gavdav

John - the new Thomann Ovid System mics are extremely good and quite reasonable - not much more than a microvox and far superior sound as they are good quality condensers.

Will be sticking this on eBay within the week. Open to any reasonable offers before then, and obviously donation to c.net if sold through here.

more images and sound samples available on demand.

Due to divorce and the financial uncertainties of life as a full time gigging musician I need to sell one of my concertinas. As I currently only play one song on the C/G this is the obvious candidate. It is a 1926 four row Wheatstone. It has eight fold gold tooled bellows - by David Leese with the original unusual wheatstone tooling. Restored and tuned last year it is a great singing box - due to its size it wouldn't really suit fast tune playing, though the reeds are nice and responsive, but it is a superb and very rare concertina. Condition is pretty good - there are the usual cracks and the box would undoubtedly benefit from a full investment in a restoration, but it is sound and plays well. As well as all the buttons you would expect from a 39 key anglo, this currently has an extra row of notes that are currently drones (duet keys) but which could be altered to provide a third anglo row - e.g. in the key of F I will post pictures shortly, but it features in the main image at http://www.gavindavenport.com I would like to raise £4500 from the sale of this concertina but am of course open to offers. This price is competitive and with some thoughtful work on the extra row could be an amazing amazing instrument. I would consider part exchange of smaller C/G or F/C concertinas. thanks Gav

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=4974 Old footage of winlaton.

Also now available on iTunes - Gavin Davenport, Brief Lives - if people want to preview or purchase digitally. thx. Gav

Easiest way to get hold of a copy is to PM me and I'll send paypal details. I'm waiving shipping in the UK and US/Canada on Ballad-L and I will do the same here, so the cost is s straight £10 Thanks to Mike for the plug and Kind words. Features anglo concertina on several tracks and a bit of one row melodeon, guitar and cittern and some fiddle too! All songs, all narrative. Gav

Playing at Bright Phoebus at the Boardwalk on November 2nd in a little showcase spot. The concertina is one of the anglo duet hybrids, but I'm basically just on the Anglo rows here.

Love the sound, but the camera didn't pick you up so clearly; I can't always tell what you're singing. Can you tell us what your lyrics are? It seems different from any version of the False Knight that I can discover, though not without similarities. It is my own composition - leans on the format of the trad. ballad but is based on the true story of the day a very brave, or very foolhardy Canadian artillery captain destroyed himself and an attacking tiger tank to save the rest of my grandad's unit. Mike - yes, I will be at Whitby - hopefully performing solo but may have a few other things up my sleeve too. all dates on www.gavindavenport.com

a quick vid of me, singing with a bit of Concertina (Wheatstone AngloGerma/ duet) at the Woodlands Lawns - not sure who took this!

Thanks for all the enquiries - both of these instruments have now sold, and hopefully a donation to c.net will be on its way! Gav

bump - Jeffries price reduced, on here for a few days before going to eBay.

A friend of mine, (who happened to be an engineer working for the likes of NASA) made his own melodeon/button accordion, having borrowed a top end italian one, copied everything accurately and used top notch parts. When it was finished he went straight out and bought an italian box of his own, saying he could now understand where the money went and why they cost what they did.

both my april 1926 boxes have the puckered octagon (best metal??) labels

Suggesting that one should avoid any product that derives from an animal source, even if no animal was harmed in harvesting it? Shearing sheep doesn't harm them. In fact, in hot summer weather shearing is beneficial. But if avoiding contact with anything animal is your philosophy, then I guess you don't have any pets. Yeah. No glue joints, were there? I feel my sense of irony and the general light heartedness with which this thread began may have been lost somewhere in the previous thread - FWIW (nothing) I eat meat (as ethically as I can) and play a large number of instruments made from restricted or endangered or animal products - I'm unconcerned by this fact, as in in neither proud nor ashamed - what works works. The above items were merely an attempt to collate a fun list of items used in making a concertina which derived from animal sources (not to avoid them), in answer to a question earlier in the thread.Personally I'm more bothered by waste than what we use in a material sense. As for fur, pick up any felt hat of any quality (mine, used for occasional Morris outings, is made from beaver fur felt) and most will say fur felt - the highest quality available. I wasn't sure what grade of felt was used in the average wheatstone or jeffries of the last century, and was just citing an example of something else one could get ones knickers in a twist about if you so desired. Again, despite the ranting and stigmatic things from people on both sides of the pro/anti fur lobby I think it is really sad that piles of fur coats get burned so as not to offend anyone. Having just googled it it looks like 'tinas and pianos do usually use wool felt...anyway... Again, I have no axe to grind on either side of this argument - this started off as a well meaning academic question and seems to be drifting into something else. I'm off to play that rosewood Jeffries...

exactly - I didn't mean to derail a construction based thread, but what's done is done and anyway, can you imagine a synthetic based concertina that would still be as playable as a vintage jeffries or wheatstone is now, in another 100 years? (and yep, I love that brazilian rosewood, bone and leather box...) I was intrigued by those carbon fibre edeophone ends though... FWIW I don't really think you can make anything that doesn't have some impact or potentially arguable ethical side effect if you particularly wanted to go down that route, but life is too short PS - Morse concertinas also contain Beeswax if we're still tallying a list of animal ingredients

Shellac is the refined resin secretions of the female lac bug - so yes French polish is derived from animals. Is the felt of woven wool? yep, and red shellac actually has crushed cochineal beetles in it . felt - normally broken fur fibres so there is no "thread" and *ahem* there's a slight fur ethics issue in historical felt... but really...you could go crazy with this stuff... my Buddhist side says yes, animal products bad, then again, my other Buddhist side says, restricted harvest/illegal wood content, metal content, animal content, plastic parts, poor hourly paid manual labour, blood, sweat and tears etc etc all add up to make yet another instrument I shouldn't play, just like my rosewood guitars, koa cittern, held together with cow glue and so on and so on...but... music is probably the purest, most honest thing I've ever experienced and the more you pursue these things the more ethically futile it all becomes - there's something special about taking an out of fashion hundred year old assemblage of matter and doing somethinf that moves and engages people. academically I'm intrigued by alternatives, but somehow musical instruments are disturbingly and reassuringly alive whatever their origins...

French polish? oh, and the felt!

I was listening to a thing about sustainable fishing the other day, which basically says you have to farm or at least as a consumer, support quality farmed fish to be genuinely sustainable. here's a by product... http://www.es-salmonleather.com/

I think I'd rather see (as in, maybe be more intrigued by) a recycled concertina than a veggie one - without wanting to get into a debate about the pros and cons of vegetarianism there is an awful lot of wasted leather in woefully out of fashion clothes doing the rounds of our local charity shops - rather than that ending up in landfill it'd be nice to see stuff like that used. Similarly recycled wood (which was good enough for Paul Reed Smith's first guitars) can be interesting (and better than burning). Swings and roundabouts - maybe it is good to have a concertina that never degrades but I have a kind of instinctual dislike of plastics and petro chemicals. And is it just me, but I love the smell of my concertina ?

Well, how about the Oakwood? Will that be ready? Chris The music room have been demoing some chinese made hybrids which were pretty good, all things considered - similar externally to the normans. It isn't a huge stretch of the imagination to think that an Oakwood concertina might effectively be a pretty similar platform with some upgrades.

At a session in Sheffield this week the barman said they'd some lost property in which we might be interested. Taking a look at it, I'd say it's an English Concertina, played by a woman (or someone with quite small thumbs!), who is into Border morris and French music. That's still a fairly wide field, so can we get the word out? NB. The instrument has a fine identifying feature - a pair of eyes stuck on it. Does that ring any bells? ---- forwarded from a mail I received - hopefully claimed already, but I'm just spreading the word. Gav

I'm pretty sure this is a miniature anglo - 29816 (marked AG in the ledger) very cool. would love a mini but have to be sensible!