Accordion types.

There are several accordion types and sizes. Most accordions have two parts connected by the bellows : the right side (the melody side) and the left side (the bass side). On the right they have the treble keys used to play the melody lines. On the left accordions have the bass key and bass chord keys. Let's have a look on different accordion types:

A. Piano Accordion
B. Diatonic Accordion
C. Chromatic Accordion
D. Concertina

A. Piano Accordion

The most popular accordion is the piano accordion. On the right side it has piano keys usualy 25 to 41 keys and on the left side has the bass keyboard which is usually the Stradella system(12 to 120 keys), or one of the various free bass systems.
Sizes are marked with the number of bass the accordion has got. From the smallest with 12 bass with 6 Root Notes and 6 Major chords to a little bigger ones with 24, 32, 40, 48, 60, 72, 80 and 96 bass systems, up to 120, 140 and even 160 bass accordion. There are also some hybrids with 111 bass systems and other combinations.

B. Diatonic Accordion

A very simple type of accordion that have a melody side keyboard which is limited to the notes of diatonic scales (1 row or two max). The bass side usually contains the principal chords of the instrument's key and the root notes of those chords.
Almost all diatonic button accordions are bisonoric, meaning each button produces two notes: one when the bellows is compressed, another while it is expanded.

C. Chromatic Accordion

On the right hand you have buttons which are arranged in the chromatic scale order on diagonals. There can be 3 to 5 rows of treble buttons. In a 5 row chromatic, two additional rows repeat the first 2 rows to facilitate options in fingering. There are different types of scales, most known are the B and C scale. The right keyboard is usually the Stradella system, one of the various free bass systems, or a converter system.

D. Concertina

A concertina is another free-reed musical instrument. It has a bellows and buttons typically on both ends of it on the sides. It is usually much smaller the a regular piano accordion and each button produces one note, while accordions typically can produce chords with a single button.

Ok So many accordion types to choose from! So what type should you choose?
Now before you consider what is the suited type for you, ask yourself some more questions:
- What kind of music do you wanna mostly play? While piano accordions are more straight forward and more used in jazz and rock and roll, the chromatic ones are more used for classical pieces.
- How serious you want to get? Concertinas have less keys, so is somehow easer to learn but the music area is much more restricted than other accordion, like a piano accordion for example.
- Which accordion type is more available in your area? You might what to check that in order to make your life easer. And when I say "more available" I meant easer to buy, easer to find a repair shop, easer to find a teacher.

So, having in mind the above, you should decide the type of accordion you want to buy.

3 comments:

samjan said...

Panic Over. I don't know anything about accordion, and being handed the job of buying an accordion for a church made me sweat, and this site helped a lot. thank you.

Daniel said...

Whats about convertor?

Daniel said...

Oh you wrote about it sorry