tzirtzi

I hadn't realised that there was a larger version of the image... having found it, I agree with your reading. I went back to find the place I original read "brass reeds" (their secondhand catalogue), but couldn't find it any more - so either I misread that originally or they've also noticed that it was a mistake and changed it. Either way, if it does turn out to have steel reeds and/or the drilled holes in the end successfully make it much louder then it may not be the kind of instrument I'm looking for anyway... I will ask whether I can look inside it, but I can imagine that that might be a problematic request if the people in the shop at the time aren't concertina experts specifically! Thanks for the advice

Well, it may come down to just having to trust that Hobgoblin will have had an expert look at it... But it's becoming clearer to me that I probably shouldn't just go in, try, and buy without having looked around a bit more generally and made sure of everything. Thanks, that's useful to know. I may see if I can persuade my girlfriend to come along - as a guitar and cello player she has a better ear for tuning than I do...

Thanks, that's a good suggestion - it hadn't occurred to me that I could ask to try an instrument even if I couldn't afford to actually buy it Hmm. Yes, I see those - I had assumed that they were just part of the design of the fretwork. Is there any obvious reason someone would drill extra holes in the fretwork? Thanks for the suggestion, I'll email him. It's a bit far to go to actually visit - a good 3 hour drive - but I'll see how things go.

Hello all Having played for about 7 months, I'm finding myself pushing against the limits of the Jackie EC - the lack of the top of the range means many violin pieces are awkward, and I'm spending a lot of effort learning fingering for difficult keys that would be comparatively easy with the extra accidentals of a traditional EC. So I'm thinking of upgrading. I've identified this Lachenal in Hobgoblin Bristol, which is close to where I live when not at university. It's a rosewood 48 key, bone buttons, brass reeds and a 5-fold bellows. I think it's just what I'm looking for - it has the extra range and extra accidentals, and I'm looking for a quieter concertina to minimise annoyance caused to flatmates by incessant playing so brass reeds should be appropriate. The Hobgoblin staff report that it is in tune at concert pitch and is fully working, but don't know the serial number. I hope to be able to go to the shop to try it out next week some time. What I wanted advice on is - when trying it out, what should I be looking for? I've only ever played the one concertina, so I won't be able to compare it to much. Is anything likely to be wrong with an antique concertina that might not be immediately obvious? Also, is the price - £800 - reasonable? Again, I have little to compare it with - concertinas on ebay almost always need work, so aren't very equivalent. Thanks -tzirtzi

On the other hand there are odd things that really quite awkward on the English as a result of the particular pattern of buttons, that might not be obvious until you actually pick up and start playing - sequences involving repeated fifths or tenths are very awkward, and playing parallel lines in octaves or sixths I find very awkward because switching from hand to hand means you lose much sense of the logic of the tune. But it's extremely easy to playing parallel thirds on the English - lots of classical arrangements for the EC make considerable use of this (for example this arrangement of a piece from Mozart's Magic Flute), but it can sound good in folk music as well. And the ease of playing accompaniment an octave lower works for any pair of octaves, whereas on the anglo (I assume) it's only easy within the specific right hand range/left hand range that it's designed for.

The English can play chromatically (i.e. in any key) with relative ease - the anglo, on the other hand, becomes progressively harder to play as you move further away from its home keys. So with the English one can easily play music outside the folk genre such as classical music and jazz, whereas I've not come across many anglo players doing this. On the other hand, they do say that the quick and constantly bellows direction changes involved in anglo playing give it a certain punchy, rhythmic sound that makes it particularly appropriate to Irish folk - the EC doesn't have this sound, or at least not unless the player puts effort into imitating it.

Raising our sights, striving a little harder and reducing the quantity of embarassing videos posted (and I have to admit, this is a crime I'm guilty of..) sounds good - it would indeed help to improve the image of the instrument, which would mean more players, which could only be good. Raising the bar would also mean that more players would be encouraged to practice to a greater level of proficiency, and, personally, I think that would mean enjoying themselves more as well. The more proficient I am playing an instrument, the more enjoyable I find it. Of course, I didn't mean any of this to imply that there's anything wrong a model of musicianship different to my own - quite as you say, as long as it's enjoyable, the details aren't too important!

david_boveri - what you say makes complete sense to me (well, the general comments - much of the anglo-specific technique went over my head as an EC player). The anglo and English concertinas each suffer from specific historically motivated cultural distributions which make virtuosity as it exists for many other instruments much less likely. The anglo has always been associated with the folk music scene, and has remained reasonably popular in this scene ever since its invention. Folk music, as much as I love it, is not massively conducive to virtuoso playing - tunes tend to be comparatively simple, short, repetitive and in only a small number of easy keys. Most folk music is monophonic, homophonic, or heterophonic - there is very little (if any) polyphony. It is also a comparatively small scene. Virtuoso playing is made more likely by a bigger scene with more players and more competition, and more complex and varied music. The EC was associated with classical music, and my impression is that in its early days it very much did have its virtuosos. In the beginning of Regondi's Rudimenti del Concertinista he writes: - no suggestion of the concertina being a limited instrument there! However, the dramatic fall in the popularity of the EC, in part due to the rise of the electric guitar, has left it with such a small modern following that it too is unlikely to produce many virtuoso players. I learnt the piano by Suzuki method, which involved spending years at the beginning of my learning concentrating mainly on expression, style and technique. Concertina learners don't have access to such goldmines of societal wisdom - most, such as myself, are self taught and so at best are working from printed materials, which can never be quite equivalent to an educated music teacher. It's no surprise that there are fewer concertina virtuosos than in most other instruments, and, at the very least, this lack cannot be argued to evidence a shortfall of the instrument itself.

(Those final three files were successfully uploaded to a large-file-upload site and added ) I've also added a user comment system - anyone can leave a comment on any item in the database.

If anyone is interested in it, they also let you bid online - http://www.boldon-auctions.co.uk/lot_detai...mp;lot_id=54930

Well, it was easy enough to do by email as it turned out - almost all of the pieces are now in the database. Thanks for the suggestions, though

Aye that email address is fine. I imagine that the maximum attachment size that will be allowed per email will be 20mb or so? I'm sure it'll work some way or other

David, Sorry to have taken a little while to get back to you. I'd be happy to spend the time uploading and entering your collection into the database, and I have the excess storage space - if you could email it to me that would be great. As it does indeed like at least some of Ed's is different, I've PMed him asking if it would be ok to add his to the database as well - although I imagine it'll be fine, as his purpose in putting online was to get it to a larger audience. This should increase the size of the database considerably!

English-Concertina.co.uk database of EC online sheet music If anyone knows of any other EC music online that could be added and would like to do so then please do - the guest password to add stuff is concertina.net - not very secure, but the point was to ward off inadvertently spamming bots rather than purposive human spammers. Similarly I've added very little violin music and no guitar music, so if anyone wants to add some more of that then feel welcome also . In future I intend to add the ability to upload .pdfs and images to the site itself, so that stuff can be added that isn't already hosted elsewhere on the internet.

Thanks to everyone who've left suggestions I have taken your advice and obtained some guitar and violin music - I wasn't expecting much of my local library, but they turned out to have a very good sheet music section, and I've borrowed six Bach suites for cello arranged for guitar, and sixteen Bach dance movements for cello arranged for violin. I'll report back on how I find it. I've also been playing some pieces from the book from Juliette Daum's site - Mozart's Oh Dolce Concento + variations, and Non Più Andrai. Both quite easy as they have been transposed to G major, but very useful for getting my fingers used to playing chords. I am also intending to join the ICA, as it sounds very worthwhile. I've also created the database I mentioned - it's working and has about 100 entries, but I want to add a couple more features. So I will post a link to that for anyone who's interested soon . Thanks again for all of your advice!

Thanks I do use the IMSLP, but find it woefully short on concertina music (only a single item, and that's for the anglo and both beyond the range of the EC and written on two staves). Still, it's a great resource for violin music and the like.

Thankyou very much! Some of this is exactly the kind of stuff I've been looking for I will indeed consider an ICA membership then. Can members go and use the library in person, if they live within a reasonable distance, or is it all digital? I also hadn't thought of trying guitar music - wikipedia confirms that a typical guitar tuning gives a range only slightly larger than an EC, so hopefully there should be some appropriate stuff. Thanks for the suggestion

Hello I've been playing for about 4 or 5 months now, and have so far been playing almost solely folk tunes available both online and in books, and have been feeling generally under-challenged. So recently I've moved on to violin classical music - stuff from the mid-level grade books, at the moment a JS Bach partita and a bourée. But what these all lack is much use of the concertina's polyphonic and chordal potential - folk tunes seem always to be written out as a single line, violin music only includes occasional chords, so I feel I'm progressing little in this important area. I was wondering if anyone knows of any freely available classical music written or arranged for the EC? Such music clearly exists, as I've seen it sold online, and is presumably mostly Victorian and so public domain. I've looked, but haven't been able to find anything online myself. If no-one does know of anything already online, what would people thing of the idea of starting to collect some online, to be available for free? There are good folk music collections online so there's no need for anything of that sort, but classical sheet music is quite scarce online generally, and especially so for the concertina. Would a free online collection of public domain concertina sheet music be of use to anyone? Would it be stepping on the toes of people selling concertina music? Would anyone be willing to contribute scans/photos/pdfs/ABCs/etc. if such a collection was started? -Tam

Nice In some ways similar to mine, in others (such as the flat mounting of the reeds and the quality of the fretwork) rather nicer. Does it play ok? Thanks! It's helpful to see pictures - confirms that I have indeed understood the descriptions of tuning. I've got as far as buying a set of appropriate files, but have now realised that half of the reeds are inside the box, which may or may not be glued shut... Hmm... Also, sadly, it's accordion reeded in the sense that the reeds sound in pairs, so there's no point in only tuning those I can easily access . I'll see how it goes...

Yeah... This does often seem to be the way of ebay - when I bought this I'd been hoping for something in rather better condition based on the description. Leave lukewarm feedback and move on... I look forward to seeing those

Thanks The one you've linked to is in fact this one - I was the buyer - but I hadn't realised that you can search old listings, which is very useful. A search there suggests that £40-£60 is about what one should pay for one of these in good, working order - considerably less if it needs significant work - so I think I will indeed have a go at tuning. Lots of what I've read about tuning talks about making a test bellows - am I right in thinking that the purpose of this is to speed up the process, so that you don't have to put the concertina back together every time you adjust it to see what it sounds like? In which case, this time at least I'll do without - I have no spare bellows lying around... Or is there some more necessary purpose for a test bellows? I'll see if my guitar-playing friend will lend me his little tuning gadget to aid tuning to conventional pitch...

Interesting - having googled pictures, it does indeed look similar to the insides of a bandoneon. Still haven't decided whether to have a go or to sell it.. Could anyone advise me what a reasonable price to expect might be, untuned vs. tuned? I realise that it won't be going for much either way.

Sounds feasible... but I'll go away and do some more research before deciding whether to have a go. Thanks again for your help

Thankyou again! So the whole layout (colour coded - blue means flat) looks like this: As opposed to the normal G/D layout (ignoring the top line): I've read that reeds can be tuned by filing them carefully to change their shape. Is this a practical/safe thing to do or is it likely to destroy them? The inside of the concertina looks like this: So it's got accordion reeds mounted unlike a normal concertina.

That sounds like it makes sense! Thanks. Means that it's even more out of tune than I imagined, though...