Anglo with tweaked Wheatstone layout

[Owen Anderson]

I have a ~20 year old C/G Marcus anglo that I recently acquired. I've determined that while it's mostly in Wheatstone layout, it has a couple of tweaks:

• The left-most button on the right hand outer row is reversed - d# on the push, c# on the pull
• The left-most button on the left hand inner row has D on the pull rather than A,. It's the same D as the push on the button to its right. The push is B, as expected. 

 

For my purposes, I'm going to flip over the the c#/d# reed pair to get it to standard layout. But I'm curious - why would someone have made these tweaks? Particularly the low D, seems like a peculiar choice.

[Takayuki YAGI]

The Lachenal that I bought 23 years ago, restored by Andrew Norman, was arranged exactly like yours.

Then I swapped the pull C# and push D# to get the standard layout.

 

I am assuming that someone familiar with Jeffries layout has swapped these reeds in the past.

 

Regarding pull D, in addition to that Lachenal, I have seen old Bastari, Jones and Harley with a pull D on the far left.  It may not be that unusual. (Jones and Harley has push G instead of B though.)

Edited February 6, 2022 by Takayuki YAGI
typo

[hjcjones]

On 2/5/2022 at 11:46 PM, resistor said:

• The left-most button on the right hand outer row is reversed - d# on the push, c# on the pull ...

For my purposes, I'm going to flip over the the c#/d# reed pair to get it to standard layout. But I'm curious - why would someone have made these tweaks?

 

Someone will have done it because it suited their purposes. We must remember that these instruments were once used to play a wider variety of music than is probably the case now, and what suits modern players of Irish or English traditional music may not have suited players of other types of music.

 

I deliberately reversed those notes to facilitate playing an E-Eb sequence which crops up in a couple of tunes I play.  After playing it like that for many years, as my playing developed  I became increasingly frustrated by the lack of the push C#, and found that (on my non-standard 40-key) I could play E-Eb a different way, so I swapped them back. Nevertheless for a long time the reversed configuration suited me. 

[Alex West]

The low D is quite common on Lachenals.  It makes sense for the G row pattern, but not when you consider that it's an exact duplicate as you point out, so the A is a useful and common swap

 

Alex West