Change stradella from A to E from the chin end

[man1nvan]

This may be a really stupid question but then again I live in hope

I have an old hohner Carmen 24 button bass. The bass end starts on A at the chin end but i would like it to start on E the same as on my student

Can I.... just move all the reeds up a space in their blocks and magically everything will work OR would this just result in a load of random awful chords.


The (rather limited) mathematical part of my brain says YES but it is a NO from the rest of my brain which remembers all of the other times i tried something like this.

 

[colinm]

I have checked the pitch change between adjacent notes and it is 3 1/2 tones for the three pairs of notes that I checked, maybe you could check them all, so I think it would work providing the reeds would fit the new positions, I expect all the reeds would require fine tuning after this.

 

[man1nvan]

Thanks Colin i am going to give it a go

 

[man1nvan]

It doesn't work :-( if the chord reedbank was arranged in the circle of fifths like the bass reedbank etc it would work but because hohner have arranged the chord reeds

G#

D#

F#

A#

F

C#

C

G

E

D

A

B

I think it is a non starter unless i get the soldering iron out

 

[colinm]

It doesn't work :-( if the chord reedbank was arranged in the circle of fifths like the bass reedbank etc it would work but because hohner have arranged the chord reeds

G#

D#

F#

A#

F

C#

C

G

E

D

A

B

I think it is a non starter unless i get the soldering iron out

Sorry about that, logic of bass system confuses me.

 

[jollyrogeraccordions]

Short answer, yes you can shift the reeds around as you want. I've done it a few times (see jollyrogeraccordions.co.uk). Sometimes you might come up short on reeds if you don't have a counter bass row..in which case I have hundreds (probably thousands) of reeds and recycle the ones I need. On one Chinese made PA the bass arrangement was a bit weird and I made a grid to map the reeds from one location to the next, but it does work.