RAc

Also true, David, but I do not think that it makes Chris' elaborations irrelevant. There is also the practical consideration that the end face of a concertina should (for ergonomics purposes) have the smallest size that accomodates the reeds needed, so the "reduction" argument imho outweights your purely mathematical observation. In other words: If you start out with, say, a square concertina and add sides, keeping the corner-to-corner size constant, then you add more unused space (at least as long as you do not add any reeds) which is ergonomically undesireable. So your blown-up octagon circumfering the square may be (relatively speaking) more bellow efficient, but it is less playable. The surface covered by the finger board will trivially not change, but the unused space around it will. If, on the other hand, you measure side-to-side and keep reducing the number of sides until you have exhausted the maximum density allowed for by the reed dimensions, you make the instrument more bellows efficient as well as better playable. I ran across a similar issue when Alex had built my Crane #3. He used a number of elaborate tricks to squeeze all the reeds needed into an octagonal shape (standard concertina measurements across the flats required by his toolset). As a result, I now play a wonderful small sized, leight weight AND bellow efficient instrument. Btw, all the best wishes for 2023 for you and everybody else here on the forum!

When playing chords on the concertina, the third is frequently left out, so concertinists tend to do a good deal of accompaniment with power chords. That has the additional benefit that you do not need to distinguish between minor and major chords! 😉

Sorry John, but you can not be serious here. Do you imply that I, being German, are not allowed to be interested in the music of other cultures? Do you, as an Irishman living in Germany, feel unwelcome in German folk circles? Do you feel you should? I know this is not what you feel because you have always been open and interested in German folk music. Do you not grant that attachment and interest to other people? Ken, can we close this thread? It is getting really way off musical issues and into very murky waters.

Your suspicion can not apply in my case because, I, as a German, am "foreign" to both ITM AND English folk dance music - when I decided to pick up the Concertina, I knew that I would not get into German ("native" for me) folk music but I really wanted to play the English build concertina in one of its home territories. I actually tried Irish first, but as I explained, it simply could not attract me, but English (which was even more "foreign" to me than Irish) could afterwards.

In Germany, I perceive it the same way. On one of the Irish concertina meetings I attended, the musical leader dropped the remark that "the first thousand tunes are the hardest, it gets easier after that," then set out to start some set at breathtaking speed. My impression of the way ITM is looked at here is olympic - rather competitive with musicians trying to outperform each other in number of tunes in repertoire, speed, ornamentation skills and so on. I also attended a few Irish sessions. I found them unwelcoming to newcomers; you were expected to either play along with every tune note for note at full speed or not play along at all. I remember a number of venomonous looks I received for trying to at least accompany the tunes with the root notes of the chords. I was determined to make up for my lack of repertoire and got a copy of "110 Irish concertina tunes" with the intention of learning as many of the tunes as possible (I had done compatible things before) but gave up after by listening to the CD, I realized that even at low speed, many of the tunes were interchangeable, almost impossible to distinguish from one another, apparently made for the "first 1000 tune marathon." I could not find a whole lot of heart and soul in those tunes (even though I perfectly understand from listening to artists like the Corrs and Socks in the Frying Pan that there is a lot of it in Irish music). In contrast, I found the English folk dance scene to be welcoming and encouraging. In sessions and meetings, the attitude for the most part is "when there are enough attendants, the tune will be carried by the majority, so play along at any level, and don't be afraid of making mistakes. How else are you supposed to learn ensemble playing?" As an additional bonus, I find English dance music to be much more accessible; many tunes are simple but very idiosyncratic with clear and distinguishable melodies. This is not derogatory to ITM in general, obviously I am in no position to judge a genre (which would also be fairly stupid to do as generalizations are never accurate nor fair); also, there are a number of lovely Irish tunes that have slipped into the repertoire of English and Balfolk playing circles. Yet the "Irish idiom" (at least as practiced in Germany which is the only ruler I have to base experiences on) has not managed to attract me musically or in the way people interact with each other.

Alex has made a glass-buttoned instrument and documented the process in depth here: No. 7: A 47 Button Hayden Duet and Leather Case – Holden Concertinas

well, yes, cross-country inavailabiliy of certain contents is a fact of life (in Germany, for example, there are even programs originating public stations in in Switzerland or Austria we can not watch without nerd knowledge or semi-legal tricks). No reason discussing that; there are pros and cons to that approach. One possibility to work around that would be for someone to download the movie and make it available via a file sharing service, but that's shady legal territory. But thanks, Peter, for the pointer. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the docu. It is heartwarming and utmostly authentic. Exactly the kind we need desperately in times like these where the differences between people appear to outweigh their similarities.

Even so, this is not the same haptic feeling, and, what is worse, the keyboard-like position of your hands is totally different. I have a crane emulation software on my tablet, and I use it frequently, but to get a feeling remotely related to concertina playing, I need my hands to be parallel to my body center line, not perpendicular. The only way to accomplish that with a tablet would be to use two tablets and arrange them like the end plates of a real tina.

Reading the caution note here , I believe a Micro is not the best choice fot your purpose as the USB can be used to either program the Arduino or use the port, making development sort of cumbersome. For that reason, I chose a Due for my MIDI concertina which has two USB ports - one dedicated to progamming and the other with full USB capabilities. The Due also has 102 usable I/O pins which should be enough to satisfy your requirements.

Thanks, works like a charm! 😊

Hi there, apparently older forum software supported the feature to ignore a user (a post dating back to 2006 claims that). Is that feature still available in the current forum software? If yes, how do I activate/ use it? Thanks!

Hi Richard, you mentioned your project earlier, I would be very much interested in details. Again, I am using reed switches which to me have proven superior in several respects over electrical contacts. Also I am glad I decided for a matrix keyboard which drastically reduces the amount of wires (yet in turn requires that you address the issue of ghosting). fwiw, I attach two images of the current state of progress ( I have resurrected the project recently). I wll remove the images soon because of upload size limitations.

Well I wouldn't ever even think about arguing with someone in Frank's league, but the idea of using safety pins has always sent shivers up my spine... There are tons of instructional videos on Youtube as well as photo series or videos on this very forum about making springs (eg type "spring site:concertina.net/forums" into the search moloch). It's actually not that difficult. Needle nose pliers and a small wire cutter are definitely indispensable, but other than that, I've seen people using nothing but up to fairly sophisticated jigs. As for the raw material, I generally use unwound steel guitar (or banjo/dulcimer/whatever) strings, used or new, doesn't matter. Those come in all kinds of diameters and cost next to nothing. Tension helps a lot, so if you find a way to jam one end of your wire securely somewhere so you can make your two coils under tension, it will yield better springs. The rest is mostly bending wire skills.

My 0.02 EUR worth of experience is that (almost trivially true) the best dance musicians are those who also love to dance.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. In any case, I never meant this to be a permanent solution, only a troubleshooting technique to narrow down the problem It's certainly a good idea to swap the reeds back after the test is completed.

yes, of course. F,G and C is what I meant to write. The soft keyboard on my tablet yields unpredictable output. Sorry for that and thanks for pointing it out! Poor Roger obviously followed me in falling down the trap door...

Interesting! Obviously, the question arises why the sharps are ommitted from the F,G and A names? Is that deliberate?

yes and no... there is nothing incorrect about what you write; however, the important (semantic?) difference between text and music (the "contents" of what is being written) is that texts are for the ear (through listening) AND for the eyes (through reading), whereas music is exclusively for the ear*. Thus, any musical notation is a crutch that attempts to "freeze music on another medium for later playback." I believe that there is no inherent advantage of one crutch over the other; they are all targetted a different aspects of the playback process (for example, all of the "standard notations" and their variations bear a visual relationship between pitch and position on the staff which - I postulate - make it inherently easier to visualize music within the mind's eye. On the other hand, MIDI and abc - which is sort of twins separated at birth - make it much easier to render music electronically, transport it, transpose it and so on.) Possibly within one or two more generations, standard musical notation will be but an exhibition piece in the museum of cultural history, with digital storage being the state of the art. That would very likely yield neither better than worse music than the last several hundred years, but certainly a very different way to approach music and musical learning. *(Of course, a nicely and diligently laid out score (in any notation) also has an inherent aesthetical value, but I darestate that this value does in no way relate to the value of the original piece of art and its reception.)

Sean, a fairly straightforward test on a unisonoric instrument is to swap the push and pull reeds in the offending chamber. If the problem stays on the same direction, look at a valve issue. If the problem switches directions with the swap, it is a reed issue.

My nephew decided to learn Piano Accordeon at the age of five. I decided to learn the concertina at close to fifty, in parts because I had hauled his Weltmeister from A to B one too many times... But I had tried myself at the guitar for about 30 years prior to that, and I guess my nephew and I picked our first respective instruments for the same basic reason: We had heard someone play it somewhere and liked the sound. Thus the formula appears simple: The more popular an instrument is, the more young followers it will attract. Of course, there are other effects. My father had dediced to learn the piano at a young age also for the same reason, and it would have been natural for me to get started on the piano as well when I was a kid. Yet it seemed uncool at that time; the guitar seemed so much cooler (and was rather rebell-ish back then which made it even cooler).

I believe I mentioned that already, but for my projects, I'm using FluidSynth on a Windows machine to render the input coming in over USB MIDI. I haven't exactly stress tested that yet, but I can't say the results were unsatisfactory. Worth a try in any case.

Couldn't agree more - it is apparent that a lot of heart blood has found its way into the organization of rhat remarkable WCD. Thanks so much to everyone involved!

Actually, I was able to find the original sound file that Alan posted in 2011 (it seems to have disappeared from the older thread). I uploaded it here: https://soundcloud.com/rac-13/march-of-concertinas As far as I can tell, this is his original playing, ie before I started destroying it with my beginner's slab on it (which is still accessible in that thread). I currently don't have easy access to recording equipment, so I probably won't be able to contribute this time. It's worth noting, though, that this is at least the third attempt on this collaboration (in the older thread, Alan mentions that there had been an even earlier attempt a few years prior). I think it is great that finally - fittingly for WCD 2022 - this wonderful piece gets the attention and life it deserves! This is sort of TOTM revived? Hoping for more such collabs!

Here are some more recordings... unfortunately a good share f them got lost in the internet's dementia. Mabe I can recover a few of those, let me dig... Thanks again, Al!

Another example where this occurred is Alex's Muller conversion#2: A Second Müller Conversion – Holden Concertinas If I recall correctly, Alex posted a sound comparison between the original wooden and the modified metal end plates on Instagram and also came to the conclusion that the difference is hardly audible. That caused me to abandon the idea to ask him for a second set of end plates on #4 (I had originally toyed with the idea of having both a metal and a wooden set on the instrument).