Start with the room, not the gear

The single biggest improvement you can make to a home recording of a concertina costs nothing at all: choose the right space and quieten it down. Anglo concertinas are bright, reedy and surprisingly loud, and they excite a room's reflections far more than a guitar or a fiddle. A bare, boxy spare bedroom will make your instrument sound thin and clattery no matter what microphone you put in front of it.

A carpeted living room with a sofa, curtains and a couple of bookshelves is close to ideal — soft furnishings soak up the sharp upper frequencies that make reeds sound harsh on playback. Small square rooms are the worst offenders, because their dimensions reinforce the same wavelengths and give you a honking midrange. A kitchen or bathroom will flatter nobody.

Practical steps before you press record:

• Switch off anything that hums: boilers, fridges, extractor fans, and phones in the room.
• Close the windows and pick a time when traffic and nearby lawnmowers have quietened down.
• Beware the central heating: a boiler firing up mid-take is the classic home-recording nuisance.
• Sit on a dining chair rather than an armchair so the bellows can open freely, and play in your normal posture — the tone of an Anglo depends on how you work the bellows.

Microphones: modest is plenty

You do not need an expensive studio microphone for this. A single sensible microphone well placed will beat two placed carelessly, every time. Plenty of players record perfectly usable tracks with a handheld dynamic microphone on a stand, or a modest USB condenser. Small-diaphragm condensers are lovely on reeds if you happen to own one; a stereo pair is a bonus rather than a necessity.

Avoid laptop and phone microphones for anything you want to keep. They are fine for checking your own progress, but they add processing and pick up every keystroke. If your microphone has a low-cut filter, engage it gently: it will tame bellows rumble and foot noise, but too much will thin out the reeds. A shock mount, or a microphone stand placed on a rug rather than bare boards, saves you from recording every creak in the floor.

Placing the microphone

Start roughly 30 to 45 centimetres away from the instrument, with the microphone angled off-axis at about 45 degrees and pointing towards the space between the two ends rather than straight down the throat of one fretwork end. Pointing it directly at an end from close range gives you button clatter, hand noise, air-valve hiss and reed "chiff" while losing the body of the tone.

Try a slightly raised position, aimed down and across the instrument. Then experiment in small steps — 20 centimetres, 40, 60, a metre — recording twenty seconds at each distance and listening back. You will hear the balance shift from mechanical detail towards room sound. Most players settle somewhere between 30 and 60 centimetres.

If you are using two microphones, one for each end, keep them an equal distance from the centre of the instrument to avoid phase cancellation when the signals are combined. Check by summing to mono — if the sound goes hollow or loses bass, move one microphone. Never put a microphone directly above the bellows unless you actively enjoy the sound of folding leather.

Levels, format and monitoring

Set your recording peaks around minus twelve to minus six decibels, and record at 24-bit if your interface allows it. Reeds produce fast transients that clip far more easily than you expect, so set gain conservatively and raise the level later. Leave auto-gain, heavy compression and noise reduction switched off; you can always add polish afterwards, but you cannot undo a squashed take.

Monitor on closed-back headphones, or in-ear models kept at a sensible volume. Open-backed headphones leak badly into the microphone, and headphone spill on a solo concertina recording is very hard to disguise. Record a few seconds of silence at the head of each take — that room tone is invaluable later if you need to patch or fade.

Playing for the microphone

Recording is a different discipline from playing in a session. A few habits make it much easier:

• Check the instrument first: any reed buzz, sticking button, squeaking strap or loose end bolt will be magnified on playback.
• Play a little slower than performance tempo, and aim for absolutely even bellows pressure. Recording exposes a jerky or sagging bellows mercilessly.
• Leave a second of stillness at the start and end of each tune. Clean beginnings and endings save hours of editing.
• Record whole tunes rather than patching bar by bar. The phrasing is the point of a folk tune, and stitching destroys it.
• Do three or four complete takes and choose between them, rather than stopping at every slip.
• Take breaks. Tired arms make ragged bellows work, and you will hear it.

Editing, listening and keeping a log

Keep the edit simple: trim, fade, a gentle touch of EQ, and perhaps a little reverb. A dry, honest recording is often more useful than a polished one, particularly if you are using it for tuition or to compare instruments. A modest amount of hall reverb flatters a concertina, but a great deal of it turns a lively tune into a wash.

Listen on more than one system — headphones, a laptop, the car. What sounds full in headphones can sound thin through a phone speaker, and vice versa. Finally, keep a written log with each recording: the date, which concertina, the tuning, the microphone distance and position, and any notes about the room. That notebook becomes quietly indispensable when you are trying to recreate a sound months later, or working out why one instrument records so much more sweetly than another.