All of this reminds me of what I love about the instrument, which
has been my personal fascination for quite a long time now.

Thing is, with the English box (no disrespect to the B/C,
C#/D, and other chromatic players) is that everyone comes at
the thing in their own way.

My theory is that an extended period of willing or unwilling
celibacy and long evenings at home is actually required in order
to really get the good out of the box.

Oh, those in stable relationships can master basic chordal
song accompaniments, but the ones who put the "melody" in
"melodeon" probably did so in the company of nothing warmer
than a sixer of ale for a period of months or years.

You would, for example, never mistake Tony Hall from our Martin
Ellison, nor the latter for Rod Stradling or (again) our Brian
Peters. And Kirkpatrick's got his own thing going.

It's precisely the ambiguity of the instrument which makes it so
much more like the guitar than the piano (both of which I also play).

I've stolen a couple of tunes from our Martin, but if we sat
down across from one another and played them, we'd probably
both end up wide-eyed and saying "you finger that passage
like THAT?!?" Or "hold on...what did you just do THERE?"

The fourths-tuned boxes are nothing if not ambiguous. Watch
two good players playing in D on a D/G boxes and you'll likely
find that sometimes one is pressing and the other drawing. Not
so much in G --- those inner rows are stickier, but the outer
row, aye, that's where the magic happens.

That's the fun, really. Working it out. Discovering the syncopation
of a bellows reversal in the midst of a button change that makes
a little 'grace' note when deliberately mis-timed. Three for the
price of two, that is.

There's no other instrument that I've played, other than perhaps
the 5-string banjo, where "practicing" is really such great joy
of discovery, as you never know when, in a tune you've played 1000
times, a little quirky cross will accidentally appear and make
you say, "where have YOU been all my life?"

There is so much of the mental, intellectual in these things, but
then an equal measure of 'muscle memory' required to execute it.
This is the instrument where 'mistakes' have the potential to become
brilliant additions to the capabilities.

Mathematically, they're 'shaped' like Western music-- 1-4-5
circle of fifths ascending and descending, the relative minor.
Years of music theory and I didn't really "get" it until I played
the D/G box.

Physically, that translates into magic for the sort of music for
which they're meant.

Which I guess was the point of the inventors...they wanted something
that the 'unwashed masses' would buy and be able to honk out the
music that was meant for them. Only along the way, because they
designed it to be a natural sound-producer for 1-4-5 music, they
got more than they, and we, bargained for.