Electronic Tuners

[Dan Worrall]

[

Ah-Ha Dan,

 

my rig, as does my friend's, works by pushing up to exhale the air before use, and then by gravity opening the bellows drawing air through a vent with the reed in a carrier held in position by the other hand.

 

One hand to lift the bellows to exhale them, and then to control their rate of decent, one hand to hold the reed carrier over the rig's vent slot.

 

Two hands, none spare to twiddle the knob!

 

 

Dave

Ah, I get it. Your reed carrier is causing you to use an extra hand. Our respective jigs sound identical, except my reed carrier is built into the rig, thus needing no extra hand. My work so far is with accordion style reeds, so at first I thought maybe your mobile reed carrier needed to be handheld because to the curved shape of concertina reeds. But then I remembered seeing Bob Tedrow's (see a photo here: http://hmi.homewood.net/reeds/ ). His is essentially the same as Harold's and mine, but has built-in holders for both accordion style and concertina style reeds...and needs no hand to hold onto the reed when tuning. Harold's bench is a bit slicker still, because his pulley systems make the bellows knee-controlled (no hands at all). At least you can now see what I'm talking about....I have no position on what tuner you use! Sorry for the thread creep...I'm always interested in learning new tricks, hence my interest in why you didn't like the dial.

[Chris Drinkwater]

Given that the Victorians didn't have access to all these modern high tech tuning devices to achieve concert pitch, how did they tune reeds? A tuning fork and a set of master reference reeds perhaps? Or a piano and a good ear? Before modern concert pitch A440 hertz became the standard pitch, you could have your concertina tuned to Old Philharmonic C.540 vibrations, Society of Arts C.530, New Philharmonic C.522 and Normal C.517-20, all just a bit sharp compared to mcp. How did they do it and did the method change over time?

 

Chris

[mike averill]

Given that the Victorians didn't have access to all these modern high tech tuning devices to achieve concert pitch, how did they tune reeds? A tuning fork and a set of master reference reeds perhaps? Or a piano and a good ear? Before modern concert pitch A440 hertz became the standard pitch, you could have your concertina tuned to Old Philharmonic C.540 vibrations, Society of Arts C.530, New Philharmonic C.522 and Normal C.517-20, all just a bit sharp compared to mcp. How did they do it and did the method change over time?

 

Chris

 

THe method was something like - tune the key note with a fork - then up a 5th down a fourth up a fifth down a fourth..... til you you cover all 12 notes, and to get the temperment and avoid the error they allowed a couple of beats a second one way or the other on each. I have a book some where that describes the technique applied to victorian reed organs ( which are just like large concertina reeds).

 

I would imagine that the concertina makers would have done as accordian makers still do and have a master set of reeds for tuning, so only ever had to tune one set to the tempered scale , then all others were just matched to those on the jig.

 

 

 

Mike A