How to Set the Bass Side in an Accordion

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right. So, we've set the treble part of accordion aside, that's the piano part, and now we've got the bass side here. And you might look at the bass side and be like--you look at all these buttons and you think, "Well, gosh. Does the accordion have that many different reeds on the other side?" And the answer is no. It doesn't. If I turn this up, you can see it still has just banks of reeds. Well, basically, two of these two giant harmonicas are the same way to the other side is. And so, doing maintenance on this side is really going to be the same thing as working on the treble side where you can remove these banks of reeds. You might need to take out these extra pins here, or like the same when we took these pins out with the needle nose pliers. Remove the bellows. And then if you need to remove these banks of reeds and work on the reed as you can, it's basically going to work the same way. But the difference with the bass side is you've got all these different buttons and you might wonder, "Well, gosh. How does that work?" And the answer is, is that we're going to see this in a minute, is the inside here, there's a really kind of brilliant system of little levers that each kind of like a little code where each button, it tells each button which reeds to open and close. Okay. So, it's kind of the same idea with the right hand side but whereas the right hand side, everytime you push a button on the piano keyboard, it only opens one hole. And when you push one of these buttons, there's an interesting little system of levers in there that will open several holes at a time because really what these are doing is making chords. And so, in order to get to that, we need to turn the accordion on its side. I've already loosened the kind of screw that tightens the hand strap. I'm going to move that aside. And then, oftentimes you'll need a flat head or a Phillips screwdriver to open these little screws so that's what I'm going to do now. And, again, you might want to be really careful and make sure you remember which screws go into which holes. That's kind of more important when you're working with screws than if you're working with pins. So, I'm going to take this out and then we'll open up kind of this panel of the bass side of the accordion and see what we've got."