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Aside from Alex's remarks, the simple answer, as you already found out, is drill. An invaluable tool for that is Michael Eskin's tune trainer, to be found at Michael Eskin's ABC Tools and discussed in this forum many times. You can set it to gradually increase the speed of a tune you play along to from slow to unmanageable. Every brain has a pivot point at which playing along becomes impossible, but your goal is to push the pivot point out gradually. Make it a sport and reward yourself every time you can play along faster than last time.

Have you seen this here thread? A fair number of the suggestions also apply to your question. Other than that: Totally impossible to say. Each person's journey through the world of music is unique and individual. It all depends on what you wish to accomplish and what kind of musical intuition you have. My personal advice would be to hook up with other musicians as soon as you possibly can. It will be both a potentially frustrating and the most important experience ever. Good luck!

Oh no, how terrible. I was in PM contact with him just a few weeks ago. He had a profound role in my development as a Crane player. Fine fellow. RIP Kurt. Edit: Kurt Braun Obituary (2024) - Baton Rouge, LA - The Advocate (legacy.com)

Call me old-fashioned, but I would not buy a concertina from a cigarette. Who knows where the money goes.

wow, you never fail to impress me... well younger than 20 years, and already that dedicated to concertinas! If you'll still be at it at my current age, the c world will be looking at one of those who did make a significant difference. Thumbs up!

I would agree with that. For many not computer affine users, the distinction between PMs and public messenging appears to be too subtle to figure out. A few years ago I remember PMing somebody about a rather embarassing message he had inandvertently put onto somebody else's feed, believing it was purely private. As hard as I tried, I couldn't explain the difference to him...

Thanks for the pointer! A good deal of the UI and functionality appears to overlap with Michael Eskin's abc tool. The community/teaching part/business model is interesting.

Maybe your router gives you a new dhcp address after idle timeout?

A good strategy to simulate "real life" ensemble playing would be what @Jillser Nic Amhlaoibh suggested, but you can take it even a step back - playing against a metronome is the "most simple" form or getting used to playing with distractions because the metronome does not force you to align your playing with the tune, only the next beat. Next step up would be metronome practice mode, a backing track, then sound files, then utobe videos. Also, Michael Eskin's tune trainer is a true game changer. The important thing to remember is that each next level will be frustrating at first because to you it will feel as if you start from scratch every time. Accept it as a challenge and part of your journey. There are few more satisfactory moments in a musician's life than the feeling that you finally cracked a nut after it looked like an impossible endavour for so long.

I believe it was made the default during a forum software updatea few years ago.

< off topic and misplaced, sorry for the noise >

It never ceases to amaze me how comparatively few people are aware of Stan Rogers... I heard about him maybe around 15 years ago, and he completly blew me off my feet. I became addicted on the spot. Since then, I have introduced many people to him, and I do not know of a single one who wasn't as affected as I was. Music is very personal and individual, so a lot of the music I like is not appreciated by others, even those of the same musical environment. That's fine and by definition perfectly ok. Yet Stan Rogers was different. He manages to reach out to everyone, even long after his death, and world wide. What a giant as a musician and a human.

Bummer... are the reeds truly tetuned (ie can you spot solder flecks and/or file scratches) or are they "simply swapped?"

I am surprised that nobody so far has brought up Edward Jay's 3d printed concertinas yet... possibly because he is currently not accepting new orders, but given the demand, I would expect spin offs or possibly him licensing the technology to other makers. Anyways, he has a 36 button EC in his catalogue which may fit the bill.

260 CONCERTINAS? I've heard about CAS, but you do need some professional help, you know? 😁

That is terrible, Bob... maybe it provides comfort and encouragement to know that Rainer Süssmilch, an exceptional jazz EC player, lost part of his rh middle finger but still plays a killer concertina.

yes, we are on the same page! 🙂

Alex once gathered experiences about this while Mullering an EC where he replaced the wooden end plates with metal ones. The results, I believe, were sobering as hardly audible. I had pondered ordering both metal and wooden plates for #3 but moved away from that idea due to his previous results

I would consider that description accurate. For me it helps to look at it from a practical rather than theoretical point of view, though: The key signature roughly indicates the melodic (scale notes) and harmonic (chords) material to use in the piece. I would not use the term "real key" at all. What is important to the ear is the "mode," ie the location of the tonal center of the piece and how the material revolves around that center. For example, in dorian and myxolydian mode (widely used in irish music), the characteristic chord is the major below the root chord, and there is no half note step leading up to the center node (which is the trademark of the ionian mode which 90+% of "western" music is made of). That is clearly audible and what makes the two modes exotic to our ears. It is confusing when looked at in theory, I agree.

Not at all, at least not on my side... Yes, we are almost in sync now, I may just have not made myself clear enough in this point - apologies, I hope the following paraphrase leaves no more room for confusion - what I meant to express is this: No algorithm realized in software that relies on hardware input can be more accurate than what the hardware it runs on can provide. Thus, IF there is inaccuracy is a hardware time base, software can not compensate for it unless it has access to a different, more accurate secondary time base. I hope we can put this debate to rest now. Overall, I believe we have had a technically rather fruit- and insightful debate and are now in basic agreement after communication errors on several sides have been ironed out.

Are we talking the same language here? Steve and Alex explicitly refer to SOFT strobe tuners running on Apple devices. From my understanding, everything realized in software - no matter what algrithm they implement - must use the underlying hardware for reference. Your statements above imply that the tuning apps guarantee high accuracy regardless of the underlying hardware. I do not think that is possible, but of course, I can be wrong too. Please clarify if I am mistaken in my understanding. I have been a professional embedded software engineer for ~30 years, and I work in close cooperation with hardware designers. I am well aware of technical specifications, requirements for industrial systems and how designing hardware works. I was present at numerous systems being tested in cold and heat chambers. Thus I do not need to research or relearn the procedures. Of course you are correct in your elaborations. Yet we are talking consumer devices here, and from my technical experience, I can assure you that quality assurance and -control in consumer frequently falls victim to cost reduction stipulations. For many companies building and selling consumer devices, it may be much more attractive (cost wise) to produce on the lower end of the specification compliance list and risk even a rather high percentage of returns and destruction of malfunctioning devices than design systems that are highly reliable. I am not implying that this happens regularly on Apply smart phones and tablets, but I have experienced what I wrote earlier, and all I am doing is drawing conclusions. As for etiquette: No, I do not feel offended myself, and I do not feel a need to defend Alex, I know him well enough (I believe) to understand that he can do that well enough for himself, so no need to further pursue that strand. I too encourage everybody to conduct experiments along the lines of what Richard and I sketched out. It is not a lot of work, and the more data we gather, the mre reliable the results. I have run a short test this afternoon involving my Surface pro tablet, and in 2 5 minutes recordings at about 8 vs. about 15 degrees celsius, I was not able to reproduce and audible (or visualizable) skew, I will later attempt to repro the problem on my Celeron Windows PC. Best of luck, enjoy the rest of your weekend! 🙂

absolutely. Another fairly straightforward way to investigate temparature effect would be to make two, say, 5-minute recordings of a clicking metronome app on your consumer device at different temparatures as you suggested, export those to another computer (just to be on the safe side) and overlay them in your favorite daw (eg Audacity).

Tom, I do not understand your harsh judgement and dismissal of Alex's experience and knowledge. First of all, he is an education electronic engineer, and - as you can tell from his feed on instagram - still understands hardware better than many professionals, even though his daily work is not mainly EE. Also, I can sort of back up his statement empirically. A few years ago I owned a Tascam handheld recording device, and for a while I used to experiment with recording both through that recorder and my PC - meaning I would record one track using Cubase and a microphone hooked up to an external sound card, and another track separately on the Tascam, hoping to be able mix those into one recording. Both devices were set to the same metronome speed. When I exported the recording from the Tascam and tried to import the sound file into my Cubase project, I found that the tracks, even though perfectly synchronized in the beginning, would skew away from each other over time to a degree that made it impossible to use this recording technique. So far, there is nothing unexpected here; no two uncoupled oscillators will ever generate a clock source at the exact same frequency (this is, I believe, also the reason why most professional recording devices allow for external clock source feeding). The very interesting thing for me to observe was that the degree of the skew would change over time. I would typically make several recording attempts on either device and try to match the tracks to find the best sounding combination. As it turned out, two recordings from the PC taken at different times would have a varying skew - whereas in one of the recordings, say, the first two minutes were usable before the tracks would deviate from each other audibly, in another one it would be, say, 115 seconds against the IDENTICAL external sound file! A pattern I believed I detected was that a major factor that determined the skew rate was the time after bootup of the PC. I discussed that phenomenon with a colleague who is a full time embedded hardware developer, and he suggested that indeed, the temperature in the CPU mainboard might well be a contributing factor to the deviation between the two recordings. Needless to say, since all audio frequencies are derived from the CPU clock source, this behavior would affect both metronomes and tuning software. I will agree that devices specifically designed for use with audio applications will have additional compensation components to ensure frequency stability, but this does not necessarily apply to consumer devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones. Btw, it is terrible to hear about your hearing issues, that must be a very hard burden to carry - I am afraid I can not wish for you much more than a stop of the deterioration; miracle hearings are supposedly very rare with these conditions - all the best!

You don't have to (scroll down to the last but one contri in the thread):

Nice recording, but there is something strange about the tags showing in the mp3. All the names and titles visible (Klaus Hirschburger, Sandra, Into a Secret Land and In the Shadows) are of contemporary artists and songs. This is probably some kind of software issue while downloading. Do younhappen to have access to the original cylinder, Alan, to at least identify the true title of the piece?