Playing the Accordion in G Flat

Series Summary

Music has always been a part of all of us as human beings. This being the case we have devised ways to write it, read it and of course play it. We have developed terms for every musical scenario that might occur and ways to teach all of this as well. Things like minor and major, 7th chords, intervals and chords are all great examples of the way we like to organize things as a species. Improvisation is a great example of the speed at which our brains work. Very popular among jazz players, improvisation is a great tool to test your knowledge of the instrument as well as let go of some of the rules.

In this great video series our expert Ryan Larson, a great accordion player, shows us not only how to play in the key of Gb and all the notes in that key but also how to instantly better our improvisational skills. You will learn all the facets of the instrument as well as techniques for how to play both sides of it. You are only able to improvise with as much as you know so make sure the next time you're jamming with your friends you wow them with how well you know your instrument, whatever it might be!

Video Transcript

"So today we're go over our basic G flat major scale and we're going to show the different cords that we get out of that scale. They're called modes but we're not going to get to much into that today. We're just going to show what they are and how to find them. Especially on your left hand, we play all your cords on the accordion. We're going to go through and improvise a couple of different scales, including the Blue scales, the B lap scale. Then we're going to go through our basic sight reading adventures through a nice Blues tune, we can get some nice cord changes down and see how to read through some nice simple music that you'll encounter a lot. Again, the accordion, a lot of the music written for the instrument is folk melodies or very well known pieces and it's a very simple approach to the instrument even though it looks really complicated. A lot of buttons. It's really easy to get down to master once you've figured out what everything is. So we're going to go through and give you all the information you need to know to approach this instrument and the many sounds you can get. Just by pressing these buttons you can get different sounds. Here on the left hand which you can play a lot of base. If your playing with a base player you want to just ..... So we'll go through and show you some of the basic cords and basic ways to go through and get that accordion singing."