How to Remove Reeds from an Accordion

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Every instrument's going to be different inside, but there's usually a very easy way to remove one of these banks of reeds. In this case, this particular instrument just has a couple of little catch latches here, and you can just pull it back and then you want to be gentle, but then you should be able to just lift that bank of reeds out, and there it is, okay? And so, you can see now, now we can look into the accordion and see those kind of those holes here, right? And these are the holes that open and close when you push different keys on the keyboard. So, let me see if I can make some of those open. Actually, I might need to press kind of one of these banks to let loose. Yeah, there we go. Okay. So, those are the holes that open and close, so we'll set that aside now. So, here are our banks of reeds, and this is basically just like a giant harmonica, and let's look at this a little bit closely. Actually, a small harmonica is built the same way. Each one of these metal elements here is a different reed, its different note of the scale, okay? and the reed itself is, I'm going to be real gentle doing this, the reed itself is this sort of little tongue of metal, you can see that you could just sort of freely move in and out of kind of a rectangular opening, see that? So, I'm kinda using the tip of the needle-nose pliers, but this is the reed itself. Even though if you get a replacement reed, you get this whole piece, but the part that vibrates is this little piece here. So, these are actually steel reeds here but they make brass reeds also. Steel reeds kinda have a brighter sound. You'll also see there are these little flaps of leather, and what these flaps of leather are or they're valves that basically close the reed that's on the other side, okay? So, in other words, if we were to take this out and, well, we probably shouldn't do it because they kind of seal them with beeswax around there so they kind of--we could take these out if we wanted to but we have to seal it in again. This reed has another reed just like this right behind that piece of leather. And at the same time, right behind this reed, there's another piece of leather. And what that leather does is it acts as a valve so that air can only go through that reed one way or the other. So, remember when I told you how a free reed instrument has air going over it both ways. So, this reed, this whole sort of piece of metal will be used for one note, but one of them will vibrate when on the pulling the bellows while this piece of leather lays down flat and prevents the other reed from vibrating. And then when I squeeze the bellows, the reed that's underneath that piece of leather will vibrate, whereas the piece of leather on the other side of here is going to prevent that one from vibrating."