Syntina

[alex_holden]

I just came across this electronic Hayden project over on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/syntina/

 

 

 

[DaveRo]

On mobile, if you get

Unreviewed Content
This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.

... and don't have the app (and presumably an account) use Old Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/syntina/

(This might be a UK thing - an effect if the Online Safety Act.)

[John Wild]

Do the electronics need regular routine maintenance?

[David Barnert]

1 hour ago, John Wild said:

Do the electronics need regular routine maintenance?

 

You’d have to ask the guy in the video, Div Slomin: dgslomin@alumni.princeton.edu

[caj]

On 9/23/2025 at 6:47 AM, John Wild said:

Do the electronics need regular routine maintenance?

 

I'm not 100% familiar with what the guy is doing, but I would take a wild guess that it doesn't.  This is keys + sensors + a Pi synth + an amp + speakers, all nicely self-contained.  The bellows pressure is detected using a load cell.  I would expect something like this to basically work indefinitely, perhaps one day needing a new battery.

 

I have to say, also, that I really like this guy's "end-to-end" build, so that there are zero visible wires and no complexity if someone decides to bring it to some kind of music session.  He even told me that he made the front hole larger than it needs to be (much larger than the speaker) in part because it copies the aesthetic of a guitar sound hole, which might feel a bit more familiar to other musicians; the whole thing is quite brilliantly thought out.

Edited September 28, 2025 by caj

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

Very interesting - I do feel however, design wise, in appearance, it could look a little less ' box-like' in its appearance, but sounds very nice.🙂

[RatFace]

The project looks really neat, from a technical point of view.

 

However, the musical demonstrations are, in my opinion, completely devoid of any musicality/expression, which is very disappointing, because that is precisely the concern people (well, I anyway!) would have with electronic instruments. One of the nice things about the concertina (if played well!) is that the ends have some inertia and move, which can actually help with articulation. For example, imagine playing a scale with slight gaps between the notes. On a real concertina, the mechanics of the instrument let/help you pulse and shape each note. Without the movement/inertia, on an electronic instrument, you have to either fake that electronically (which itself subtracts from expressiveness) or work extra hard to do it.

 

The guy clearly knows his way around the keyboard. He has other videos of him playing acoustic instruments, which are genuinely musical, though I couldn't find any recordings of him playing concertina. 

 

So the question here is whether the load-cell is actually effective, and if not, then whether it's due to how he has it set up or whether the configuration actually discourages it from being used.

 

One reason I suspect the latter is that I've always found on EC that opening the bellows is more natural (and that's definitely the case on larger duet-type concertinas like the bandoneon). On the bandoneon, articulating the fingers whilst pressing with the palms is really awkward - so the bandoneon technique is to (a) avoid it and (b) use gravity instead. So I can imagine here, it would be very tempting to end up configuring that load cell to saturate very easily - meaning that most playing would end up having no nuance.

[divbyzero]

Thank you for your kind assessment and thoughtful critique.  I agree that my actual performances in the video don't show off the instrument's expressivity to anywhere near its full potential.  I had to rush the video out the door to make the deadline for an instrument invention competition and was still debugging parts of it while filming.  Having to keep restarting tunes over and over because notes would hang randomly really distracted from playing nicely.  Fortunately that's now fixed, and I really need to record some more videos.

 

There's negligible physical inertia in the load cell, but I do make use of hysteresis and envelopes in the synth patch design to simulate it.  And yes, static envelopes do sound artificially rigid, but if you vary their timing based on the squeeze sensor (i.e, the louder you play, the faster the notes swell into their target volume), it breathes much more life into them.  I also take into account the slower response of lower pitched reeds by varying the envelopes based on pitch.

 

Similarly, the pressure sensitivity of the load cell is linear, which doesn't feel like a bellows at all, so I map it through a roughly logarithmic response curve in the synth patches; tuning the curve to be more shallow makes the average volume lower but makes it easier to control dynamic variation.  Refining the patches is a journey of continuous improvement, and having such a configurable mapping layer between the hardware and the sound output is one of the more gratifying aspects of the instrument.

Edited November 6, 2025 by divbyzero

[Richard Mellish]

My MIDI concertina is in several parts, connected by cables, so is more of a proof of concept rather than a practical instrument for taking to sessions, but I'm happy to take a real concertina to a session. I use a load cell to simulate bellows pressure and direction (direction of course being essential for an Anglo) but I like the idea of adjusting the response curve. In my case that would need to be done by some analogue circuitry, but it seems worth investigating.