G'day Margarita,

It sounds like you have a book that doesn't apply to your particular concertina (and I don't know what system you have). The English has a rigorously exact layout, although the 'Concert Pitch' has vacillated over the decades.

As well, there are deeper and higher English for playing parts in bands and some of these are higher or lower by (say) a fifth (eg C up to G of C down to F) as well as sometimes being "voiced" to sound like other band instruments and round out the band's tonal range. If you have one of these instruments, the instruction book for a standard model need to be modified.

If you play Anglo-German (20 - ~ 26 keys) rather than the 30+ Anglo-chromatic, you may well find the two rows are not the keys of G and C that are assumed in most books. My first Anglo was in Bb and F - one whole tone lower than 'standard' - probably played with woodwind and brass instruments in the 19th century.

As well as a more common G/C 22 key Anglo (-slightly chromatic) I have a D/G 20 key (fully 5 semitones lower than usual), although this was rebuilt by me for use in session playing. A number of cheap (old East German) boxes (such as the notorious old 'Scholers') were somewhere near D/A, a tone higher than 'standard'.

All good concertinas should be tuned to something like concert pitch (unfortunately, a lot of old ones are tuned to a very different concert pitch than today's, but the variation is rarely more than a semitone. A difference fron C to F is either a misreading of the book or a differently pitched instrument.

This happens with other types of boxes. Here in Australia (and elsewhere, I suspect) the old button accordions were commonly in C/F and they played exactly as they would nowadays in D/G because many oldtimers would tune their fiddles lower (by a tone, commonly) to reduce strain in the hot dry climate ... and to produce a sonorous tone with the old gut strings.

I have a ~60 - 70 year old Hohner, like a moderm #2915, but in lovely blond wood, and it was originally in C/F (and has a few note names scratched into the handplate with a penknife blade - wrongly!). I have since converted it to G/C for playing Australian dance music with musicians of the Bush Music Club and my group 'Backblocks'. I just can't persuade fiddlers to 'slack-tune' these days!

Regards,

Bob Bolton