I just this week learned a very severe lesson. If you have acquired basic skill on the Anglo Tina then it
really has to be kept going! If you stop for some years, as I did, then most of that know-how is gone!

Now relearning, with different fingerings, tunes I thought I had down! And to make it even more fun, the different reeds in my current study react differently, very unforgiving, like a good guitar, of clumsiness.

I like to keep it simple with cross row use of phrasing and keep entirely away from the heavy decoration found in Celtic. So I am very happy that I enjoy a little bit of Morris music as well. Indeed that was my main reason for getting back into the hobby.

Other lessons to be learned. If you can learn the basics of tuning your own rig! do it.

Today with Youtube free tutorials, it ain't as tough as you may have been misled to believe.

_________________
"The more you weigh the harder you are to kidnap,
be safe, eat more ice-cream"

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If you can recommend any good YouTube free tutorials that'd be brilliant. There are loads of videos out there, but it's always good to have a way of identifying top quality ones. Shame there's not some way of "voting" for good ones...I guess the Thumbs Up thingy on YouTube is kinda doing that though.
Anyway, please do share any good videos you've found.

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Instruments: Saltarelle Bourroche CBA (C system)
Music: mainly Irish, but also some Scottish / English / French
Website: https://www.mudchutney.co.uk

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... ina+tuning

My own home made tuner's bench ..

https://www.flickr.com/photos/46137657@ ... 284959793/

To make that easier a small vacuum cleaner, and most essential, it's long as possible hose, is handy. You could use a regular size with a step down pipe adapter. Too it makes such a set up easier by using a switched extension power cord, so that without leaving the bench you can start or stop the air flow. Remoteness is needed because a tuner will not work well near the loud whine of a vacuum cleaner. I found that 7 feet in another room with the door partly shut was enough to get accurate readings on a Cellphone app tuner.

Other things needed, if working on Tina but not Harp (- those brass reeds can be done with a battery powered diamond tipped pencil engraver - ) is a small jeweler's file and any old mechanics feeler gauge set, used to put a protective shim UNDER the reed. Then the tuner, well not so much these days as there are free tuner apps for cell phones and those are very accurate!

Then its practice on any old Harp reeds for a bit until you get the feeling of taking a wee bit at a time off of a reed, the checking the pitch. I find that some of them will not budge for a few file scrapes then suddenly jump a hunk of cents up, or down.

IOW pray you do not have to deal with anything within a few cents, like 2 or 3, because it is very difficult to make such an adjustment, besides one can not discriminate their dissonance 99.999999 % of the time. But a difference of like 5 cents is very bad and very noticeable esp on 5ths and octave. Those HAVE to be corrected.

But I have heard of tuning steel reeds with a diamond tipped Dremel type tool, by working longwise in the middle of the reed, IOW don't work on the edge of a steel reed with such a tool!. Never tried that yet. I stick to the old style 'angled cross reed full width file draw method', which you see in old movies about the London concertina trade from the 1940s.

Hope that explains the tuning side. For Anglo instruction, and with C&F approval I hope, I suggest you get on Concertina.net for more information. I have found several great Tina tunes on YT but then I have been playing over 10 years, on and off, or whenever I happen to have one.

_________________
"The more you weigh the harder you are to kidnap,
be safe, eat more ice-cream"

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