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Chris Ghent

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Everything posted by Chris Ghent

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Very different playing styles Lukasz. I use the style you describe on my B/C accordion.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Mmm, should have said, take the plate out of the instrument before hitting it..!
  9. There has to be a better place to ask this question. A repairer of chemnitzers or bandoneons would have to have done a few of them. In the concertina world gang plate reeds only occur in old German concertinas and I have not heard of one being repaired as it is not worth the trouble because they are the antithesis of the image of modern German engineering. If you have to do it yourself one would have to start by tightening the rivet. There is a youtube video of riveted accordion reeds being manufactured and the operator progressively tightens the rivet by placing the head of the rivet on something hard and peening the other end. He hits it a couple of times and then realigns the reed so it doesn’t hit the side and then tightens it more and realigns etc.
  10. A good memory from Mrs Crotty’s 2009…
  11. I have seen them with the actionboard and the padboard painted red also…
  12. Looking at the layouts reminds me of one of the issues complicating the provision of alternative direction notes. As an example, lets say you want to push through the left hand phrase DEFG. If you decide to create a push F button to enable this, then it cannot be in a place where it demands the use of either of the fingers needed to play the E or the G. In the past I have retuned at different times both the D#3 and the Low A#, both draw notes, to E, and found the fingerwork involved in using the new note ridiculously tricky. This is one reason why all of the alternate notes in my layout use fingers which are less likely to be needed at the time. The most obvious of these is the low F# which uses the second finger on the right. The other reason, not an inconsiderable one, is that I am putting this layout into a relatively small concertina which means there might just be room for one reed on the left but it would be severely compromised. On the right however, where the reeds are considerably smaller, there is plenty of room for the two extra buttons and the slightly larger reeds of the reversals (slightly larger than the reeds which usually would be in those positions).
  13. One of the things I like is most players can play the layout and be unaware of the changed notes because they never use those buttons anyway. On the other hand, established players are unlikely to adapt to all of the changes. I find the most handy is the low f# on the RHS, a change I copied from the Dippers 23 years ago. One person, a spectacular player, asked me to reinstate the e6, I think they were used to using it as an octave.
  14. https://anglopiano.com/?_30_eFHhJKNMmn_110_PPlQsSVtTv._15_cGGIijkLMN_80_LkoOqpSRuTRU.IHjlMNOopq_110_nmSrUTvurstV&title=Chris Ghent 32 Key C/G Irish Augmented
  15. Uploaded a layout I made half a dozen of. Essentially it replaces on the right the dog whistlers I never use (not the same as saying no-one ever uses) with repeats of RHS notes which are not repeated in the classic layout, plus five notes from the LHS. https://anglopiano.com/?_30_eFHhJKNMmn_110_PPlQsSVtTv._15_cGGIijkLMN_80_LkoOqpSRuTRU.IHjlMNOopq_110_nmSrUTvurstV&title=Chris Ghent 32 Key C/G Irish Augmented
  16. Always surprising, life… https://www.facebook.com/dljenks Sorry to those who can’t follow to Facebook. Its a link to an interesting concertina maker in Kwa-Zulu Natal. If you are a member here David, well done…
  17. I tried leather for bushes about 20 years ago. The problem with the leather I used was it continued to compress with use quickly until it was paper thin anywhere the player was bearing to one side while pushing the buttons. Piano bushing cloth (baize) had a natural returning tendency and while it also will compress it takes much longer.
  18. If it is a buzzy rattle that happens on the low notes when you transfer from push to pull without lifting the button, learn to live with it. It can be avoided mostly if you lift the button and put it back down between push and pull.
  19. The “brass framed with clamp” reeds look like a concertina reed but the ones I have seen have the vent geometry of an accordion reed. Instruments using them could be called semi-hybrid! Some makers using them alter the vent to be like a concertina.
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