RAc

There's a surplus dot at the end of the URL. It should read this: https://pghardy.net/concertina/lachenal_32801/lachenal_32801.html

Possibly the TO is puzzled about the seemingly missing backgrounds in some of the photos? It is my understanding, however, that these effects can be created by professional or semi professional photographers employing lighting techniques.

Being a relative newcomer to concertinas myself (I got my first concertina, a Lachenal, in 2011 at the tender age of 48), I don't have decades of experiences to draw from, but the last 9 years have been pretty intense musically, so there are lots of incidents which I'd call highlights on an amateur level. I feel incredibly fortunate to have connected to the English folk dance scene which is a lovely group of open-minded and supportive people as well as a treasure cove of great tunes and dances I immediately felt at home with. Fantastic musicians, such as Alex Wade, Adrian Brown, Dave Ball, Chris Jewell and Jochen Riemer, have greatly helped, influenced and encouraged me. I especially love to play for dancers. There is something truly magical to the (between musicians and dancers) shared experience of a Ceilidh night. One highlight was a Ceilidh I helped organizing early this year (before "it" all began...). In the preparational process, I learnt a lot about the "behind the curtains" of dance nights, such as interacting with callers, understanding tune sets, matching dances with tunes and so on. Everybody was very nervous because we (the band - which only meets irregularly and had to perform without our "front man") didn't know what to expect (it was a Scottish ceilidh which until then we hadn't done yet) and the callers didn't know us except for a few videos. So the tension was almost audible, but with the first few bars, it was clear that the match was good, and from then on, the evening was pure fun. The other recent highlight was the positive encouragement I received in this wonderful forum for my "personal musical work." I intended my Soundcloud recordings most of all to be something like a documentation process of a musician's evolvement (some of my older recordings are actually pretty mediocre at best, but I leave them there because they were the best I could do at the time I recorded them). So again, thanks to everybody who listens to what I post - every comment or feedback is a small to major highlight, and if I learnt at some point that what I did actually helped someone else in his or her musical growth - that would certainly bring an even brighter smile to my face. Another major highlight was working with Alex Holden and Nina Dietrich towards my custom Crane, in particular the first minutes I spent in Alex's living room, being handed the beauty he had finished just hours before. It's impossible to convey the experience; after months of very intense communication and pondering detail options, seeing, smelling (yes, that's an important element as well) and playing and listening to what had been a random collection of raw materials just shortly before that is truly wonderful and also magical in its own way. Thanks for starting the thread, Alan, and I was moved quite a bit by your story! As a German native, I am naturally very aware of all the wrongs and sufferings our ancestors must be held responsible for, and I am very grateful for having spent most of my grown up years in a Europe that focussed on overcoming borders, healing and forgiving. It's very tragic that we are in a backlash period now (which I strongly hope will be over soon).

Hi Lappy, I like this! You've got a good voice that suits this kind of music really well. May I ask if you (as a Canadian) have been tackling any of Stan Roger's songs? Might be a good match for your voice! The only suggestion I have about this video is the arrangement. I believe it could benefit from more distribution between the instruments and the voice. I'd suggest that you insert an instrumental break somewhere in the middle where you let the concertina take a solo (similar to what you do at the end) and then vary the voicings over the chorusses. Shanties with numerous chorusses tend to becoming tiring to listen to, so you may want to use the instruments to add a few surprises (such as leaving out the concertina altogether for half a verse). But given the number of instruments I see in the back of your video, it looks like you're very experienced, so you would probably have thought about these things yourself... Really good!

This is really an unlisten youtube video. Since it is unlisted, I won't post the direct link. The tune is labelled Tom Maguire's Fancy, user's name is clunktrip.

You're welcome! I'm by no means a Joplin expert, but I suspect there's even more. I'm planning on digging a bit deeper into that musical period, believing there are more treasures to be unearthed!

Well, Geoff, apologies for not having responded so far - but (I'm almost ashamed to admit) the name Tommy Williams wasn't familiar, so I ordered his CD, my curiosity roused by your remark. The record arrived today, and I gave it a first listen. What can I say? Being likened to someone of his calibre is about the most flattering compliment imaginable. Thank you so much. Naturally, he was several leagues above what I can ever hope to accomplish musically, so reading those kind and encouraging words made all the long hours of working on the instrument worthwhile. There are a number of his pieces that may be doable for me, although very likely not as his level of technical ability, so once I've given the record some more thourough listening, I'd love to tackle transcribing and learning a few. Thanks again for pointing out his name to me, the record "Springtime in Battersea" should be very interesting to every duet player. Coincidentally, the record I got is a double CD featuring Gordon Cutty (EC) as the other artist. It's a lucky coincidence that there is one piece both players recorded (Woodland Flowers) and thus can be found twice on the record. I find it very instructional and enlightining to compare the EC and duet players' respective takes of the same piece!

Hi Aleskei, I don't think anyone has pointed that out to you yet: When tackling concertina restauration jobs, DO get "the bible" (Dave Elliott's "Concertina Maintenace Manual"). It'll answer most questions you'll have at that level as well as prevent you from falling into numerous trap doors.

Well Aleskei, I hope you do have extensive experience with wood/leather/paper/metal work outside of instrument restauration! Reading statements like the above tends to give me goose bumps - for the simple reason that concertinas make you believe they're easily restorable by amateur craftsfolks, but there are lots of trap doors you can fall into (btdt). My own personal experience is that the first restoration project tends to be a throw away job for reasons that are impossible to assess without some experience. I strongly recommend to learn your abcs from a cheap beaten up instrument of which there are many offered on ebay. The one we're looking at appears to be too valuable to be at risk of falling victim to beginner's enthusiasm. So best of luck - please keep us informed about your progress, but unless you are an apt and experienced craftsperson with lots of tools and patience at your disposal, expect the job to be harder and more time consuming than you may envisioned.

In my ongoning exploration of early 20th century American music, I added a rendition of Joplin's Rosebud March to my SC collection: Played on my Wheatstone 55 button Crane. Thanks for listening!

Hi Stephen, yes that's correct. The second reed is under the valve. You can actually take out the entire reed plate, there should be a hole in it into which you can stick a finger in and pry the thing out. It may take some work, but the plate is not mechanically attached to the casing. In Order to avoid putting it back the wrong way, you may want to put alignment markers on the top with a felt tip pen or somwthing the like. If you visualize the air flow, it's easy to deduct which one is which: On push, the bellows are initially full and press the air out via the reed whose button is pressed, so the air first pushes through the (inner) reed, then blows out the outer valve and escapes throgh the holes in the end plate. Likewise, the air presses against the inner valve and seals it, so all of the air must go through the inner reed. On pull, the reasoning is opposite.

Hi Randy, we had this discussion before: https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/20357-top-ten-session-tunes/ I still tend to believe that sessions tunes go in and out of style fairly quickly. There are tunes that pop up infrequently over and over again over the years (eg Chinese Breakdown or Levy Jackson Rag), but when it comes to "bread and butter tunes" such as 32 bar jigs or reels, I couldn't name any that make it beyond local favorite status (in our "tribe," The Great North Run is in that group)... I'd be curious how others look at this though.

Hi Son_of_Leo and Stephen, Stephen may have erratically replied to the notification Email (even though the Email explicitly states not to respond). @Stephen: When logged on to c.net, you need to click the little envelope symbol on the right hand corner, then navigate to the message in question and follow response instructions. If you hit respond to the notification mail in your email client, nothing will happen; the response will go into byte heaven and never be seen by anyone. It's easy to fall into that trap. Some forum implementations therefore do not include the text of the message into the notification mail but simply inform you via Email that you have received a message, thus forcing you to explicitly log in to see the message. @Son_of_Leo: You can verify whether the recipient has read the message in your personal messenger area by looking for the "read" timestamp (it will either say "not read yet" or give you a time stamp for the time the recipient has retrieved the message).

Hi Gregor, if my ear serves me right, I am inclined to suggest that you practice this against a metronome. The first part sounds about right, but in the second part I believe you lose the rhythm a few times. It appears to be rather tricky so without discipline it's very easy to lose the steady beat. Apologies if this should be a wrong assessment (I'm currently not at home so all I can do is tap out your video against the mp3 file you linked). Thanks RAc

I would think so. It doesn't make sense to utilize two significantly different technologies in one product, in particular if one of them serves a use case not in the product's main target market.

Ok, thanks for clarifying. You're arguing in terms of message broker latency. Should be easy to figure out how Zoom does it in either case, I'll give it a shot later this week by wiresharking the network traffic when doing my next Zoom conf. I suspect it's message broker usage (MQTT?) regardless of the number of nodes. I also suspect that even pure peer-to-peer systems like JamKazam utilize message brokers - even though they don't need them technically - for several reasons ("just" ones such as being able to queue connection requests to peers even when Offline such as in SIP as well as "greedy" ones such as being able to control the server end for possible sources of income). I did a quick search but the only remotely related discussion I could find was here: https://medium.com/@gjovanov/building-your-own-slack-54874bf5fd7a

Hi Jim, I took the buttons to a local jeweller and had him clean them in their ultrasonic cleaning device. Wasn't expensive and turned out decent enough!

I believe I understand what you are getting at when comparing pure peer-to-peer software packages like JamKazam to One-to-many video conferencing software systems like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. In the latter, there is an additional complication relating to the fact the multiple "audio feeds" from several clients must be processed quasi-simultaneously; thus, optimizing and reducing data stream sizes in this case buys possible additional performance. Yet, in either case, the factor that blows the show is the internet itself (as we know by now, thanks among other things to Jody's sharing of experiences). If all your neighbors hooked up to the same provider and same switch on the provider's side are watching hi-res cat videos while you try to Jam via any conferencing software, you're out of luck. In that case, additional cutting down on traffic may help you in pushing a Zoom conf quality a wee little bit towards the maximum possible JamKazam quality under the same network throughput restrictions, but I'd assume you'll never get beyond it, right?

Some splitting hairs in two: The latency is not inherent in Zoom; the front end software is only one contributing factor. The major issue (we discussed this before) is packet turnaround in the internet infrastructure. Thanks, Eskin, for the description!

What do I think? Hmmm, I don't know. If you (or anyone else) are/is willing to put the work into it, I'll draw my hat in awe (it WILL be a lot of work with little return, almost inevitably), but I'm not sure if a separate subsection in an existing established internet presence such as concertina.net, concertina.org or concertinas.org.uk wouldn't be a better home for this kind of thing. At the heart of the issue is the simple fact (imho) that the Crane layout per se is nothing that deserves an internet presence of its own. Don't get me wrong; I feel comfortable with the system right now and feel that there are more technical idiosyncracies to be explored on it, but the same could be argued for any other layout system. Furthermore I still believe that I would have become as proficient on any other system as I have on the Crane had I started on that system. Thus I don't feel emotionally attached to the Crane and/or its history; rather, I feel attached to the Concertina (any layout) as a way of expressing music. But it's up to you, really. If I can be of any use in helping out (with content or technical issues), I'll be happy to do so, but I can't make a long term commitment.

Hi Rod, should we relocate to this thread?

you're absolutely right, of course, Peter. Respect is a two way street by definition. I take it as a given that a newby will first scout the scenario, be humble and determine for himself/herself how to behave in a new environment and make sure that s/he doesn't implode the session. Rumors have it that there are less apt players totally unaware of the dynamics (that's just as inacceptable as narrow minded silver backs), but I'm assuming the TO is not one of those and has charted the local scene.

Hi Sean, the lesson to be learnt from your example is that the skeletal melody IS (as written out) g for three beats. There are always half a bazillion ways to vary the melody (thus put flash on the skeleton). Which gets us back to the "wrong" or "right" question: The only thing you can do wrong in dance music is lose the rhythm. All that dancers ask for is a good steady solid rhythm to dance to. Pretty much everything else is up to interpretation. So to me the better approach to dance music is to strive at mastering the skeletal melody and get that one up to speed; once you feel comfortable there, you can fill in the void spaces however required (thus build up the pieces gradually). The additional benefit is that the skeleton will sound good against any variation whereas some variations don't work well against each other (in your example, if one person plays an upward thriller G-A-G and another one an arpeggio over G involving a B, you'll have a friction between the A and the B). You can even go below the skeleton by playing chordal accompaniments ("fake it" like guitarists do), then build things up from the chordal structure. All good session leaders will be tolerant about beginners as long as there is at least one person in the group who can play over the mistakes of others (some of the best even take great delight in recovering any tune even in a group of total beginners, it'll reconfirm their quality as a musician). The bigger the session and the more experienced players there are, the easier it is for you to experiment, make your mistakes unnoticed and grow in the shadow. But without being able to play along at all, you'll constantly be lacking experience in ensemble skills. Edit: The answer overlapped with Gary. I'll second all of what he wrote!

https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/15386-spring-making/ https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/21321-spring-winder-from-a-film-reel-rewind/&tab=comments#comment-197820 https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/21438-spring-winder-2/&tab=comments#comment-198747

Hi Kelteglow, it's always the same answer to all like questions: Musicianship is a combination of many skills that are frequently independent of each other, sometimes contradicting. Leading a tune (in its simplest form, barring feedback incorporation) is the closest to playing the tune in the familiar comfort zone of your home, although you'll find that once you start listening to what the session group does with (or, less desireable, against) your lead, you'll find it as hard as following. Playing against distractions is the first level of added difficulty on top of simply rendering the tune. It's a different skill and must be practiced separately. And since we're all individuals, everybody enters the ring with individual difficulties. I feel uncomfortable leading a tune (always fearing that nobody else joins in so I'll need to terminate my solo as quick and graceful as possible), but once others have picked up and joined in, it's exactly the same to me as joining into something others have started (except that I'm expected to call changes and out in that set). A lot depends on the dynamics of the session. In smaller and more intimate groups, the person who started tends to be the expected front person, so the leader role is more active but likewise carries more responsibility. In bigger groups, what generally happens is that once the set has taken off, it gets a life of its own, so you're practically not a leader anymore. Does that make sense?