Cost of Concertinas

Good concertinas are not cheap.  This is because they are not easy to make.  You can get a very nice new guitar or a violin for a few hundred dollars. The about 50 pieces in total are needed to make a guitar and a violin about 40, but a concertina is built with about 1,500 separate pieces.  There just isn’t a way to get around this without affecting the quality of the instrument.  Cheap concertinas are only possible to make in countries with very low labor costs,  but the people making them will seldom have the skills or motivation to make really good instruments that could compare to Wheatstone Aeolas, other fine old English made concertinas or concertinas made by the top makers of today.  The serious quality instruments made today all cost several thousand dollars and up.  Furthermore the makers of the best concertinas are usually behind on filling orders and it can take up to 10 years or even more to receive your concertina on order from them. 

Why are top quality concertinas so desirable?

1. A good instrument will have top quality reeds.  Good reeds will produce sound quicker and with less air pressure.  Good reeds can be made to play louder with less distortion of sound than cheap reeds.  Good reeds will require less air or wind and so the player won’t have to pump the bellows so hard, which makes for more relaxing playing and is easier on both the player and the listener.

2. A good quality instrument will have a well engineered and fabricated action board.  This means that the buttons will work smoothly and the levers inside will not bend from playing.  The feel will be solid, but light and give the player confidence.  The action will be fast and allow for rapid playing as recovery of the buttons will be instantaneous.  The springs will be light with low tension and be therefore much easier on the fingers, especially when playing the concertina for a long time.

3. The best bellows are more expensive to make, but they will breath much easier, not be stiff, but instead be supple, yet without being baggy or saggy.  Good bellows have the potential to outlast the player.  I’m playing on several instruments that are 70 to 90 years old and still have the original bellows that are in excellent condition!

4. A good instrument will also be made of beautiful materials and be an instrument of great beauty that gives the owner a special feeling of pride and happiness of ownership.

5. The good concertinas are an excellent investment.  If care is exercised you can buy a top vintage concertina today and in years to come it will always sell for more.  So even if you wind up not playing much, you will still come out ahead on your investment. 

There was a golden age of concertina making, the Aeola, that was pretty much from about 1900 through 1930, though I have two wonderful concertinas were made in 1938 and 1939. 

I think that Anglo concertinas became very popular because thousands of really cheap ones were imported into Ireland and U.K. from Germany.  This was due to the possibility for the Anglo concertina to be made quite cheaply in great numbers.  This made it possible for people of little means to acquire a concertina.  Later, the English makers saw a potential for some of the income from the market for this type of concertina.  The English makers applied their considerable talents to the making of Anglo concertinas and thus to raise the level of quality much higher than the German made instruments.  The Anglo concertinas are easier to make because they have less reeds and less buttons than English concertinas.  Now days the old Anglo concertinas sell for more money than old English concertinas simply because of demand. 

Because of the current very large interest in Irish music and the belief that the Anglo is the best instrument for this type of music, the demand has driven the price up faster than for the other types of concertinas.

Juliette Daum 2008