What's Your Ltd?

Dana Johnson · October 26, 2006

Reply to the overall thread.

There are a few issues I have with the idea of LTD as people are measuring it, being of much use for comparison of concertinas, or judging their worth. I think the basic idea is a worthy one and might well be persued, but some time shoud be devoted to working out a testing method that puts people on the same scale, otherwise a half deaf person with a great concertina might compare poorly against a poor concertina played by someone with acute hearing.

The other thought I have is that we would need to understand how this can relate to actual musical needs. Reed starting pressure for instance, is very important for determining the speed of a concertina, and consequently how it can be played. It doesn't matter if a reed will go on forever when nearly silent if you can't start it playing except at a substantial volume level. It also matters what volume level a given airflow through a reed will produce. This is a measure of the reed's efficiency ( and the concertina's ability to support the reed ) Reed design has a large effect on air usage. Sometimes there may be a trade off between going with a reed of larger area over a smaller reed to gain more volume to help balance an instrument, or to increase the back relief in a reed shoe to make the reed feel easier to play even though it increases air usage.

Try as I might, I am having a hard time figuring out what I could really learn from LTD as it stands. If you want to tell if your bellows or pads are leaky, you can do that best with no buttons pressed. Knowing how long you can play a musically useful note might be important if you were buying an concertina and knew your style demanded a lot of chords, or octave playing etc. and that a concertina would need to have a certain capacity to work for you, but you can test that on the spot, and unless you have a lot better measuring standard, you couldn't ask a prospective seller to measure it for you.

Any ideas of what else you might find out from measuring this? and how we could simply get on the same measuring page? Unless we can do that, comparisons are nearly meaningless.

McIsog · October 26, 2006

I have 2 Tedrow c/gs (one for my son, one for me).

Tedrow #1 built in '05 ran for just under 120 seconds.

Tedrow #2 built in Aug/Sep of this year ran for about 90 seconds.

That is first run, on the draw, b/c. The bellows on Tedrow #1 are tight as a drum - They really SUCK!

Richard Morse · October 26, 2006

Any ideas of what else you might find out from measuring this?

For me this exercise pinpointed out a bunch of problematic reeds when playing at low pressure. As the fit of the reeds were all consistent, the problems turned out to be tip set and valves. Most of the vavles have a slight curl when at rest and some didn't close under light pressure.

Certainly there are a lot of folks that don't play that quietly or use mulitple reeds when doing so, so this issue wouldn't be much of one (or be apparent at all?) to them. I do play multiple reeds a lot (being a duet), and have been working with very quiet starts and passages (the *length* of sustain isn't an issue for me though).