Wakker Midi Anglo Review

[Chris Allert]

i've had my wakker midi anglo for a few weeks now, so i thought i'd post a review for anyone considering one.

 

my first impression is that this instrument is very well designed and playable, especially considering how few of them have been made. there is no serial number on the instrument, but wim said that mine (or the one before mine, i can't remember) is the ninth one they've built.

 

playing the instrument requires a different technique than playing a "real" concertina. i still haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet, but i'm sure i will with practice.

 

the main difference is that when you press the buttons, they let through less air than when you press them on an ordinary concertina, and when you press the air button, it lets through the same amount of air as when you press any of the other buttons. this is unlike a reeded concertina, where the air button will let through considerably more air than a note button. wim says this has to do with how the electronic sensors work, and here's his explanation of this (which i hope he doesn't mind me sharing. he's on holiday right now, and i think this is useful information to anyone considering one of these):

 

About the 'air economics'; The amount of air for the air button is not adjustable. However, if necessary, the air hole can be enlarged. Actually the hole size is about standard (17mm). it is the same as on a wheatstone linota.

 

The amount of air passing through the holes when playing is only slightly less than on an average reeded concertina. It depends on which instrument you compare it with. Our A-1 model uses only slightly more air. In theory you can make these holes as large as you want. The only problem is to maintain enough pressure in the instrument. A reeded concertina needs a certain amount of pressure to start the swing cycle. After this initial start, the reed will 'coast' on the air flow. A midi concertina needs to maintain the same air pressure in order to maintain the same volume. If the air holes are too big, you won't be able to keep up the pressure. I noticed myself (also heard the same from other midi players) that you'll get used to the limited bellows movement. Just experiment with the velocity and expression settings.

 

i've only been able to pratice on it at length four times so far, and it's already beginning to feel more natural to me. but if you decide to order one of these, be prepared to do a little fiddling with the settings to get it just right.

 

the other thing i've noticed is that it's quite a bit lighter than any reeded concertinas i've tried, i'm guessing because it doesn't have any reeds.

 

i haven't tried using it with a computer yet, but it works with my synthesizer just fine. so far i've just used it with a dave smith evolver desktop ( http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/ ) which is a really great little monsynth you can get for about $500 new (it's basically a prophet V with more features). playing the concertina is kind of like playing a midi keyboard, except that bellows pressure controls the overall volume, giving similar expressive possibilities to a real concertina. changing bellows direction turns all notes off, while releasing a note button just sends a note off for that note. (i think. i need to record the midi stream at some point to see what it's actually doing).

 

one neat feature of the midi implementation is that it has two different "layers". this could be used to control two synthesizers simultaneously, and you can change the octave of each layer independently. you can also have two different keyboard maps simultaneously, one for each layer. so on the same concertina, you could play in jeffries and wheatstone layout at the same time and hear the results on two different synthesizers. i'm not sure why anyone would want to do this, but it might be useful in another way: you could program a custom keyboard map of accompinament notes that would always sound good against the main keyboard layout you're using.

 

like a reeded concertina, this one has a real goat-skin bellows that need to be broken in. so i expect it will feel different after i've had it for a while.

 

if you're hoping for a concertina you can practice on with headphones, i'm not sure that this is really ideal. it's a very capable instrument, but it feels enough different from reeded concertinas that i'm not sure how productive practicing on it would be. i bought it because i wanted to play the synthesizer with a concertina-like controller, so i'm really very happy with it and would say that it has exceeded my expectations. but it's enough money that you should make sure it's what you want before ordering one since it may be quite a bit harder to sell than a vintage jeffries if you don't like it.

 

i'll try to post some recordings when i get a little better at playing it. if you're interested in getting one of these but want to try it first, i'm in olympia, washington, which is between seattle and portland and you're welcome to visit to try it out. i'm not sure what the distribution of midi anglos is around the world. i know there's one in japan. does anyone else have one?

[Chris Allert]

correction....

 

i think there is a serial number. it says "AMC 0643", but i'm not sure what this number means.

[JimLucas]

if you're hoping for a concertina you can practice on with headphones, i'm not sure that this is really ideal. it's a very capable instrument, but it feels enough different from reeded concertinas that i'm not sure how productive practicing on it would be.

It sounds like the bellows technique is somewhat different, so if that's your practice goal, this may not satisfy it. But if you have your bellows technique pretty well down on both standard and midi instruments, then I think that work on tunes and arrangements -- fingering, basically -- on either instrument should transfer pretty well to the other.

 

...it may be quite a bit harder to sell than a vintage jeffries if you don't like it.

Won't command as high a price as a Jeffries, but they're still rare enough that I would expect one shouldn't have any trouble selling one without taking a loss. Admittedly, I can't guarantee that, and the situation is likely to change once there are several coming used at once. But I'm fairly sure that's still some years in the future.

[Chris Allert]

It sounds like the bellows technique is somewhat different, so if that's your practice goal, this may not satisfy it. But if you have your bellows technique pretty well down on both standard and midi instruments, then I think that work on tunes and arrangements -- fingering, basically -- on either instrument should transfer pretty well to the other.

 

...it may be quite a bit harder to sell than a vintage jeffries if you don't like it.

Won't command as high a price as a Jeffries, but they're still rare enough that I would expect one shouldn't have any trouble selling one without taking a loss. Admittedly, I can't guarantee that, and the situation is likely to change once there are several coming used at once. But I'm fairly sure that's still some years in the future.

 

yes jim, these are good points. you may be able to resell it if you don't like it, and if you order the english version and don't like it, you may even be able to resell it to me if i've decided to switch by then. and practicing on it is still useful for fingering. and of course practicing the midi concertina is very useful for getting better at playing the midi concertina.

 

one other thing i forgot to mention in the review because i just noticed it today is that the handrests are padded and covered in the same goatskin as the bellows, making them very comfortable. i've never had occasion to play a concertina with this feature, and i think colin dipper is the only other maker that does this, but it's very nice.

[Chris Timson]

the main difference is that when you press the buttons, they let through less air than when you press them on an ordinary concertina, and when you press the air button, it lets through the same amount of air as when you press any of the other buttons. this is unlike a reeded concertina, where the air button will let through considerably more air than a note button. wim says this has to do with how the electronic sensors work, and here's his explanation of this (which i hope he doesn't mind me sharing.

I'm a bit puzzled by this, to be honest. My Whiteley Lachenal conversion doesn't have this problem. The air button lest through a lot more air than the other buttons, and the more note buttons you hold down the more air passes through, as you would expect in both cases.

 

Inside a MIDI concertina is a pressure sensor that determines in which direction and by how much the bellows are being pressed. The control program converts the pressure into MIDI note and volume messages that then control the synthesiser. So far so good, but if this was all that happened the MIDI concertina wouldn't feel at all like a reeded concertina. At the heart of the control program is a table of values that relate air pressure to MIDI volume messages. You can graph the table and the graph will give you a visual indication of the responsiveness of the instrument.

 

The picture below is one that Roy sent me. It shows three processor chips together with graphs of the table for each chip. Roy actually sent me these three chips so that I could try them out and report back to him on the feel of the instrument.

You cannot believe the profound effect changes to this table made to the feel of the instrument. Anyway we went round this loop a couple more times before we were both happy that what we had was a reasonable facsimile of an anglo concertina.

 

All this is leading me up to suggesting that it may that the table in the Wakker MIDI anglo is not quite right yet. I'm pretty tentative in making this suggestion because all I am going on is your report; I have not handled one myself. It would be most interesting to put the two anglos side-by-side and do a proper comparison.

 

On the plus side, if I am right then it is sa simple matter of programming to fix, it wouldn't need any hardware modification.

 

In one very big respect I would expect the Wakker to be superior to my Whiteley / Lachenal. Good as Roy's conversion is, it's still after all a Lachenal rosewood-ended anglo, and this cannot be disguised. I would expect the Wakker to have a higher build quality and a faster action than my MIDI anglo. I am playing with the thought sometime of commisioning a modern maker (say Bob Tedrow, whose sunburst concertinas are visually stunning) to make a concertina without reeds specifically for Roy to convert. But then you may ask: what's the point? And you'd probably be right.

 

Chris

[Chris Allert]

this is interesting to hear about the retrofitted lachenal feeling more natural.

 

i was also thinking a while ago of asking bob tedrow to build some kind of flashy reedless concertina to have retrofitted. what's the point? when i was little my mother used to use the expression "that money is burning a hole in your pocket" after i got my allowance. i guess that's what she was talking about. i probably should have listened to her more as a child.

 

wim said he was hoping to get some feedback from me that he can use in future instruments and firmware upgrades, so you're probably right about the table not being quite right yet. but the concertina lets less air through in general, and wim apparrently decided what amount of air worked best with the sensors. maybe his midi anglo works differently than the accordionmagic retrofits, though this would surprise me.

 

the build quality of the instrument is pretty much flawless. if i didn't already have so many instruments, i'd definitely put in an order for his reeded anglo, but i can't think of an excuse to order yet another concertina.

 

do you play your midi concertina much? if so, do you use the built-in synthesizer or do you do other stuff with it?

[Chris Timson]

do you play your midi concertina much? if so, do you use the built-in synthesizer or do you do other stuff with it?

Yes I do play it. Though I have taken it out a couple of times to show people (Jim, for instance, tried it at Arran) it mostly lives at home. I play it for the fun of it. When you're playing Galopede and you sound like a brass band it's difficult not to keep a big cheesy grin off your face. MIDI concertinas are an awful lot of fun. That's what I bought it for and that's what it has proved to be.

 

I chose not to have the built-in synth. These are, after all, only GM synths, and it is possble to buy much better synth modules for not much money on eBay. Portability is not a major issue for me.

 

Chris

[Michael Eskin]

I just received my AMC-30, having a good time with it.

 

Still trying to understand exactly what the expression and velocity settings on the control box do to the MIDI data, but overall, I'm happy with the results so far. Using a Roland JV-1080 with several expansion cards as my synth module.

 

Cheers,

 

Michael

[Michael Eskin]

OK, did some MIDI data capture from the AMC-30, very interesting results.

 

Pressing a button causes a note on event for the key associated with the button with the velocity value set on the control box menu. Releasing a key sends another note on event with the velocity set to zero.

 

Adjusting the expression value on the control box just sends expression control messages, they are not generated on the fly during playing.

 

Volume control on MIDI controller #7 messages are sent continuously if the bellows are under pressure. Any reversal of the bellows causes a volume level of zero to be sent. The minimum volume level value is set on the control box.

 

Reversing the bellows also causes an "All Notes Off" control message change to be sent.

 

Enabling the Layer 1/2 buttons sends the program change set for that layer on the controller, sends a Pitch Bend equal to zero on the channel associated with the layer channel, and resends the expression value set on the controller.

 

The air button causes a volume level of zero to be sent on a push, but the minimum volume level to be sent on a pull. This seems a bit odd, makes it difficult to maintain volume during a press air button action as you would on a real instrument. I'm asking Wim about this behavior.

[Chris Timson]

Still trying to understand exactly what the expression and velocity settings on the control box do to the MIDI data, but overall, I'm happy with the results so far. Using a Roland JV-1080 with several expansion cards as my synth module.

I use the same, in fact I have two, one for each side of the concertina (I don't know if the Wakker can do this, but my concertina can be set to send on channel 1 on the right hand and 3 on the left). I know I could get the same effect by using performances, but 1080's are so cheap on eBay nowadays and it saves a lot of mucking about.

 

Chris

[ocd]

Inside a MIDI concertina is a pressure sensor that determines in which direction and by how much the bellows are being pressed. The control program converts the pressure into MIDI note and volume messages that then control the synthesiser. So far so good, but if this was all that happened the MIDI concertina wouldn't feel at all like a reeded concertina. At the heart of the control program is a table of values that relate air pressure to MIDI volume messages. You can graph the table and the graph will give you a visual indication of the responsiveness of the instrument.

.

.

.

 

Chris

 

Of course, if you are playing through a computer, you can re-map the midi volume parameters that the concertina sens to anything you like. It is easier to experiment this way.

 

ocd

[Chris Timson]

Of course, if you are playing through a computer, you can re-map the midi volume parameters that the concertina sens to anything you like. It is easier to experiment this way.

True enough, but isn't it better to have the response the way you want it out of the box? I tend to use it with a direct connection to the synth.

 

Chris

[ocd]

Of course, if you are playing through a computer, you can re-map the midi volume parameters that the concertina sens to anything you like. It is easier to experiment this way.

True enough, but isn't it better to have the response the way you want it out of the box? I tend to use it with a direct connection to the synth.

 

Chris

 

Yes, experiment with the computer until you are happy and then make the setup part of the midi concertina.

 

ocd

[Michael Eskin]

Anyone played with using a software synth with the AMC-30? GigaStudio or the Roland Orchestral softsynth? Since we'd only need a few notes of polyphony, as long as the system latency is low enough, shouldn't require a very high end laptop to work.