Chris Ghent

A job well done Dana! If anyone has not seen inside one of Dana’s concertinas, there is a lot of lovely well thought out engineering in there. And thanks Dana for all of the good sense you put my way over the years. And the great company on our many phone calls..!

I find carefully lifting the end off the action box, making sure the end is perfectly positioned and lifting vertically so as to not disturb any of the buttons or the pads, will show you where the pads are positioned on the pad board. Only works with a concertina that has inscribed circles around the pads as an alignment guide. When I made concertinas without such a circle I would put a dot in the centre of the pad so the alignment could be gauged from underneath. These alignment methods only work in conjunction with oads in good condition and no extraneous matter caught underneath.

I find .5mm a little thin for gussets. I think there is a chance if they are too thin they will absorb some of abruptness of a bellows change by moving slightly. .7, even .8 sounds right.

Having only one C# compromises your phrasing occasionally in the same way as does the single F# on the left. Having the high A on the push more handily placed is a bonus but it is there on the Jeffries layout, at the end of the row.

Yes

If you are using any chemical method and the brass is starting to look a little pink it means the zinc is leaching out and leaving the copper behind.

I have always found the description of concertina tone/timbre difficult. One way I have found of assessing and demonstrating differences in concertina sound is as follows. This is a comparative method. What you do is play a note on one of the concertinas and mimic its sound with your voice. While still singing the note, play the same note on the other concertina and adapt your voice to the new note. You will find (if there was a difference) you need to change the shape of your mouth/throat to mimic the new note. This change is mostly a matter of the size of the mouth/throat chamber. I have surmised the need for a bigger mouth chamber means the lower harmonics dominate and a smaller chamber means the upper harmonics dominate.

Bellows which open by themselves are unfinished. They need to spend time ( I don’t mean ten minutes, I mean at least a couple of weeks, preferably more) firmly clamped up, and being taken out every few days and stretched and then clamped again. And then when they go into service they should be immediately put away in a blocked case when not being used. After a period of time, when they have given up resisting you can be a little more relaxed about it. There is a sweet spot between bellows that are too floppy and bellows that are too tight. In that sweet spot are a lot of good concertinas. Bellows can be stiff for a bunch of reasons. Anything with folded cards will be stiffer. However, a lot of people who say “the bellows on this concertina are too stiff” are actually having to push harder to compensate for the inefficient nature of poor reeds.

A feeler gauge of around 6-8 thou is a good tool. Around here there are two types of feeler gauge, parallel with a rounded end and tapered with a round end. The tapered ones are best.

I suspect it is the same one

Very different playing styles Lukasz. I use the style you describe on my B/C accordion.

Buttons only need to be pushed to the bottom of the travel. I suspect those liking flush low travel limits are pushing harder than that. I find when you push harder and further than needed you lose feel of how little the finger needs to move to release the button and it takes longer. My ratios are about 2:1 and the travel distance (this really helps with speed) is 2.75. When the ratio is 2:1 you need to watch out the top of the arm does not hit the underside of the action box. Thinner felt layers in the pad will help that.

I’m with Wally.

It is definitely easier to make the popping sound on the two higher notes with a better quality concertina. The Clover would be a little more difficult but definitely not impossible. The button needs to travel about 1mm down and then the finger needs to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Some people do a glancing tap where the button is tapped on such an angle the finger is off the button sideways very quickly rather than needing to reverse direction and be raised. Try putting a large amount of bellows pressure on while you are trying to get this technique. The pressure will make it pop easier and once you have it completely under control you can back off a little. The exercise I teach is to sit with a lot of pressure on the bellows and keep tapping one note, seeing how short and sharp you can make it. When I was learning I spent hours doing this. Although it is often taught, play the low note, pop the two high notes and play the low note again, I don’t hear people doing this. One successful technique I hear entails holding the low note through to the end of the first of the high popped notes, play the second popped note and then the low note again. This means during the first popped note you have two reeds sounding and this emphasises that note which is what you want for rhythm. If you do this the low note must be stopped exactly when the high note does or it will just sound muddy. Learn to do it playing very slowly. The word to remember is crisp..! Listening to others is good and I recommend Brenda Castles; she has a large number of techniques but also she plays without other instruments and you can hear her.

Mmm, should have said, take the plate out of the instrument before hitting it..!