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About David Barnert
- Currently Viewing Topic: complimentary instruments
Profile Information
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Gender
Male
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Interests
46-button Hayden Duet Concertina
Morris, English Country, Contra Dance Music
Classical and Early Music
Retired Anesthesiologist
YouTube channel ("Dr. Sleep"):
https://www.youtube.com/@David_Barnert
SoundCloud channel ("Dr. Sleep"):
https://soundcloud.com/dr-sleep-1/tracks -
Location
Albany, NY, USA
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David Barnert's Achievements

Ineluctable Opinionmaker (6/6)
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Tuning/repair in NE US
David Barnert replied to Leah Velleman's topic in General Concertina Discussion
Glad it worked out. I was afraid to ask... -
David Barnert started following Dedicated notes to fingers. (Anglo) , IS THIS THE WORLD'S WORST INSTRUMENT? 🤣 , Anglo action and 6 others
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IS THIS THE WORLD'S WORST INSTRUMENT? 🤣
David Barnert replied to Leah Velleman's topic in Concertina Videos & Music
As you can see from my 2-year-old comment on the youtube page, I feel the same way. My favorite part is where he mistakes valves for reeds. -
The picture in Theo’s post is a picture I took of my two 46-key Haydens (Wheatstone on left, Bastari on right) on my dining room table in Albany, NY. It is unrelated to the discussion about Stagi, but appears two posts below the quoted post by Simona in Italy. I don’t know how it wound up here.
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Here it is, cued to the above scene: https://youtu.be/YXGfCKNa_9E?t=855
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tradlessons.com has been renamed appcordions.com and is the brainchild of concerti.net member Michael Eskin. This is me playing it (the iPhone version—the iPad version has more buttons, like the Beaumont):
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I’ve been playing with the Hayden-specified slant for nearly 40 years. When I first picked up a Beaumont, something felt odd, but I couldn’t place it. Then I realized it was the absence of the slant. But others seem to have no problem with it. As far as the mirrored layout, I’m not aware that anybody has actually built one since the days of Kaspar Wicki, so unless you’re planning on commissioning one bespoke it’s likely the choice will be made for you.
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I was wondering the same thing.
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I don’t have the patience to work through the analysis and I’m not an anglo player (Hayden duet), but in choosing my chord progressions, I frequently opt for horizontal rather than vertical considerations, that is, placing more importance on the integrity of the progression over the duration of the phrase than on what notes are sounding simultaneously at any given instant. At first glance, it appears that Kimber had no clue how to think like this, but, as I say, I haven’t gotten beyond the first glance.
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There are no concertinas in Chile
David Barnert replied to Rodrigo Álvarez's topic in Instrument Construction & Repair
Here’s one from Chile: The description on the YouTube page translates to: Thanks to the long departed @Leo , who first pointed it out here. Of course, the concertina came from (and presumably went back to) Bolivia. -
How can this be played?
David Barnert replied to Martin Essery's topic in General Concertina Discussion
I agree with everything above and would add: If the next chord doesn’t contain a B below middle C and a G above the F# then the C is almost certainly an error. Nobody writing music as well-behaved as this would write an augmented 4th (C - F#) that doesn’t resolve to the adjacent B and G. And, of course, if there IS no next chord then the sequence ends with a dissonance, also unlikely. -
What an odd way to play that!
David Barnert replied to SIMON GABRIELOW's topic in General Concertina Discussion
I was a biophysics major in college, so I’m well-acquainted with the 3-dimensional Cartesian co-ordinate system, but I was trying to avoid that kind of terminology. Yes, if you consider any real object with respect to three orthogonal axes, reversing any one of the axes gives you a mirror image. Unless the object is symmetrical this is inconsistent with reality. Reversing a 2nd one brings you back to reality. So unless we’re contemplating turning the concertina inside-out, or otherwise making a mirror image out of it, we have to reverse an even number of axes. In this case, we’re reversing up/down and left/right while leaving front/back intact (the keys remain under the fingers). A classic puzzle/question about this goes: A mirror reverses right and left, why doesn’t it also reverse up and down? The answer is that a mirror doesn’t reverse right and left, it reverses front and back. But we’re vertically oriented beings, subjected to vertically oriented gravity, and when we look at something reversed back-to-front we instinctively turn it around in our heads about a vertical axis, swapping right/left and back/front in the process, leaving us with right-left reversal. It would never occur to us to turn it about a horizontal axis, swapping up/down and back/front in the process, leaving us with up-down reversal. -
Dedicated notes to fingers. (Anglo)
David Barnert replied to Alan Day's topic in General Concertina Discussion
I’ll stay out of this one. Doesn’t seem to apply to the Hayden that I play (or to the EC or other duet models, for that matter). It’s really just an Anglo concern. -
What an odd way to play that!
David Barnert replied to SIMON GABRIELOW's topic in General Concertina Discussion
I think we’re all talking about the same thing, here. Concertina rotated from normal by 180° about the forward/back axis, so that the left end is on the right, the right end is on the left, the top on the bottom and the bottom on top. The keys remain on the side of the handrail furthest from the body. No mirror reflections involved.