The Hayden duet system is a neutral system, rather akin to a free-bass chromatic button accordion. It is just a matter of size. The 6.25" 46 button Wheatstone Hayden is ideal for traditional folk music; and the larger 65 button instruments are suitable for 3 or 4 part harmony classical music, and song accompaniment, or what ever music you might like to throw at it.
I do sincerely hope that the Jeffries duet in question is bought by someone who is first of all going to learn to play it rather than put it into the back of a draw for another 50 years, and that the Jeffries system is the ideal one for the type of music that they favour.
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As Geoff points out the main problem is not the cost but the waiting time before a new Hayden duet arrives.
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I completely concur with the idea of making a new pair of reed-pans if anyone intends to convert the 50 button Jeffries currently on ebay. As pointed out above the original reed-pans need to be properly preserved. However I would have thought that anyone capable of making new reed-pans, could easily construct a double ended box that could house the original reed-pans clamped flat.
Henrik Muller has recently been writing about constructing a router for making the double dovetail slots in reed-pans.
About 5 or 6 years ago I was talking to one of the stall-holders at Sidmouth who told me that he was in the middle of converting a 50 button Jeffries Duet to a G/D/A anglo for himself. The following year I asked him how the conversion had gone. He told me that it had made a most successful instrument. When I asked him if he had it with him, and could I see it: he told me that a very good anglo player had seen and played it, and immediately asked him to to name his price, so the instrument had gone to a very happy player.
I note that a couple of days ago a Lachenal 46 button Maccann sold on ebay for only £165 (2 only bids), the sort of price a 20 button Lachenal anglo might make. "Ripe for conversion" ?
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My very first proto-Hayden system started life as a 50 button Jeffries Duet. However at that time I hadn't discovered the best way of arranging the notes. By the time I had hit on the right way, I had experimented with several different note arrangements, and completely wrecked the reed pan. This instrument cost me £18 in 1966, which translated into modern terms would be about £350 - £400. Any Jeffries instrument is going to cost ten times that today.
My first new made Crabb instrument had the same curves and spaces as a Jeffries, However subsequently I did a lot of work on the best spacing and angles, to come up with the now standard 16mm, 9mm, 10,5 degree dimentions.
For around the £400 mark you might be able to buy a small wooden ended Lachenal Maccann duet & a Lachenal 20 button anglo, which will give you almost enough material to make a 46 button Hayden duet. In my opinion this would be a better starting point for anyone wanting to experiment with concertina conversions.
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Lachenal made a two voice English concertina to compete with the up and coming piano-accordion before WW II. These were called "Accordeophones" They were square (like a bandoneon) with perloid ends. I have seen and heard one which the late Tom Jukes had and played. The sound was similar to a cheap Chinese melodeon ! One or two still exist and they were discussed on concertina.net about 10 years ago.
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Colin Dipper and Robin Scard have made several instruments with 10 sides including at least 3 Hayden Duets that I have seen.
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Looks like a concertina made for a melodeon player. Like the RHS of the Franglo that Colin Dipper developed for French melodeon players,;nearly 100 years later. These players wanted an instrument with the same fingering as a French melodeon, but with the sound of a concertina.
Can you give a button diagram, which might confirm this ?
Many, especially Irish, melodeon players do not use the left hand chords at all.
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The saga continues:
As you can see there is quite a tradition of left to right rising pitch, and left to right for flat chords to sharp chords.
It goes with out saying that pianos have this, and organs too, inspite of the fact that on an organ with two keyboards it would be possible to mirror the two keyboards.
the Crabb family made me a very nice medium sized Duet concertina with my arrangement of buttons, and i expected this to be just a one off, just to suit my personal tastes. However Dave Arthur the editor of "English Dance & Song" asked me to write an article about it for the magazine. This generated a certain amount of interest in the idea, and people started to communicate with me on how they might obtain such an instrument. Whilst Crabbs had rather a long waiting list (I had waited nearly 7 years for mine to arrive); Steve Dickenson had recently taken over Wheatstones and with a new apprentice was looking for extra work. - I ordered ten instruments.
Before I went to see him and work out the final details, Pat Robson; (a bandoneon player with an encyclopedic knowledge of the many ways that buttons on all types concertinas had been arranged); invited me to come and see him to look at several aspects of my concertina. A couple of questions he asked me were: "what is it like for playing a chromatic scale" - I demonstrated this to his satisfaction; and "what about playing a tune in octaves". I had never done this, but with a bit thinking about it played a scale in octaves. He then asked me if I had considered making the left hand the mirror image of the right, as is done on several chromatic bandoneon systems, and is said to make playing in octaves simpler.. I admitted that I hadn't even considered this idea, but would think about it.
I considered this possibility from all aspects, but at the end of 3 days I decided that this was not a good idea. Several of the people that were interested in my idea were accordion players looking for a much more portable instrument, who liked the idea of a left hand with the chords in the same order as on a stradella bass. Also I was considering using the idea on electronic pianos and organs. Used on an electronic piano the left hand simply runs into the right hand side. I also had in mind for an electronic organ the same keyboard could be split (with a moving line depending if you were playing in sharp or flat keys), and with an extra set of buttons for the thumbs to play the equivalent of a pedal board, which wouldn't have worked if you had two diverting separate organ keyboards.
I then set about to teach myself to play tunes in octaves using both sides of the instrument. I took 3 weeks to master this technique. If I had had the left hand mirrored would I have done this in 3 days? Other useful techniques would have been more difficult. See replies above.
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The saga continues.
I did not mention earlier that Melodeon left hand basses and chords are also arranged in sets of four, with the ones that semi-automaticaly accompany the flattest key down to the left, and the ones for the sharpest key up to the right.
Some years later I bought a secondhand C/G Jeffries anglo concertina. The left hand had the lowest notes to the left and the highest notes to the right. I quickly modified this instrument by moving a few reeds so that I could instantly play morris tunes on the right hand side; and quickly learned to accompany them on the LHS.
This was an excellent instrument for Cotswold Morris, but when I started to accompany singers it was more difficult. So I got what I thought might be the solution by buying a Jeffries 50 button Duet. The left hand also had most of the lowest notes on the left hand side to the left and the higher notes of the LHS were to the right.
However I did not find the instrument particularly easy to play, and being pitched in the Key of Ab didn't help. I experimented with several different layouts over a year, and finally came up with the now celebrated "Hayden Duet System". I was totally unaware that a Swiss Gentleman had come up with the same idea for a bandoneon style concertina nearly a hundred years earlier.
The Jeffries was by now almost a complete wreak; so some years later I had a concertina made to my specification. I had by now seen the two other common types of duet. (Maccann and Crane) which also played in parallel (not mirrored), and one player even showed me how he could turn the instrument over to play the melody an octave lower with a high up accompaniment. I rather liked this idea, though I have rarely used it.
To be continued.
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Playing Opportunities In England, Scotland October 2015?
in General Concertina Discussion
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The West Country Country Concertina Players, Kilve weekend is at the end of October (21st - 23rd October I think). with over 100 concertina players. I am surprised that no one has mentioned this. If there is still time to book, you should add the extra Sunday night session at the local pub.
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