Playing Chord Buttons Too Long - Mistakes Self-Taught Accordion Players Make.

[dak]

Unless a score is articulated, defaults need to exist. I've checked three different method books (Palmer-Hughes, Magnate method, Pietro Deiro method book). They all mention chords to be played short and not at full quarter note value.

And for the record, my teacher was strictly against slurring every bass note into the chords. As opposed to "never play long notes" his stance was "slurring every single bass note is not correct. They need to be detached".

The important thing is you need to be aware of your options and of what they are conveying and how to control them.

You want to avoid your accordion sounding like it is drunk and slurring all its phrases while dragging its feet and falling over them. You want to be conscious of all the choices that are there and that you are making.

And yes, slurring things into a mush for something intended as a brisk dance is not going to work well.

Now that I think about it more, it wasn't so much about playing the bass note longer, but it was about defaulting to a legato.

I suspect that both "default" and "legato" here are euphemisms. A typical beginner mistake (and here I dare call it a mistake) is to apply bellows pressure through the bass buttons. That requires taking over the force from the bass button to a chord button and in reverse. But legato is an articulation choice, not something that happens because you are being sloppy. The buttons are under control of their individual fingers; it is hand back and palm that control the bellows pressure and movement through hand strap and bass cover. The time when a finger engages and releases the button is a musical choice that has nothing to do with maintaining bellows pressure or a mechanical dependence on what other fingers may be doing.

When you are playing fast, the timing of the key release has a very direct influence on the onset of the next note because the bellow travels with some inertia: leggiero, a short pause before the onset of the next note, leads to an accumulation of pressure accenting the onset of the next note. That makes for a pronounced and reliable onset. A full legato that releases a note only once the next has been started will start a note with half the available air and will make the timing of the onset both hard to perceive and less reliable.

An accordion, unlike a piano, is not a percussive instrument. Notes last while the button/key is being pressed, and the wind requirements of the instrument make the timing of the release a crucial part of the articulation. Your teacher certainly is right in making sure that you don't develop bad habits that prevent you from making sensible performance choices.

Choices have consequences, so it should be you that is making them, not some motorically convenient habit. And your teacher is certainly right in working with you until your articulation is deliberate and not accidental, and you are aware of it. Your audience has a lot more leeway to listen to effects of what you are doing without the distraction of having to do all those movements yourself, so you need to actively train listening to and controlling fine aspects of your performance.

But when you are in control, it is ok to think outside of the box. Most of the time, nothing useful may come from it. But if there were only one correct way to play a score, we wouldn't need all those musicians.

 

[dak]

This leaves me with the feeling that the obsession with everything staccato is either very recent or very USA-centric or both. I'd like to think it's confined to people who only play waltzes and polkas, or confined to people on instruments with no register switches and too many bass reeds.

Over a decade ago, I was in Winterthur in Switzerland, at the music store that I had mail-ordered my big instrument from a few years before. The owner was heavily invested into Beltuna (which is why he had gotten rid of non-Beltuna stock to my advantage) and I got to play around with a number of standard bass instruments (fewer than I liked because there wasn't all that much of C system in stock, never mind being in Switzerland). I had some scores I worked with along. I didn't get stuff to balance out in the manner I was used to. Accordion reeds tend to sound louder with lower notes, and an instrument built to consistently get the most from reeds of consistent high quality tends to end up stronger on the bass.

Working in a contrapuntal manner requires working with significantly different sound signatures and/or adapting relative loudness. I wasn't able to get there with single-reed registrations in the right hand.

It's not really a matter of "too many bass reeds". I do get into problems if I try balancing a single reed on the right with chords using 10 or 20 reeds on the left on my instrument. But I certainly have registrations on the left that combine well with just a single reed on the right and plain playing style.

I think that there may be an overobsession of today's production on quality components rather than on the art of creating an instrument from them. In a way that wraps back to the discussion of articulation choices: today's production is not one where everything a master builder does is by choice and deliberate. Choices are made and changed due to engineering decisions rather than extended experience in what influences sound in what manner and what subtle changes have which subtle effects. Any change takes lots of effort and justification, there are no whims.

And that results in instruments where every reed plays as loud as it can and responds together with all others. Small wonder that you need to play the bass side staccato for good results.

 

[Plinky]

An accordion, unlike a piano, is not a percussive instrument.

Hi dak I had been trying to play triplets and sliding off black notes on my Hohner student VM as quietly as possible so I can to avoid the clicks
On the Bravo silent key its fine ,but the 3/2/1 and slide on both my vintage Hohners its not really possible for me to play at any sort of speed without the noise.

I went to a folk-ish gathering at weekend. some great box players and that's how they all sounded
The general consensus was that's one of the charming characteristics of these folk boxes.
Go figure.

 

[nou]

Personally, the moment my teacher would argue, that the original author was wrong it would be the end of my lesson with him. Just too many music teachers have this „drill seargant” attitude (I can’t find a good english equivalent of polish word „tresura”, training but as in animal training). It’s toxic.

It’s really telling, that you dropped „Amelie’s Waltz” as an example there - when you „add interest” to a tune so well established it stops being that tune and becomes a derivative. IMHO there is huge difference in „what is good practice” when you’re adapting a piano/band/orchestral work to an accordion/concertina/organs, and when you’re playing a piece „as written” by the author. When you adapt, you inevitably have to „flatten” the orchestration to just two hands and instrument limitations, so you have to pick and choose which elements of the original are important. This process is not only necessary, but also shows your personal style. Similar but opposite process is true for folk music, where you only get barebones in „the dots” and it’s expected to add harmony and ornamentation yourself. But when you’re making a derivative of an original written for or adapted for a given instrument by the author, you better have very compelling reasons to do it. From my experience it is really, really rare for such derivative to actually sound better than the original.

Now about the video lag. I also get it, on various devices, and it was also present in your recent „…for 10 accordions” video and it’s really annoying when your hands are not in sync with music. Try adding a clear „marking points” in your videos (some subtle „clapperboard” like cues for yourself to check if everything is in order).

 

[dunlustin]

BreezyB

Just to say that I really enjoy your playing.
I enjoy even more:
your openness to other people and ideas
your constant curiosity - not least your pursuit of melody bass
your willingness to share insights where you think others might find some interest
your getting more from making a discovery than giving a lecture.
Thanks and keep at it.

PS Bet you don't suffer from high blood pressure.

 

[micahcowan]

Might as well throw my 2¢ in.

I'm a new accordion player (very long-time pianist, though), and necessarily self-taught, as I play CBA and finding a good teacher for that is difficult. I would also feel very selective about finding a teacher, as my technique (in terms of fingering things properly, and reading and executeing difficult passages) is already pretty solid, so I'd need someone who doesn't just teach "from a rote curriculum", but can actually observe my skills and weaknesses, and address those directly, without subjecting me to a mind-numbing degree of beginner materials I already know (instead subjecting me to beginner materials, specific to accordion, that I've missed due to teaching myself!). It's a somewhat weird state to be in, being able to play "virtuosically" for the most part, and yet still fumbling somewhat with timing my bellows opening and closing.

Although I'm self-taught, it was instantly apparent to me that holding the chord notes too long risks drowning out the melody. Melody and phrasing are all-important to me as a pianist, and while an accordion is somewhat more like an organ than a piano, it remains so here. So, intuitively, I staccatto my chords, when doing so aids the melody.

Which isn't always. It depends on the reeds used, the style of music, and the sense I want to evoke. Though I'm mostly strongly trying to avoid playing "accordion music", one of the first pieces I taught myself was a sea shanty with lots of quick RH notes. To hear the melody properly, I mostly need to play the bass notes at about half-length, and the chords just long enough to sound, and then release (about quarter-length, maybe less?). When I play it particularly briskly, all LH stuff plays as short as I can.

With a "Viennese"-style waltz, I would absolutely slur the bass notes into the chords (as a default). I feel like that's a requisite of the genre. With other waltzes, it varies, but definitely the downbeat gets lengthened. I've been playing (half of) Chopin Op. 70 No. 3 (a Waltz in D♭, though on my CBA I play it in C), and I think I'm playing both bass and chords at roughly half-length, up to two-thirds in some cases, depending what the RH is doing, and how much attention I want to draw to the LH (such as when there are particularly interesting chord progressions).

The bottom line, for me, is that no "rule" or even "default" dictates how long I hold my LH notes or chords. The articulation must serve the music, so I listen, and adjust, and that's it. Certainly, different genres have their own defaults (as I hinted in my comment about Viennese Waltzes). I don't agree that staccato is implied by default in the chord notes of all accordion music, I don't think composers go like "everyone knows it's supposed to be stacatto so I can safely leave that out"; instead I think they go more like "experienced players know how to get the right sound, I don't need to hand-hold them on minutia of articulation".

When it comes to the notes I play, I typically take it that the composer wrote precisely what they intend me to play (esp. for classical music). When it comes to articulation, though, I generally give myself lots of elbow room for interpretation, as I think often the soul of the performer is in the articulation, and in the choices around tempo ebb and flow. If the composer has written the articulation in explicitly, I do my best to honor it, as they've made their intention clear (for instance, on piano recently I've been practicing a piece with quarter notes in the bass, where the downbeats have been written as eighth-note, eighth-rest, with slurs from the upbeats to the downbeats - it's clear what I should be doing there!).

All that being said, @breezybellows , I still think it's probably wise to teach a beginning student to default-stacatto their chords, and I imagine it probably does qualify as a "thing self-taught beginners often get wrong". It's a safer default on the accordion than "play everything the note length that's written", and I think your video is useful, good advice. I'd just be leery of treating it as a "hard rule", or "the way accordion must be played".

I also have to say, that in your video specifically, I think the point you make is somewhat undercut by the fact that, in your example of "what not to do", the playing didn't sound at all muddy to me, and honestly was totally acceptable to me in the way it sounded. If you demonstrate the issue again in the future, you might want to make sure you are playing a very strong, "master" sound in the LH, and possibly a relatively weak (single, middle reeds?) RH, so as to exaggerate the effect you're trying to avoid by playing staccato. (Also, when you switched the chords to staccato, you switched the bass notes, too; personally I'd have left those a smidge longer than the chords.)

 

[breezybellows]

Might as well throw my 2¢ in.

I'm a new accordion player (very long-time pianist, though), and necessarily self-taught, as I play CBA and finding a good teacher for that is difficult. I would also feel very selective about finding a teacher, as my technique (in terms of fingering things properly, and reading and executeing difficult passages) is already pretty solid, so I'd need someone who doesn't just teach "from a rote curriculum", but can actually observe my skills and weaknesses, and address those directly, without subjecting me to a mind-numbing degree of beginner materials I already know (instead subjecting me to beginner materials, specific to accordion, that I've missed due to teaching myself!). It's a somewhat weird state to be in, being able to play "virtuosically" for the most part, and yet still fumbling somewhat with timing my bellows opening and closing.

Although I'm self-taught, it was instantly apparent to me that holding the chord notes too long risks drowning out the melody. Melody and phrasing are all-important to me as a pianist, and while an accordion is somewhat more like an organ than a piano, it remains so here. So, intuitively, I staccatto my chords, when doing so aids the melody.

Which isn't always. It depends on the reeds used, the style of music, and the sense I want to evoke. Though I'm mostly strongly trying to avoid playing "accordion music", one of the first pieces I taught myself was a sea shanty with lots of quick RH notes. To hear the melody properly, I mostly need to play the bass notes at about half-length, and the chords just long enough to sound, and then release (about quarter-length, maybe less?). When I play it particularly briskly, all LH stuff plays as short as I can.

With a "Viennese"-style waltz, I would absolutely slur the bass notes into the chords (as a default). I feel like that's a requisite of the genre. With other waltzes, it varies, but definitely the downbeat gets lengthened. I've been playing (half of) Chopin Op. 70 No. 3 (a Waltz in D♭, though on my CBA I play it in C), and I think I'm playing both bass and chords at roughly half-length, up to two-thirds in some cases, depending what the RH is doing, and how much attention I want to draw to the LH (such as when there are particularly interesting chord progressions).

The bottom line, for me, is that no "rule" or even "default" dictates how long I hold my LH notes or chords. The articulation must serve the music, so I listen, and adjust, and that's it. Certainly, different genres have their own defaults (as I hinted in my comment about Viennese Waltzes). I don't agree that staccato is implied by default in the chord notes of all accordion music, I don't think composers go like "everyone knows it's supposed to be stacatto so I can safely leave that out"; instead I think they go more like "experienced players know how to get the right sound, I don't need to hand-hold them on minutia of articulation".

When it comes to the notes I play, I typically take it that the composer wrote precisely what they intend me to play (esp. for classical music). When it comes to articulation, though, I generally give myself lots of elbow room for interpretation, as I think often the soul of the performer is in the articulation, and in the choices around tempo ebb and flow. If the composer has written the articulation in explicitly, I do my best to honor it, as they've made their intention clear (for instance, on piano recently I've been practicing a piece with quarter notes in the bass, where the downbeats have been written as eighth-note, eighth-rest, with slurs from the upbeats to the downbeats - it's clear what I should be doing there!).

All that being said, @breezybellows , I still think it's probably wise to teach a beginning student to default-stacatto their chords, and I imagine it probably does qualify as a "thing self-taught beginners often get wrong". It's a safer default on the accordion than "play everything the note length that's written", and I think your video is useful, good advice. I'd just be leery of treating it as a "hard rule", or "the way accordion must be played".

I also have to say, that in your video specifically, I think the point you make is somewhat undercut by the fact that, in your example of "what not to do", the playing didn't sound at all muddy to me, and honestly was totally acceptable to me in the way it sounded. If you demonstrate the issue again in the future, you might want to make sure you are playing a very strong, "master" sound in the LH, and possibly a relatively weak (single, middle reeds?) RH, so as to exaggerate the effect you're trying to avoid by playing staccato. (Also, when you switched the chords to staccato, you switched the bass notes, too; personally I'd have left those a smidge longer than the chords.)

I agree with everything you said. It's not a hard rule , but general advice for self taught beginners who tend to drown out the melody with LH chords. You put it better than how I phrased it in my video.

"If you're not experienced enough, going for a staccato base is a safer default when playing beginner level music."

My bass note duration is something that I'm still addressing. I was dragging the bases and slurring them with the staccato chords. While correcting it, I've over corrected and I'm now playing too long.


Reg my demonstration of long chords not being loud enough: I did use the master switch on the LH. I also used an internal microphone that lets me adjust the volume independently for LH and RH.

 

[breezybellows]

I suspect that both "default" and "legato" here are euphemisms. A typical beginner mistake (and here I dare call it a mistake) is to apply bellows pressure through the bass buttons.

That's a good call out. I wasn't referring to a tastefully done legato where the performer makes a conscious choice. I'm talking about a clueless beginner (like I was a free years ago) that drags the bass notes along ever single time.

Here's an example:

 

[breezybellows]

BreezyB

Just to say that I really enjoy your playing.
I enjoy even more:
your openness to other people and ideas
your constant curiosity - not least your pursuit of melody bass
your willingness to share insights where you think others might find some interest
your getting more from making a discovery than giving a lecture.
Thanks and keep at it.

PS Bet you don't suffer from high blood pressure.

Thank you. Discussing with people with different perspectives helps me look at things differently. There were a lot of useful takes in this thread. I wish YouTube would let me edit uploaded videos. I'll probably make a follow up video.

 

[micahcowan]

That's a good call out. I wasn't referring to a tastefully done legato where the performer makes a conscious choice. I'm talking about a clueless beginner (like I was a free years ago) that drags the bass notes along ever single time.

Here's an example:

So, just my 2¢, and perhaps my ear isn't "developed" enough as an accordionist, but I find absolutely nothing wrong with how you're playing the bass notes in that recording. If it's not what you would prefer to do if you're thinking consciously about what it should sound like, then it's wrong for you... but it's still a perfectly valid musical choice IMO.

 

[micahcowan]

Reg my demonstration of long chords not being loud enough: I did use the master switch on the LH. I also used an internal microphone that lets me adjust the volume independently for LH and RH.

Maybe the issue then was that you had balanced the LH very pleasantly against the RH (something not possible with a bare acoustic sound, heard just in the room it's played in), and so because it was well-balanced, the unpleasant muddiness wasn't strongly present.

 

[dak]

I'm a new accordion player (very long-time pianist, though), and necessarily self-taught, as I play CBA and finding a good teacher for that is difficult. I would also feel very selective about finding a teacher, as my technique (in terms of fingering things properly, and reading and executeing difficult passages) is already pretty solid, so I'd need someone who doesn't just teach "from a rote curriculum", but can actually observe my skills and weaknesses, and address those directly, without subjecting me to a mind-numbing degree of beginner materials I already know (instead subjecting me to beginner materials, specific to accordion, that I've missed due to teaching myself!).

Might be worth looking for a teacher who doesn't care that you play CBA. You apparently have sufficient practice material to figure out your fingering. If a teacher says "but if you play CBA, I cannot teach you", move on. But the bulk of your areas in need of advice, listening, and training appear to be unspecific to CBA/PA and rather about articulation, bellows technique, possibly bass side.

With CBA: if it doesn't work the umpteenth time, see what the 4th row may do for you. This invaluable lesson comes free.

With a "Viennese"-style waltz, I would absolutely slur the bass notes into the chords (as a default).

I wouldn't, slurring mushes up the chord. The art here is not to play them staccato, but to "pluck" them, using a soft release to have a tone quality without hard cutoff point but still not hanging into the chords, or at least being almost dead when the second beat comes in (Viennese waltzes are darn fast).

I feel like that's a requisite of the genre. With other waltzes, it varies, but definitely the downbeat gets lengthened.

Sure, but more by the second beat coming in late than by the first beat forgetting to phrase off.

I've been playing (half of) Chopin Op. 70 No. 3 (a Waltz in D♭, though on my CBA I play it in C), and I think I'm playing both bass and chords at roughly half-length, up to two-thirds in some cases, depending what the RH is doing, and how much attention I want to draw to the LH (such as when there are particularly interesting chord progressions).

Try a slow rather than an abrupt release, but still not dragging into the chord. Takes practice but does a good deal towards not sounding, well, like an accordion.

 

[breezybellows]

BreezyB

Just to say that I really enjoy your playing.
I enjoy even more:
your openness to other people and ideas
your constant curiosity - not least your pursuit of melody bass
your willingness to share insights where you think others might find some interest
your getting more from making a discovery than giving a lecture.
Thanks and keep at it.

PS Bet you don't suffer from high blood pressure.

Thank you. Discussing with people with different perspectives helps me look at things differently. There were a lot of useful takes in this thread. I wish YouTube would let me edit uploaded videos. I'll probably make a follow up video.

 

[micahcowan]

I wouldn't, slurring mushes up the chord.

I don't really see how it's possible for a slurred bass note to mush up the following chord, given that the note is typically present within the chord. Unless that's exactly what you're referring to. Me, I generally prefer that (at least, for the types of waltzes I was thinking of).

The art here is not to play them staccato, but to "pluck" them

This is generally how I play staccato (on piano as well as on accordion).

Sure, but more by the second beat coming in late than by the first beat forgetting to phrase off.

Personally, for most waltzes, I'd rather play the second beat early than late. But more typically, the second beat is more important for me to have squarely in time than either the third or the first, in a waltz (speaking only of the LH).

Try a slow rather than an abrupt release, but still not dragging into the chord. Takes practice but does a good deal towards not sounding, well, like an accordion.

I've experimented with slow releases, as well as partial presses on some buttons to de-emphasize them against whatever else is playing. On several accordions I've played, a slow release ****s with the timbre in a way I find distinctly unpleasant. For chords, the individual reeds start to drop out at inconsistent times. I've elected not to make a habit of it, and prefer to practice having buttons either firmly pressed, or not pressed, pushing all the expression out to the bellows instead, where I can achieve it much more reliably.

 

[dak]

Thank you. Discussing with people with different perspectives helps me look at things differently. There were a lot of useful takes in this thread. I wish YouTube would let me edit uploaded videos. I'll probably make a follow up video.

Well, it would likely be pretty ineffective to drag the kind of discussion we have here into your lessons: you want to learn stuff, not debate it. And any skill you have learnt you can later employ at your discretion: one cannot have enough of them.

I've experimented with slow releases, as well as partial presses on some buttons to de-emphasize them against whatever else is playing. On several accordions I've played, a slow release ****s with the timbre in a way I find distinctly unpleasant. For chords, the individual reeds start to drop out at inconsistent times. I've elected not to make a habit of it, and prefer to practice having buttons either firmly pressed, or not pressed, pushing all the expression out to the bellows instead, where I can achieve it much more reliably.

For chord buttons, that is reasonable. For the bass buttons, I think that you can with some reliance throttle the tone to a good degree.
Using the bellows for expression is certainly the preferable way, but you have only one bellows for two hands. And here we are talking more about phrasing than expression. It's not about conveying musical meaning but shaping individual notes.

I feel like my instrument is offering me those possibilities. Now I consider it a pretty good instrument, but I don't consider it magic. I can check back with a few other instruments to see whether I feel they behave substantially differently.

 

[micahcowan]

For chord buttons, that is reasonable. For the bass buttons, I think that you can with some reliance throttle the tone to a good degree.

Yeah... I said what I said, and then... I recorded some vids to post to "I Did That!" (I'd been putting it off until I get the Petosa, but I feel like at this point I've been running my mouth more than enough that I should show the extent (and limitations) of my current skill (particularly since I have in fact only been playing for ten months).

...And I found to my chagrin that I am in fact absolutely fading out my button presses for the single-note bass keys, much of the time, and of course the sound is just fine.

At the same time, my statement about harsh timbres and such is definitely still true, and on the same instrument. Just not, I guess, unilaterally. It seems to apply more to higher notes, it may also apply more to higher bellows pressure than low, idk. It seems I've adapted intuitively, somewhat, and allow myself to fade some of the notes, but not others.

 

[breezybellows]

Yeah... I said what I said, and then... I recorded some vids to post to "I Did That!" (I'd been putting it off until I get the Petosa, but I feel like at this point I've been running my mouth more than enough that I should show the extent (and limitations) of my current skill (particularly since I have in fact only been playing for ten months).

...And I found to my chagrin that I am in fact absolutely fading out my button presses for the single-note bass keys, much of the time, and of course the sound is just fine.

At the same time, my statement about harsh timbres and such is definitely still true, and on the same instrument. Just not, I guess, unilaterally. It seems to apply more to higher notes, it may also apply more to higher bellows pressure than low, idk. It seems I've adapted intuitively, somewhat, and allow myself to fade some of the notes, but not others.

Which Petosa are you getting?

 

[micahcowan]

Which Petosa are you getting?

Whoops! I'd meant to say. It's the 4100 C, 96-bass. I'd probably have preferred a 120-bass instrument like the 1100 C... but then I'd be waiting 6 mos to a year for them to build it for me, as they haven't any in stock (they don't stock a ton of CBAs in general, though probably still more than most accordion shops).

 

[Dingo40]

What about the left hand in this clip?
(The left hand comes in at about the 40 second mark: be patient )

 

[breezybellows]

What about the left hand in this clip?
(The left hand comes in at about the 40 second mark: be patient )

That was wonderful. My suggestion was mainly for beginner level rhythmic left hand that you find in the method books.