Don’t you just love jigsaw puzzles? I don’t. I’ve only ever done them out of selflessness or spite.
But what if, instead of interlocking pieces in a two dimensional grid (if you’re lucky), each piece was smooth. Instead of aligning tabs and a picture (if you’re lucky), each piece is instead had a similar resonance to its neighbours. And what if, instead of a two dimensional puzzle, it’s one dimensional. There aren’t any corners, but on the other hand, it’s all edges.
I got these vintage accordion reeds cheap from ebay a while back. They’ve been sitting on my shelf for over a year, so at an ambitious valuation they’ve accumulated 1% more vintage.
These reeds are unlike their neighbours, who came from pump organs. The reed tongues are steel (not brass) and the frames are aluminium (not brass). But beyond that there are no material differences. Only morphological ones.
The most consequential difference to organ reeds is they have to work both ways, on the blow and the suck. Not by clever reed physics, but instead out of sheer two-faced duplicity. For each each note there’s a pair of reeds facing opposite directions. This is because unlike organs, squeezeboxes are both squeezed and unsqueezed. Half the clue is in the name.
Buy land, they’re not making it anymore
– Mark Twain
If Mark Twain did indeed say this, it would have been at height of the American pump organ boom. Reeds were being made, and were not in short supply.
Not so today. All the reeds I will ever encounter were made long before I was. They are a finite and diminishing resource.
Start with Part 1.
You join the story with a working Mason and Hamlin Pump Organ. Or a ‘harmonium’ in the parlance of our times.
It’s consistently 60 cents sharp across the board.
Here I’m collecting the links and notes about harmoniums, pump organs, and brass reeds as I learn more. Let me know if you have any recommendations!
Start with Part 1.
Bellows are a mystery to me. Even now. There are plenty of tutorials showing you how to draw lines on paper and then fold them up, but my brain doesn’t find it easy to visualise it. Easily solved, I’ll just make a model.
Start with Part 1.
I just wanted another portable harmonium. Whether that meant buying or building one.
I saw one on eBay, listed as a fixer-upper that doesn’t play. I had to get it. In the best case I would have a harmonium. In the worst case I would have learned something.
The seller was quite open about it not working. I took the gamble, and met him in a car park off the M4. It looked exactly like its photo.
I should be clear that I already have a harmonium. It has three octaves, two ranks (voices) and knee-pedals to operate the swells. It’s small, and folds up smaller. If you saw me carrying it you might mistakenly think I was struggling with a very heavy suitcase.