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English Concertinas

Concertinas are those little hexagonal squeezeboxes you imagine playing the sailors' hornpipe. They all look much the same but actually there are half a deduen different types; to play, they are about as different from each other as a piano is from a guitar.

For example, the Anglo-German concertina has its keys arranged in diatonic scales (pretty much like a mouth organ) except that there are a couple of rows in different keys (like holding a D and a G mouth organ and playing both), with a third row holding some extra notes for when you can't find them anywhere else.

There are at least four sorts of duet concertina; in each case, there are about 17 people in the World who know how to play them, and if you try to learn, you'll quickly discover why (this is a terrible slander on the Hayden duet, which is extremely logical, but was only invented relatively recently, so if you want one you'll have to get it made new).

Then there's the English concertina, which (like the duets) is fully chromatic, was invented by the English physicist Charles Wheatstone in the 1820s, and has a keyboard layout to suit. As you would expect, the layout is extremely logical, easy to get started on, great to use for a wide variety of music, and has a hidden catch.

The hidden catch is that, unlike any other instrument I can think of, every second note in the scale is on opposite sides of the instrument, and is played with opposite hands. So the player's brain is completely saturated with passing messages between its two halves, and English players are rarely able to talk or do anything else sensible when playing - even control their facial muscles. English concertina players usually look not-at-home when playing.

For more information, take a look at the Concertina FAQ. Don Nichols concertina pages and Toby Koosman's concertina links have more on concertinas than I could ever hope to accumulate.

If you're interested in any sort of squeezebox, you really should take a look at
rec.music.makers.squeezebox
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Email: rim@csadfa.cs.adfa.edu.au
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25/6/1996