How to Test the Keys of an Accordion

Video Transcript

"Okay, so you got to that stage. You kind of checked the general appearance. Things aren't falling apart. You checked your straps, not to much wear. Bellows seem pretty tight. Air release switch you can see. You want to look for any obvious cracks or places where the bellows isn't attached okay. So if it passes all those tests, then the next thing to do and this might drive the person your buying an Accordion from crazy, but it's kind of a good thing to do, is your going want to test every reed in it because this thing is filled with reeds and just because a few reeds might work, doesn't mean that there all going to work. So what you need to do is just go up and down the entire keyboard and do both a bellows pull and a bellows squeeze for each key, so kind of like this. Right, I'm testing every key both on the inhale and exhale of the bellows and what that's doing is essentially testing every reed in the instrument to make sure that it's working and the air is going over it and the reeds are in pretty decent shape, so I'll keep going. Right, you can go the whole length of the keyboard, but remember sometimes if there's different banks of reeds your going to have to switch it over to the other one and test those also. Right, so okay, so far this Accordion sounds alright. Sometimes you find a used Accordion and maybe one key won't work or sound a little bit weasy or little bit dirty. It might even sound like really, really off key, which means maybe that reed needs to be tuned or replaced, but just the next step is to kind of go through the piano keyboard. Test every reed on both the inhale and the exhale, the pull and the squeeze with both sets of reeds and then start going through the left side too and so fourth and just keep going. If you test a Accordion like this and you find that all the keys work, that's great and if it passed all the other tests you might as well get it if it's a good price, if you can afford it. If maybe one or two keys aren't working, that might not be such a big deal because we're going to take some of these instruments apart and find that one or two or few keys aren't working to well, it can be fairly easy repair, but you don't want to buy an instrument that has half the keys sort of sounding bad or not working."