David Barnert

The relative locations are the same but the spaces and angles between them are not and the slant of the rows are not. If I remember correctly, the slant on the left side is different from that on the right.

So here we are 2+ years later and the error remains.

Keep the left hand light: As few simultaneous notes as you can get away with, and keep them short, with “daylight” between one note and the next. Being lower in pitch than the right side, the reeds on the left are necessarily longer and therefore louder than the ones on the right and you don’t want the accompaniment to drown out the melody. Try to start practicing with both hands before you get too comfortable with just the right hand. Practice scale runs in parallel tenths (a tenth is an octave plus a 3rd—think Paul McCartney playing Blackbird or Arlo Guthrie playing Alice’s Restaurant—eg. GAB on the left and BCD a tenth higher on the right).

Yes. He is a friend and a member of concertina.net (Didie Sendra, soloduet). Here he is, playing the Bandotin. Note that, unlike the Bastari instrument, the product of a factory, this a hand-crafted quality instrument.

I also know very little about bandoneons. I know about concertinas, Haydens in particular. You may well be right. Yes. “Ragtimer” was Mike Knudsen. You’ll note that his “avatar” image was a picture of the instrument we are discussing. He referred to it as a bandoneon not because of the octave tuning but because of the shape. That always irked me because I thought it was silly to call an instrument a bandoneon just because it was (sort of) shaped like one. That explains my attitude in my post in this thread and many of my posts in that thread.

I have played two of them. Neither in the last 15 or 20 years, and both owned by others (Mike Knudsen and Moshe Braner, whom I’ve lost touch with). They were made by Bastari. I have no idea what they might be worth. Calling them “Bandoneon tuned square Hayden Duet” is a bit misleading. They are not tuned like Bandoneons. The only thing they have in common with Bandoneons is that they’re square (smaller than most Bandoneons). They are 67-key Haydens, differing from most Haydens in that they are tuned in octaves (each key plays two notes simultaneously, an octave apart).

Wow! Is this the first time we’re aware of fraudulent content finding its way into the forums of concertina.net?

Well of course. She just keeps playing the same six-note motif (C G Bb/ G/ F C4) over and over, no matter what the harmony is asking for. The magic is not in the notes, but the delivery.

Sorry. It still works fine from here. Must be some international issue. Anyway, a man and a banjo, somewhat faster than the Rhiannon Giddens version, but you get the idea.

It’s definitely a song. With words. I listened to the video Jody posted waiting for someone to open up their mouth and start singing. Listen to the video I posted, above.

This is where I learned it from, way back in the 1960s. Considerably less complicated. Good luck.

Here’s a lovely example of how nice concertina and fiddle can sound together (along with two fine voices and a top-notch team of Morris dancers). The link was posted yesterday on the Morris Dance Discussion List by Chris J. Brady.

My point earlier was this: One of my favorite tunes is Banks of Inverness. The first measure looks like this (I’m running low on upload space, so rather than upload images, I’m providing links to Michael Eskin’s abc tool which will show the notation). Note the low B, which is below the range of the right hand buttons on my 46-button Hayden. So I play it on the left side. With the accompaniment it looks like this. If I were to notate it with the treble-8 clef it would look like this, which I find disorienting because it is not obvious how that B relates to the rest of the melody in terms of which octave ie is in. Note, on my Mac, Firefox draws the little 8 under the clef correctly, while Safari draws it well below the clef and a little to the right. YMMV

When I met Brian Hayden in 1993 he claimed to be able to play 6-voice choral pieces on his instrument.

There was value in it! I had no idea how many people were reading this thread until you lured some of them into the open (I was going to say “...out of the woodwork,” but I’ve already used that idiom in this thread).