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About mdarnton

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    violin maker, photography, music, concertina, of course.
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  1. mdarnton

    High jacking threads..etiquette

    One forum that I participate in has completely banned comments on for sale threads, saying that all relevant discussion should move to private communication. This was because some commenters find it irresistible to gratuitously trash the goods, the price, the legitimacy of the offer. . . anything they can, really. Having seen one of my favorite forums ruined by people who just need to hear themselves talk, I'd like to see all posts stay on track, but I don't think the internet is headed in that direction. Fortunately, this forum doesn't have much of that. On that forum, which has ignore controls that leave the fact that there's been a post made still visible, I can watch threads devolve into long series of ignored posts by the usual perps making off-color references, etc. In such a case, active administration could go a long way to clean up the mess, and I participate in other forums where this is the case.
  2. mdarnton

    wheatstone tenor-treble ebony Aeola on Ebay this week

    Why should there be an international shipping charge when the owner is bringing the instrument over with him? I doubt he'd turn you down if you volunteered to pay his plane fare, though. . . .
  3. mdarnton

    lachenal buttons and pads

    Something also to check: are the buttons all more or less the same height, with perhaps too much travel? If so, then most likely someone set them there--it's probably not loose saddles. I recently bought an EC where the person who had last worked on it set all the buttons to max height, then as the new pads settled in, certain buttons began to rise out of their holes as yours do. I reset all of the buttons to a more standard height. In my case the new EC was a spare for work, so I matched what I'm used to on my prime EC and everything is fine.
  4. mdarnton

    Concertina and Harpsichord

    Nice. I used to play with a friend who played viols da gamba, and it was a good pairing, Then he met some A=415 friends and that was the end of that.
  5. mdarnton

    Playing with Anna Magdalena

    https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Bach%2C_Anna_Magdalena I always enjoy your playing!
  6. mdarnton

    In praise of a good hard case

    Great--I have a custom-made Anvil road case I never use because I carry my instrument in a 6-pack soft cooler bag. I guess this is my warning, right?
  7. I've been trying to practice scales on my English. Eventually I have the idea of playing some jazz, which is often in [many] flats, and I the jazzer idea of being able to play everything in any key equally well appeals to me, so. . . Though the EC will do anything, as you add flats the runs turn evil pretty fast. I'm considering it all just being a matter of habit/learning at this point. :-)
  8. My metal-end Lachanel was too strident for my taste. Since I play a lot of harmony, upper partials of the various notes were clashing in bad ways and I was bothered by a slightly different quality in some notes. As a test, I decided to put in baffles such as came in many old instruments. I bought thin dense foam, about 1mm thick in a craft store. I think the real use is to cut up pieces and layer them to build things like Christmas ornaments--this type of thing: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/421368108856837725/?lp=true I cut pieces that fit loosely (1.5mm all around the edges, casually around the keypad) and fastened them in to the underside of the metal ends with double stick tape. If I were to do it again, I might go tight at the edges, loose in the middle, far away from the pads. Anyway, the result was a very slight drop in volume, but a much nicer tone that people around me didn't mind listening to. I didn't lose a bit of dynamic range, just the uncomfortable harshness that seemed to penetrate throughout the house and irritate those around me. 🙂 I wouldn't call the sound mellow at all--just "right" and very clean. It might be worth a try. Or you might cut pieces to fit outside, in the same manner, that you could remove when you wanted the normal sound. The foam cost me about a dollar, so it's not a big deal to try it. It's available in black, and is basically invisible. I was hoping for red, but none of the other colors were deep enough to satisfy.
  9. mdarnton


    I use a lot of India ink in my shop for this kind of job, but not on bone. I suspect it would do the job, though.
  10. mdarnton


    All I see in this incident is selling something for what it's worth, and I can't get too wound up about that. What if he'd found it in his basement, and it had cost him nothing at all? Definition of profiteering. : the act or activity of making an unreasonable profit on the sale of essential goods especially during times of emergency …
  11. mdarnton

    What type of music do you play?

    I used to play in a Finnish polka band, so I have some old tunes related to that, like a nice Slovenian polka, but I'm currently prepping a Finnish waltz and a French waltz to try to record and put up here at some point. Lately I've mostly been listening to jazz, trying to figure out some way to insert English concertina into that as a sort of mutant Saxophone, but I haven't figured that out yet. :-) I'm feeling constrained by not knowing anyone to play with. Similarly to Halifax' problem, my main practice session is while my wife is in the shower each morning so that she doesn't have to listen. So it's a solitary vice at this point.
  12. Since you're asking about "Oomph", a very high percentage of that effect comes from the player, not the instrument. When you listen to someone else's recording you really don't have any way to know where it's coming from. English and duet are more likely to allow the player to do that (play mush) than Anglo. But as an accordion player, you probably already understand how that works.....
  13. mdarnton

    Why Give Up

    I have quit a number of instruments a number of times, and for me it always comes down to whether I have someone to play with or not.
  14. mdarnton

    Really a Crabb?

    Uh, for the record here, I did NOT say Lachenals are garbage. That's what I play, myself.