Temporary Tuning Changes

[David Barnert]

Speaking as one who has never tuned a free reed but has been reading concertina.net since nearly its beginning, my understanding is that the way to do it is to determine how sharp or flat (in cents) the reed is in the intact instrument, then take the reed out and tune it up or down by that amount from whatever starting point it has attained in your tuning jig, and then reassemble the instrument.

[Dana Johnson]

 

You have to clean it well and immediately apply some liquid flux to the clean area before it has a chance to oxidise. It helps if you have a decent temperature-controlled soldering iron. I've only ever used 'real' tin-lead solder though; the modern lead-free stuff might be different.

 

I think it is. And lead solder is banned in the EU, I believe.

Of course, it doesn't help when what you are trying to solder often has a layer of chrome plating,

I use Kester lead free solder ( with some silver content ). The stuff I use has a synthetic rosin core which cleans off with alcohol, bit wipes off as well just after the solder freezes. I find it wets reed steel extremely well, melts a good bit lower than tin/ lead solder, doesn't turn grey etc. I only use it for adding weight go reed tips for some low reeds, though sometimes I use it to lower the pitch of a higher reed rather than thinning near the root which changes it's response relative to it's neighbors. High reeds require very little anyway. Wouldn't use weighting at all above C5.

Chrome plate and stainless steel are a very different story. The chrome in both cases forms an oxide layer instantly that is very difficult for fluxes to break down zinc chloride fluxes work on some stainless, but the solder needs to have some amount of silver in it to wet that metal. Even if you can break down chemically or mechanically the oxide film, some metals like titanium and I expect pure chrome, are very difficult to wet. Titanium can be soldered, but pure silver is recommended. Some metals just aren' attracted to each other.

Dana

[Patrick McMahon]

That's well worth knowing. I would rather add a little solder to the tip, than thin the root. Especially if you have a reed that is nice and responsive, I think it's more likely to stay responsive that way. In any case, it's reversible, whereas thinning the root isn't.

 

If you don't like the result, you can always try the other way. I suppose, you could try first with a bit of duct tape, if you're not sure.

If that works well, you could then go to solder or epoxy resin for a permanent job.

 

Of course, if you were doing it all the time, you would probably know what's going to work best.

[Anglo-Irishman]

The "fifth improvement" in the Charles Wheatstone patent paper 10,041 1844 page 7 12th line says

"The object of my 5th improvement is to enable the notes of the concertina to be tuned at pleasure ..."

The technical devices are exposed in figures 14 and 15.

Seemingly the elaborate innovation didn't turn out useful in practise. I think it is fairly easy to understand why....

Yes, indeed! A 48-button concertina would need 96 screws. Not to mention the weight that would be added in the form of those sliders...

 

A bit off topic, but do any of you know about the ancestors of our free-reed instruments, the Japanese sho/Chinese sheng? These have their reeds mounted in pipes of different lengths. Are the notes tuned by the length of the pipes? And if so, would it be feasible to fit the pipes with tuning slides, like bagpipe drones or concert flutes? Or even make a "slide mouth-organ", analogous to the trombone, with just one reed?

Cheers,

John

[Patrick McMahon]

I'm guessing that they are tuned by making adjustment to the reeds, like a concertina. Or maybe by the positioning of the reed.

 

But things like the oboe have one reed, and change the pitch by opening holes in the pipe.

So maybe you could make a device to be able to slide a hole up or down along the body of the pipe? A slot in the pipe with a slide fitted with a hole, and some sort of seal.