Mirrored Duet Left Hand?

[Łukasz Martynowicz]

@Jim: if such MIDI would be based on switches and not entire action (though it could be done in either case as there is no "reed placement imperative") it is possible to design "rotary endplates" to make variable slant. Even without such mechanism, Wicki version has no slant, so there is no reason why MIDI Wicki shouldn't have options for all possible orientation combinations (given symetrical number of physical buttons).

[inventor]

The saga continues:

 

As you can see there is quite a tradition of left to right rising pitch, and left to right for flat chords to sharp chords.

It goes with out saying that pianos have this, and organs too, inspite of the fact that on an organ with two keyboards it would be possible to mirror the two keyboards.

 

the Crabb family made me a very nice medium sized Duet concertina with my arrangement of buttons, and i expected this to be just a one off, just to suit my personal tastes. However Dave Arthur the editor of "English Dance & Song" asked me to write an article about it for the magazine. This generated a certain amount of interest in the idea, and people started to communicate with me on how they might obtain such an instrument. Whilst Crabbs had rather a long waiting list (I had waited nearly 7 years for mine to arrive); Steve Dickenson had recently taken over Wheatstones and with a new apprentice was looking for extra work. - I ordered ten instruments.

Before I went to see him and work out the final details, Pat Robson; (a bandoneon player with an encyclopedic knowledge of the many ways that buttons on all types concertinas had been arranged); invited me to come and see him to look at several aspects of my concertina. A couple of questions he asked me were: "what is it like for playing a chromatic scale" - I demonstrated this to his satisfaction; and "what about playing a tune in octaves". I had never done this, but with a bit thinking about it played a scale in octaves. He then asked me if I had considered making the left hand the mirror image of the right, as is done on several chromatic bandoneon systems, and is said to make playing in octaves simpler.. I admitted that I hadn't even considered this idea, but would think about it.

I considered this possibility from all aspects, but at the end of 3 days I decided that this was not a good idea. Several of the people that were interested in my idea were accordion players looking for a much more portable instrument, who liked the idea of a left hand with the chords in the same order as on a stradella bass. Also I was considering using the idea on electronic pianos and organs. Used on an electronic piano the left hand simply runs into the right hand side. I also had in mind for an electronic organ the same keyboard could be split (with a moving line depending if you were playing in sharp or flat keys), and with an extra set of buttons for the thumbs to play the equivalent of a pedal board, which wouldn't have worked if you had two diverting separate organ keyboards.

I then set about to teach myself to play tunes in octaves using both sides of the instrument. I took 3 weeks to master this technique. If I had had the left hand mirrored would I have done this in 3 days? Other useful techniques would have been more difficult. See replies above.

 

Inventor.

Edited November 30, 2014 by inventor

[rlgph]

Thanks, inventor. Your historical account has been fascinating.