(Date Posted:08/10/2007 18:02:12)
Reply to : stubber
Anyone know anything about these?, I've searched the web but no luck
Stubber,
Club boxes are abundant, and it seems increasingly less popular. They have a slightly different tuning than most other diatonic button accordions, and are usually tuned in C/F. There are always a couple of pages-full for sale on eBay, mostly coming from Germany. At some time in the past they were obviously very common --- I've heard tell of huge marching orchestras of club system accordion players, sadly now defunct. Consequently, at present a mid-range club box in more-or-less playable condition often sells for around $300-$400. This in contrast to other tunings, which are frequently much more expensive. It seems as if Hohner finally stopped making them in quantity in the 60s (this is a guess, based on the age of the most commonly available instruments) --- and I suspect many perished in the great accordion extinction of the 1970s that some scientists are now suggesting was an early sign of Global Warming. The high-end models are still available from Hohner, so someone out there is still purchasing big fancy club boxes that cost over $3-5k. The older models can be found in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, and the they are, for the most part, very well made. Weltmeister also makes and sells new clubs, but I've never seen one in the flesh.
Many people speak highly of the virtues of Hohner clubs retuned to more popular keys and fingering systems(D/G, G/C). They can also be quite entertaining in their native state. For more information than you ever thought you'd need, check out Jaques Delaguerre's Club Tutorial. This is a handy resource, as finding a teacher might be hard, depending on where you live. If you search around this forum a bit there is quite a lot of discussion of the system buried in other threads.
In sum, club accordions might be described as the red-headed step-children of the melodeon world. As melodeons are, themselves, red-headed step-children, this puts club players, way out on the fringes. Clubs are as far out as such oddities as Gaita Pontos, Duet Concertinas, Chemnitzers, Bayans, Schwyzerorgeli, and Saratovskaya Garmonika, but without the cachet of any of these or other free-reed indicators of ingenuity and ethnic pride.
Oh well.
Best of luck!
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