RAc

I dunno... THAT one does look a little suspicious to me; in particular, the gap between the action case and the bellow fitting on the left hand side looks disturbing. Plus, two or three more little things (like the missing inside paper) make me somewhat wary. MAY be a bargain for somebody willing and able to do some additional work (the comment about the tuning also hints in that direction), but imho only if it has steel reeds and all of them are in working condition. I personally wouldn't bid as much as there is on stake right now (310 BP) given the aforementioned precautions.

close enough, I guess... ;-)

My estimate would be that the price settles at around 200.

Actually, the same thing happend to me before a couple of times on Ebay UK - sometimes the auction options read "ship to UK only," but someone with an outside account is still allowed to bid, and sometimes the options read the same but I receive a message saying I'm not allowed to bid. The seller normally can't figure out either what to change to allow my bids. Go figure.

Refitting concertina ends is always a potentially cumbersome issue, but normally it's not too much of it; plus, the fewer buttons there are, the less hassle you can expect. Do NOT lower the action plate onto the end, but lower the end onto the action plate (iow, the buttons should face up when you do this, not down). Ideally, remove the entire action plate (which on most concertinas you have to do anyways before disassembling the action; I don't know about the Silvagni) and lay it onto a flat surface so it is firmly rested and you can work your way down. Make sure to lower the end as parallel to the casing as possible, allowing as many buttons as possible to slide into their designated holes. Typically there will be one or two strays that refuse to find their holes. Just slide a chop stick or a small screwdriver with a long blade carefully (!) in the space between the end and the casing and give the stray buttons a gentle tilt to help them into the holes; once all are in, the end will slide down and the assembly stabilize itself. If you don't find a good start, lower the end ever so slightly tilted, allowing one button into its hole and then wiggle the end plate very carefully and slightly until the next button has found its place, release the tilt, and repeat. That procedure works well even with concertinas with many buttons; most importantly, stay calm and relaxed, don't lose your patience and don't apply any force. Everything should literally fall into place (that's how it was manufactured at least), so if you can't get it to work without applying force, there is something wrong. With your instrument with the chubby buttons it looks like a very straightforward task; some instruments such as Wheatstone duets that have rather slender and long buttons and don't have a lot of support from the levers require, well, more patience.

I don't get that - having discovered the mobile version through this thread I've used it a few times already, and every time I get the mobile version on my phone and the full version on my PCs. Which, IMNSHO, is just as it should be! see I believe what happens is that by default, your browser display on your PC is PC and on your mobile is mobile, but once you select a different view with the button mentioned, a cookie gets deposited on your respective gadget which overrides the default and then puts you into the different view w/ next login... I think you're right on the spot with the picture displayed in the mobile view being the profile picture, not the avatar, btw.

This discussion proably deserves a separate thread which I may take up at another time - then again it may be too special here, maybe a candidate for offline discussion... I do wish to thank you for your curteous and considerate responses to my ranting. As far as I am concerned, the answer to your hope is a definite and clear yes.

yet another random piece of noise on the subject, from the point of view of somebody who has from the beginning worked with dot music: ANY form of musical notation is a crutch; namely, an attempt to map something that is meant for one sense (the ear) to another sense (the eye) so that the eye can do its best to retranslate the visual to an audible. In the history of music, there have been many attempts to do this mapping; some have gotten lost, some prevailed, and some others pop up as technology progresses. Nothing is ever cast in stone and nothing is ultimately "the best" or better than something else just because it's been around longer (otherwise we'd all be taught music as written out by Gregorian monks or some other ancient form of notation). Any notation has its limits which lose information that the ear has to try to get from elsewhere. I personally feel comfortable with dot notation, but it has its limitations and weaknesses. For example, if you try to decipher a ragtime piece written out in conventional notation, you have a fairly hard time because the syncopations used in ragtime rarely line up with the measure bars, ending up with a lot of dotted notes, connecting bows, 16th pauses and stuff like that. It would be possible to make the scores much more readable (and more faithful to the musical spirit behind it!) by for example rearranging the measure bars along the syncopations, but the notation conventions don't allow that (and, thanks to the digital reality, it can't even be done when you use music type setting software. Good old music pads and pencils). Not even mentioning the age old debates as to whether some phrase shouldn't be written out as 5/32 to 3/32 instead of 3/16 to 1/16. To me, the ultimate purpose of any notation is to be able to render music (again, something from the ear to the ear!) as faithful as possible and as sharable by as many people as possible. That is why I never got into Guitar tab; sure, Tab makes it easier for those who limit themselves to the guitar to access music, but whoever does that will never be able to for example tackle violin or piano music unless somebody else undertakes the translation (or the musician has good enough musicality to do it by ear in which case no notation is needed in the first place). I was dimly aware of ABC and its possibilities, and thanks to this discussion, I now have an incentive to look a little closer into it - it seems as if due to its close interoperability with MIDI, ABC offers a number of possibilities that make "interactive" dealing with music a little easier, such as slowing down or transposing scores. On the other hand, it seems to me as if it's not easy to write out polyphonic music well on ABC. Oh well. If ABC should become the state of the art and as much music is available in ABC as is in dotted notation now - fine with me, I'll switch to ABC then, as long as the expressive power of it is at least roughly compatible to that of dot notation. Anyways, once more, what counts is the music, not the way to approach it. When I hear a good piece of music and I like it, I don't care how the musician got to the point of playing it - everybody has a different approach to music, and the more ways there are to get a handle on it, the more folks have a chance to be musically active, and that can never be wrong. And as a final note - at the end of the day, there's not a big difference between the two anyways. Try expressing things like blue notes, non concert pitch, tempered tunings, oriental quarter notes, near east scales and some of the more complex African rhythms with either, and you'll run into the same limitations. ABC, dotted notation and MIDI all run off the Western musical understanding (that among other things divides the octave into 12 in part arbitrarily spaced intervals, assume that the "normal" scales contain only half and full note steps which are divided in order between the 12 half note steps and assumes somewhat linear rhythms). Which is not to say that the notations systems couldn't handle those things; they can, if need be with modifications and extensions, they just don't model them naturally or intuitively. <edited to block out possible misunderstandings thanks to cboody's input and subsequent private conversation>

Hi there, I've been on vacations the last couple of weeks and kept up on things with my Smartphone. The forum software seems to be able to detect a mobile browser and by default offers a simplified interface. There is a small link on the bottom of the page allowing to switch to "Full version." Very convenient! But. Some of the avatars in the mobile client versions are different from the full version; for example, Dirge's avatar in mobile is some kind of oldtimer car, and Jim Lucas has a picture of himself standing up with a Concertina in his hand. When I switch to full version, Dirge becomes his close-up self, and Jim has no avatar (same as in the PC view). The content itself seems to be in sync. Unfortunately I can't make a screenshot of my Win6.2 HTC HD2 without installing some obscure applet, otherwise I'd attach a proof. Could it be that the avatar database for the smartphone client version of the forum software has been frozen at some point in the past and needs to be resynced every once in a while? Thanks!

two spring breaks in one month? in summer? lucky you! (scnr, just like jim lucas i am hostage to any pun that comes my way). anyways. that does not sound right, maybe the spring is ill fit. do you have a close up picture of the action pan? in the mean time, you can cut down on turnaround by making and fitting your own springs. bob tedrow has a little tutorial on his homepage. sorry for the lowercase, i'm on smartphone...

Tom Paxton has a good number of children's songs in his repertoire, just check on his web site...

I have been monitoring Concertinas on Ebay for a few weeks now. One thing that came to my mind is that there seems to have been a "standard" model made by Lachenal which is a 20 button + air button Anglo, wooden ends, bone buttons, 5 fold. On Ebay UK there seems to be at least one of these every single week, sometimes there are two or three on auction in parallel. As I write this, there are two up on sale, one in need for restauration and one fully restored.* I must have seen about 10-12 of those during the last couple of weeks. Judging from the prices those instruments go for, it seems as if there is little virtue in restoring them - almost inevitably, the final price for those in need of restoration settles between 100 and 150 pounds, and those fully restored have a hard time finding a buyer at the (almost always asked for) starting price of 300 pounds. Depending on the state of the concertina, the work and material one has to put in to get the instruments in a good working order easily exceeds 100 pounds (and a restorer naturally also wishes to make some revenue on the project). I suspect that many of those concertinas end up as reed donors - given that concertina reeds are hard to come by and those that are on sale tend to be dear (David Leese asks 7,50 for a used steel reed), buying such an instrument at 150 Pounds pays off even if only half of the 40 reeds are in working condition. Probably the buttons and pieces of the hardware can be reused as well, and if some collectors have enough carcasses piled up in their basements, at some point there'll be enough pieces left to put together one half way decent instrument from the pieces of x wrecks (which may at that point even pay off when sold for under or around 300 Pounds). I'm just curious about the input from pro and semi pro restorers here. Have I just unearthed the secret of your trade, or stated the obvious that everybody knew already, or am I way off? What I find fascinating is that the same type of instrument only with a few buttons more (30 button Anglos) sells like crazy, brings in easily 1000 Pounds in good working condition and is well worth the restoration effort, whereas the poor smaller siblings are treated like, well, almost dirt? Guess that's the way the market works... maybe one of these days someone finds a way to upgrade a 20 button to a 30 button instrument with doable effort in which case the small boxes may shoot up in value again... * http://www.ebay.de/itm/260838897745 http://www.ebay.de/itm/170682655574

Thanks Chris for your words of wisdom and caution. I'm unlikely to become involved in anything too complex or costly. In the days when I played around with tape casettes I had yet to acquire a computer. It makes sense for me to now think in terms of convential CDs, which I guess have probably all but consigned casettes to history, and, I suppose, also make a bit of editing a realistic possibility ? Rod Rod, I'm not sure if I understand you quite right, so apologies if I should be too far off... CDs (as in compact disks) have consigned magnetic tapes to history (well, that holds true for 99,9% of magnetic tapes, but that's a different story), but they (CDs) are well on their way to be flushed down history as well... CDs (as well as their next generation, DVDs) are nothing but one of many storage mediums for digital data. There are also hard drives (used for examples by DJs who take the pop musical history from the 60s to today to one of their parties - all one one hard drives), flash memory devices such as mp3 players, USB sticks etc. pp. All of these can carry everything that can be represented digitally - music, videos, documents, computer programs - you name it. Editing as in manipulating digital music (or for that matter digital videos, documents etc) is completly unrelated to the storage medium. Editing normally takes places on the computer these days, but there are also limited possibilities of editing (= post processing after recording) on the hardware devices mentioned by Will. Once editing is complete, you'll end up with one digital representation of the process (a file) that can be stored on either a CD, a USB stick, a hard drive, even a magnetic tape... so editing and storing are really two very disjoint processes. Again, apologies if I should have totally misread your post and only stated the obvious...

yes, you are absolutely right, Will. Didn't even consider it because Rod was asking for an in-PC solution... For a standalone recorder, the Zoom is a classic. An alternative appears to be the tascam DR-07MKII. The one scenario where you may prefer using a PC over a portable recorder is if you wish to record several tracks over one another (eg accompany yourself with a guitar). I believe that's not easy to do with a standalone recorder (except you use a more sophisticated one like the Boss BR micro, but that one's a little awkward to use). But apparently Rod is asking for a single track recording device for which your suggestion is perfect.

As far as hardware is concerned, you could probably get away with the built in micro on your laptop, but more than likely the recording quality will be poor. The minimum I think is necessary to get decent sound quality is a condenser mike and (as the microphone needs power supply, so-called phantom power), an external sound card that you plug into your USB port. Of course this is an invitation to protest; some may have achieved good results using a dynamic mike (which can be plugged directly into your internal sound card if the laptop has one) or even the built in mike... I guess it all depends on what you consider acceptable recording quality. Needless to say there is no ceiling as far as the money you can spend on recording hardware is concerned. My setup is this: An Alesis i|o2 external sound card (it even came with a software license for Cubase for free which is the commercial counterpart of Audacity), an AKG condenser large membrane mike, a cable and a mike stand. All of it together was I believe in the ~ 280 EUR range. I consider the recording quality very decent. Next step in improving would be to seal the walls against outside noise. Something else you need to consider is that your computer will generate noise while operating which will feed back through any microphone in its vicinity (eg fan or hard drive), so you may also have to worry about silencing your setup (which in the simplest case may encompass extending the microphone cable so that you can move the computer to an adjacent room; again, silencing computers is a bottomless niche occupation as well but when purchasing a desktop computer you can specifically shop for silent machines).

looks interesting (at least as far as translating the dots in my head gets me), have to try it out @home. Is this Strathspey meets Jig (what would Mr. Skinner have to say about that)?

Thank you indeed - but I wouldn't take credit for somebody else's work - I'll pass on your compliments to the person who did this. I just remembered the contribution from a fellow concertist and added it to the discussion.

He gets a $56000 grant! Just imagine what kinds of concertinas could one buy with that - instead, it gets wasted on theorizing...

you may want to check here: http://home.allgaeu.org/kwenger/Luftknopf/luftknopf.html It's German unfortunately, but there's a lot of pictures that should show you what's going on. The gent has relocated the air button. May be a solution to your problem. HTH

well, i can think of a few (in particular Rock) musicians in whose context the term "smart" makes sense only if you also grant single cell organisms a smartness option...

Hi there, David Elliott recommends plastic wood for a case like this (see attachment). I'm just worried about the crack widening and wonder if one could also glue a small strip of gauze for support under the action from below (of course making sure that the chamois gaskets are not affected by the support)? Thanks for any input! P.S. I'm also worried about the baggage retrieval system they got at Heathrow, but that's a different story...

also, as a side effect, the mechanical linkage also links dynamics - press hard, and you'll get a different effect from pressing gentle. Press fast and sharp, and it'll sound different from pressing slow. A micro switch will be digital, so it's either on or off. Of course the dynamics will to some degree translate to the on/off (eg fast/slow can reasonably well translated given a high enough switch sampling rate), but some will be lost (eg a slow opening of the valve), so by merely digitizing the path between the button pressed and the valve opens, you'll lose some of the possibilities that purely mechanical concertina action offers. Of course one could try to approximate this by putting a micro controller in between, inserting both an on and and off position switch and sampling the time between the two positions to determine attack speed and force. This could then be translated to a table step motor that drives the valve not in a strict on/off fashion. A similar problem arose when folks tried to emulate bellows effect in MIDI concertinas where complicated pressure sensor samplings and evaluations had to be added just to figure out how the bellow was moved. All that could be done, but would incur tremendous development costs and driving the price of the unit up significantly (as you already point out for the "simple one switch" solution), just to approximate the effect that comes for free in the "real thing." Remindes me of the modern cars in which digital sampling is used to measure the gas tank level - and in the dash board this is translated to an analog signal driving an analog meter so that one is fooled into believing that there is a good old swimmer in the gas tank... I believe that people who belong to the "target group" outlined by Alan may be best off with MIDI concertinas (eg, arthritis may also make bellows moving painful in which case an affected person may prefer a no bellows concertina). Just a few random thoughts here...

for retaliation? actually, that one keeps reoccurring. I saw it a few months ago where the offer text read "about 1920." I then pointed him to the ledger so he corrected the time. Anyways, the auction ran out, and he put it up again at least once more in between...

Hi there, I have stumbled across a 30 button Lachenal currently auctioned on the Bay: http://cgi.ebay.de/ANTIQUE-LACHENAL-ANGLO-ENGLISH-CONCERTINA-ACCORDION-B-/110709692571?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19c6cfd89b Looking at the closeups, it seems to me as if the instrument is in need of restoration. I was wondering if the suggested price of $2500 is justified and realistic for that kind of concertina in that condition? Of course we'll see by the end of the auction (no bid so far), but I don't plan on following it all the way... how much would those of you who do restore and sell themselves be willing to pay for it? I'm not the seller or (business or otherwise) related to him/her , by the way, just asking the question out of curiosity. Thanks, RAc

shouldn't be a problem; you only need to find a maker who designs the reed pan to order. the only instance where I see it could become interesting if you want for example a very high note on push and a very low note on pull on the same button; but even then, it should just be a matter of pairing up a large and a small reed shoe hole in the same chamber (I wouldn't know about the subleties about air flow physics in such a situation, but intuitively I don't see show stopping issues here).