How Sound is Produced on the Accordion: a Free Online Music Lesson for Beginners

Video Transcript

"I would like to show you now how sound is produced with an accordion. You have two chambers inside which are blocks of reeds. The accordion is considered a free reed instrument. What that means is inside of here are these wooden blocks that are hollow and set in bees wax on each of these blocks are hundreds of little pieces of metal with a reed, a little metallic reed that is fixed at one end and vibrates freely on the other end, hence the name a free reed instrument. The longer and wider the reed is, the lower the sound. Those reeds are on the bass side. The smaller and thinner the reed is, the higher the sound, and you will find those reeds on the soprano or treble side. Here I have opened up my accordion so you can see inside of it. Here is the billows and inside the reed blocks. Here are the bass reed blocks and here are the treble reed blocks. I am going to pull out one of the reed blocks so you can look at it. As I mentioned, it looks kind of like a giant harmonica except that the reeds are exposed here. They are fixed at one end and the other end vibrates as the billows push or draw air through the holes. I’ll show you; I can even play it like a harmonica using my own lungs as billows. You can see as the reeds get bigger the sound gets lower. The small reed, higher sound. The big reed, lower sound. Here we have what are called stops just like on an organ, and by choosing different stops you combine different sets of reeds. The treble side of this particular accordion has 11 different sets of reeds. If I press master, you will hear all 11 sets at the same time. If I press piccolo, you will hear just the highest smallest reeds played. If I press bassoon you hear the lowest reeds of the treble side played. The bass has five sets of reeds and again a variety of different sounds. The billows push air through the reed blocks and cause the reeds to vibrate much like a harmonica does except that you are using your own lungs as the billows to push the air or draw the air by inhaling it through the reed block. Same thing it is just a whole bunch of different large harmonicas inside the accordion."