How to Play Diatonic Accordions

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Paul Becker and I'm here to talk to you about accordions today on behalf of Expert Village. We are now going to talk about another type of accordion and in one case even a concertina. Now accordions that I have showed you up to now are all double acting accordions and you can look at the reed plate. The reed plate has actually one reed facing in one direction and the other so that you can play the accordion both pumping the bellows out and the bellows in. In double acting or action accordions both reeds are the same notes so you have 2 reeds for each note so you can play C when your arms are going out and C when they are going in. Many traditional accordions is when they are called single acting and those accordions don't have the same note facing each way but a different note and those are arrange very much the way you might if you played a harmonica. Here are the ways the harmonica is arranged. So just is just like a harmonica in and you might think it is a little complicated cause you do have to remember playing each note whether you are going in or out. But the nice things about these notes are arranged is that they are always constant or in tuned with each other. So if you played 3 together they are always going to match up you can't play a bad set of notes together. So this is a single acting diatonic accordion and it is diatonic because at least in this row you can only play the notes of a major scale for that row. So some of these would have 1 note 1 row, some may have 2, some may have 3, some have 3 1/2. "