repurposing a reed on a duet Elise to get high "B"

[JeffA]

Hello

I have a Hayden duet "Elise" from Concertina Connection and I love the little instrument.   However, the scale ends at high A and a lot of tunes need that B just above it.  I know I could try to buy a more expensive or hard to find 41 or 42 key duet concertina, but I just need that "B".  I could teach myself to be very facile with the left hand and start all tunes an octave lower so I could get farther up on that second octave, but an idea hit me:  why not replace the reed on one of the duplicate keys on the left side with a high "B" reed?

 

Is this possible?  Would a reed for any concertina (English, Anglo) fit or do I need a specific reed for the Elise?  Others in this forum talk about popping a reed out and resealing it with some wax - what if I did that with a differently tuned reed?

 

Any ideas would be welcome.  Thank you.

 

By the way, this is kind of analogous to some Uilleann pipe sets who have a separate key for "F natural" rather than requiring the kind of maneuvering of fingers over holes to achieve the same note.  

[RAc]

I believe that would generally be possible (although many aspects of the LH are designed to accomodate larger=longer reeds, so there would be more to it than just popping one out and another one in).

 

For me there would be two major concerns:

 

1. duets (like anglos) are laid out to have melody notes right, harmony left. If you "borrow" a melody note from the LH (this is frequently an issue for melodies that go *below* the RH range), any microphone directed to take more from the RH side than the left (frequently recommended for balancing reasons) will lose or underrate the borrowed notes. That will also affect listeners on one side of the instrument.

 

2. When you use the LH for accompaniment: Unless the "borrowed" note perfectly aligns with the groove, you will compromise the accompaniment (for example have to pause the oom-pah to fit in the borrowed note which may seriously affect the rendition). For that reason I never borrow notes from the LH. If need be for out of range notes, I would rather down transpose a tune to cover the RH instrument range or substitute out of range notes with harmonically fitting ones.

Edited November 8 by RAc

[Tiposx]

The reeds on your instrument are mounted onto the aluminium plates in pairs. In this case your reed plate has two similar A notes, one push and one pull. So you would need to tune one of the reeds up a full tone. This is possible, but that is quite a big jump. Another possibility might be to source a B reed from an old piano accordion, and tune one of the reeds down to A. This is safer, and quite easy to do with solder. The reed plate might be slightly longer, so you might need to shave a little wood off one end of a reed chamber.

This sort of customisation is quite common in the melodeon world.

On reflection, I don't think this answers your question though!

Edited November 9 by Tiposx
Last sentence added

[wunks]

Rather than borrow from the left side, my fix would be to make that high A bisonoric with B or better yet, pair the A with the G and make the high button B/C.