Learn About the Left & Right Sides of Accordions

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right. So just basically, let's kinda go over the parts of an accordion because we are going to take some of these apart. We're going to kinda learn basic playing. So it's good to know what we're looking at here. Accordions--a piano accordion's got a keyboard and so--this is the piano keyboard. Sometimes, there will be special switches to let you switch back and forth between different banks of free reeds that are inside the instrument. So this one here, you see, it has some of these reed selector switches here that allow you to select either--and actually I can even probably hear this. Let me take this snap off of here. So if I click this one--oop, let's see. You can hear that. But if I click this one, you'll hear kind of a different tone; same note, it's just an octave lower. And if I have this one in the middle, you're going to get both of them, kind of a rich tone here. Okay? So these are the keyboard reed bank selector switches. On the other side, you have what are called the bass notes, and accordions are often named depending on how many of these they have. And so I'm not going to sit here and count these right now but an accordion might be called an 80-bass Instrument or 120-bass Instrument, and it just has to do with how many of these buttons there are, okay? And this may look kind of confusing right now. We'll learn how to navigate through these buttons. But similarly, some accordions will also have bass bank selector switches, that's what these are here. So if I'd have one of them pressed, I kinda have a really kind of rich deep sound. Let me select the other one and there's now even a lower sound in there if you can hear that really low bass sound. Whereas this one, it's still a rich kind of a bass sound but it's missing those really low frequencies. Okay, so we have the treble side, keyboard side, the bass side, bass buttons. An accordion will have a certain number of buttons and will often get their name like that, but reed bank selector switches--so those are the left and right sides of the accordion."