My New Old Concertina

[feadogmhor]

Hi everyone,

I'm a piano and flute (hence the username) player who has decided to give the concertina a go! As an irish musician I naturally took the anglo route and bought myself a 26 key lachenal concertina. It's all lovely except I think there are a few notes slightly out of tune (a temperament other than equal perhaps?) and the lowest key on the G row, left hand side, gives me a D on the pull and low G on the push rather than the A and B I was expecting. Is there any way to change these notes to A and B, and if I were to get the concertina tuned, how much would this cost (in ireland or the UK)?

Thanks,

Feadogmhor

[Chris Ghent]

Can't find you a tuner but reassigning the draw on the lowest button on the LHS G row from D to A is not very difficult. The best way is to get another reed made in the largest frame which can be crammed into the existing reedpan slot. That is not easy to arrange unless you have a tame reedmaker. Another method is to find an existing reed assembly, the closest pitch which will fit and then retune it. The last and easiest is to weight the existing reed with a drop of solder to bring it down to pitch. The resulting reed will never be the equal of a reed designed to be of the right pitch. It will be a little slower to start and if the reed is already thin near the root it will be more inclined to drop in pitch under pressure. Nevertheless it will probably be adequate in a 26 key Lachenal and it is totally reversible.

 

Shifting the G to B is probably too far and you would need to find a replacement reed. Many tuners have access to spare Lachenal reeds and I think concertina-spares.com sells them. The frame would probably need a little fitting to the pan, something a tuner could do.

 

I don't know who is doing this in Ireland at the moment but there are several people who read this forum regularly who are in the UK and who do this sort of work.

Edited August 26, 2013 by Chris Ghent

[david robertson]

Can't find you a tuner but reassigning the draw on the lowest button on the LHS G row from D to A is not very difficult. The best way is to get another reed made in the largest frame which can be crammed into the existing reedpan slot. That is not easy to arrange unless you have a tame reedmaker. Another method is to find an existing reed assembly, the closest pitch which will fit and then retune it. The last and easiest is to weight the existing reed with a drop of solder to bring it down to pitch.

I know that the D to A shift looks like a big jump, but unless the original D reed has been previously butchered, there is normally enough meat at the root to tune it down, without recourse to solder. I was given this advice by someone much more experienced than me, and I found it hard to believe at the time, but until you try it, it's hard to credit how little metal you need to remove.

[Chris Ghent]

David,

 

Yes you could do that. The one time I did it I was unhappy with the reed as it became thin and was not very pitch stable. It could be mine was too thin to start off with and others could be much more suitable. When making reeds if I was to end up that far above pitch when the root thickness approached a suitable thickness (I would have to be very distracted!) I would definitely start the reed again but it is easy for me to say that with a supply of reed blanks at hand.