Mid Range Concertinas

[Alan Day]

I read with interest about comments regarding mid range instruments,speed,sound, quality of playing etc.

In the early seventies when I started there were no mid range instruments as such. what we had were Hohner models CG and GD with big white buttons cost at about £10 each,They were reasonably in tune a bit slow, but an ideal instrument to learn on,make sure you like the instrument ,get to a certain standard and move on. Lachenals, Jones and Jeffries were available if you knew where to go . There were no dealers then, Bell Accordions Surbiton (Now no more) dealt mainly in Piano Accordions and Melodions, but only had Hohner Concertinas nothing else. There was no Internet, nothing you could look up, most players latched on to other players for playing techniques ,ideas for experimentation with the instrument.

Walking around Arundel where there are many Antique Shops I eventually found a thirty button Jones, but it was badly out of tune. I eventually visted Crabb at Islington and fell in love with a Jeffries (What I always wanted) which was offered at part exchange for my Jones at £125. It was a lot of money for me then with a young family.

The Mid Range instruments, that filled in the gap between the cheaper Honer and Lachenals, did not come about until much later.The idea was to fill in the huge price gap between a Hohner/Lachenal and Jeffries/Crabb which by then were creeping up to £1500. Hobgoblin was I believe the first into this market with their Gremlin Range and other makers such as Morse and Rochelle models followed much later . It was always thought that a good mid range instrument would assist the Concertina World ,enable players to move up the ladder, before reaching a standard to move on to the highest level and that is still the case.Manufacturers turning out the quality, that these mid range instruments are, need applauding,they are very well engineered and are excellent for the money. They are not however top of the range instruments hand crafted to perfection. If that is what you want the same applies to you as it did for me you have to invest in the next stage, not moan about the quality. You get what you pay for. That some of the manufacturers take them back for the slightest problem and are prepared to offer an upgrade against your instrument is an unbelievable service.

Al

[Ken_Coles]

Hear, hear, Al! The choices today are worlds better than when I started looking to upgrade from my clowncertina in 1996. Concertina will never be a cheap instrument when you desire great response, tone, dynamic range, etc. from such a small package. I was talking to Dana Johnson last weekend and he told me about all the challenges in making old-style ("traditional") reeds and the various attempts by methods that would allow volume production. (Rich Morse could say a lot about this!) It seems some ways of doing things may never be fast or cheap.

 

Neither is winemaking, as Bob Tedrow once said, but he added that one never stops looking for new ways to do these things.

 

Ken