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Hello! Been reading obsessively for a little while, but now I finally decided to make an account so I could ask a few of my own questions! I recently got my first concertina, a Rochelle-2 Anglo, and I love it! The only problem is that my brain doesn't work that way, thus for me the Anglo system is surprisingly unintuitive. So, after talking a bit with a maker, I'm in the process of getting a Hayden Duet made! Only problem now is figuring out the keyboard... Before I bombard you with diagram-punctuated rambling, a little background: I'm a pianist, have been for most of my life. I've been fascinated by accordions and concertinas forever, but only recently realized I could just hop in whenever I wanted! There is no specific genre or genres I play, I'm all over the place, so versatility is important to me -however white and whaley that may be in such a compact instrument. Anyway, to the layouts! I started with the 52K layout from the Morse Beaumont, and seeing that the range had a couple holes at the bottom I added a low B and C# to make it chromatic: (right is red, left is blue, overlap is purple, and octaves have alternating green and orange labels) Then I tried eliminating the overlap by shifting the left hand down an octave, but when I tried to figure out how I would play a few songs on it I quickly understood how important that overlap is. So for a moment I thought this 54K layout was perfect, but then I got two thoughts in my head: The left hand doesn't go down very far, and it's missing Bb/A#4. So I started looking for other references for a Hayden layout and found the 65K layout used by Wakker: I found it interesting how the extra buttons were used as much to fill out the existing accidentals as they were to extend the range, and the more I learn about the Hayden layout the more that makes sense to me. But I see a lot of compromises here that I don't like: Missing F#2, G#2, and Bb4 on the left, G#3 on the right, the bisonoric Eb/F, and a lot of duplicated keys which, while great for transpositional invariance, could have been used to make it chromatic. (I actually don't know if Wakker uses linked buttons for duplicate notes, I wonder...) So I made a couple modifications: Much better for my purposes, but I still wasn't very happy with it. The left hand still didn't go quite as low as I wanted (E2 would be perfect), I had a few duplicate notes I wasn't sure would actually help, and I was starting to notice something else: The cut-down Hayden layouts tend to be very inconsistent from octave to octave. For instance, B major looks very different between B2 and B3 on the left. The example layouts I've found tend to exacerbate that problem more, and the way I've been adding notes tends to even it out, but you really can't get away from that problem completely without adding 19 buttons per octave! I tried to mitigate the non-uniformity by using only sharps, and seeing as I eliminated a lot of duplicates I extended the range down to E2: Now it's consistent, but no less limited. It breaks down with F major and the common Bb major, and fixing that uniformly would mean adding a lot of duplicates! Enter the weirdest and most interesting reference layout I've looked at: It's very sharp-biased but not totally, it has almost the range I want (both more and less), but it's... weird. I really don't like pushing the left F4 all the way over to the sharps, I don't need the low Eb, and I'd like fiddle G on the right. I ended up with this: I think this is the best tradeoff between range, uniformity, and isomorphism out of any of the layouts I've considered so far (while being totally chromatic so my brain doesn't get confused). I'm not sure about the high E and D#, I guess I'll have to figure out how significant those two reeds are for construction, but I don't see how I could improve this without adding way too many buttons or compromising the range. I also think ~64-66 buttons is approaching the edge of where I'm confident I won't get helplessly lost in the button field. So, my question: I'm still very new, so to those of you who play Hayden duet, what do you think of this? Am I making any big mistakes? Is there anything I'm not aware of or haven't thought of? ... do you like my graphs?

Hey all! I’m brand new here with my first step into the concertina family! I stumbled across this little bandoneon at a music store in my town, and couldn’t pass it up, despite obvious aesthetic and mechanical issues. I am now trying to learn as much about this instrument as I can! The system is very similar, if not the same as a Kusserow bandoneon, and the instrument seems to have been made in the early 1930s for export to Argentina, as the inside of the right hand side bears the markings of a musical instrument dealer in Santa Fe, a bit up the river from Buenos Aires. I found a virtually identical instrument that sold on reverb a while back but the seller didn’t seem to really know what they were talking about, as they billed a C.B. Arnold instrument as being made by Alfred Arnold himself. Also, upon looking at information I can find on the web, most sources would have you believe that the only bandoneons you’ll find in Argentina are 142s or variants of that particular system. Anyhow, just my little quarantine project, and I figured I would share and see if anybody else knows more about these (or can potentially correct my current notions)! CB Arnold 82 button chromatic bandoneon. I was gonna link pictures but I cannot figure out how. Thanks! -William