Baffling question

[debra]

Ok, I will open one hole in the bass plate and put 20 cm of rubber garden hose on it packed with fibreglass and a perforated pipe down the middle.

I'm sure the bass will be very silent after this. A very effective method!

 

[Monty [IIIII]]

If you ever attended some of the pub folk sessions hereabouts (in the 1980s) you'd have been very lucky to even hear your own accordion at all, no matter how loudly you played it: you'd be drowned out by the 30 or 40 other instrumentalists (guitars, fiddles, pipes, DBAs, spoons, mandolins, banjo-mandolins, banjos, bodrans, going simultaneously and full pelt!
It used to remind me of trying to catch a wave at a popular break every man or woman for him/herself !
There was just the quick and the dead.
Essentially, you had to know your stuff well enough to play it fluently without any aural feedback!
The moment you hit the first note, the entire mob jumped in. Quite unnerving!
It's amazing how several score patrons crowding a room soaks up/muffles any sound coming out of a piano accordion. This is home territory for a DBA!

Your colorful description of pub sessions is consistent with my experience in sessions in many places (Ireland, Britain, US) over many years. I just had my concertina drowned out by revelers at a local pub on St. Patrick's Day and promptly abandoned ship. My accordion might have been loud enough to pierce the cacophony, but don't know the tunes well enough on accordion to play in such a setting. That is why I generally prefer sessions in homes or private rooms where the chatter and distractions are minimal. If we have several "backup instruments" (guitar, piano, bouzouki) the accordion bass is redundant, and annoying if the chord choices are different. So the piano side alone is preferred. But with just a fiddle and flute, the accordion bass can provide a nice accompaniment, if done properly. That is my goal, to provide accompaniment without annoyance. And piano accordion already in a category with banjos and drums as far as causing annoyance to the uninitiated.

 

[Monty [IIIII]]

It's not just manufacturers but also the designers and craftsmen. Also the customers. When they pay the highest prices, they want the best hand-made reeds everywhere. Which sets you up for the bass overpowering the treble. I have a one-of-a-kind instrument (an old custom-made Morino construction) and what impressed a professional player most about it was not the intricate bass mechanism (which offers 168 different registrations for the standard bass) but how well it balanced out tonally over a large range of left/right registrations one would usually consider incompatible.

The same player said that this was a feature he missed after selling an old Jupiter bayan (where the mechanics were increasingly falling apart) that had just 4 bass reeds and was both poignant and transparent in play in a manner that the (quite top-of-the-line, including from Jupiter) newer instruments he bought failed to provide.

And indeed, when I test-played high end instruments, the one thing routinely irrking me tended to be my inability to find registrations in the left hand that would satisfyingly complement single-reed registrations in the right hand when playing held bass notes.

And I think part of the equation is that manufacturers have shifted their focus from building the best instruments to assembling the best components, without considering their role in the result. And of course, that in turn influences playing styles and literature, making accordions get stuck in a rut of specific styles of music and its execution.

Your post really gets to my point. The accordions I've played were great for belting out tunes for polkas and waltzes, but not for playing a sustained bass or chord while playing a melody on the piano keyboard. My keyboard experience started with electric organ, which had lots of ways to combine sounds and to amplify one keyboard while minimizing the other. From you comments there have been accordions which achieve this balance in the past. But apparently even the best ones aren't as good at this as they used to be.

 

[Monty [IIIII]]

Very basically... it is something that is VERY challenging, becuase if a mistake is made there is zero change of going back. You size the sides of the reed tongue so that minimal air get's it vibrating to it's tone faster. The issue is that if it's done too much or improperly, the sound can break up faster at louder volumes.

Paul mentioned Golas... normally different notes start to vibrate at different speeds. The deeper the sound, the more air it takes to start (for example). On my Gola no matter what note I play, left or right hand, deepest to highest, in whatever register, EVERY note starts and ends with the same amount of air at the same time no matter how soft or loud I play. This is something that no other accordion I have ever played does as well.

This becomes glaringly obvious when I try to play the same way (but cannot of course) on the little student FB36 (for example), where it takes way longer amount of time to get the deepest notes to start vs the higher notes. This then causes me to need to play a bit louder so that they respond quicker in some cases.

This is interesting and helps to explain my challenge at the start of this post. The problem with starting a reed to speak was particularly difficult with my accordions ( Petosa & Guerrini) which could switch off all bass reeds but the lowest. I thought this feature would be great for playing a "walking bass" but it actually was not. One really had to punch the bellows to get the notes to sound. But switch on a second reed (bass + tenor) and the sound flowed easily. Baffling.

 

[Monty [IIIII]]

On the issue of baffling, someone mentioned mufflers. I had some experience with this. As kids we wanted our motorbikes to sound louder, so we cut the baffling out of the mufflers making them into trumpets. Besides annoying all the parents and authority figures, the engine did not have enough back pressure to run properly, so we replaced the baffling by stuffing the mufflers with wire wool. Quiet as original baffles. I don't know if I would want to stuff my accordion with wire wool, but the principle seems relevant. Sound waves get disturbed by obstacles and lose energy, thus lower volume. (they probably lose various tones and overtones as well)

Another experience with acoustics came from my career as a panel beater, reconstructing wrecked automobiles. All cars had some sort of coating on the inside of panels to reduce sound transmission to the interior. Mercedes and Volvo were particularly good with a 3-6 mm layer of soft, dense, plastic/rubber material adhered to the floor pans and door panels. I've seen similar dense, rubberlike, materials in building construction for applying to wall board to reduce sound transmission between rooms -- used in soundproofing music studios among other things. Attached judiciously to the interior of an accordion, such material deaden the sound ...or ruin it altogether.

Thinking about sound transmission, the accordion body is important. For example, a tuning fork vibrating in air is nearly silent, but against a piano sound board it resonates loudly. Same for accordion reeds. Isolated in a metal frame the reed makes a quiet hum. Attached to a wooden box it is greatly amplified. (attached to cast iron....not so much) The qualities and dimensions of that wood have a measurable influence on the sound. Joe Petosa, a famous builder and importer of accordions, claimed that his accordions were superior because of the dense hard woods employed, and that an accordion made of a much lighter wood lacked the same sound quality. Yet, acoustic guitars made of spruce seem to produce excellent sound. So the beat and debate goes on.

Thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts.

 

[JerryPH]

Comparing a 1” vibrating piece of metal enclosed to a 4-foot metal or plastic string in open air are 2 completely different worlds, no?

 

[Ventura]

a dense material is good for transferring energy from one end to another

like the bridge on a Piano.. the vibrations in the strings travel
through the hardwood to a destination

a lightweight material can resonate and transmit that energy into the air
creating sound you can hear

so the Piano Soundboard (made of tonewood/ Spruce) does this
efficiently and nicely. Other woods can also work, even formed as light
plywood using mundane woodtypes, but the sound quality kinda sucks
(Spruce is the only true resonant tonewood suitable for use as a soundboard,
all others are a marketing scam/joke)

there are no resonant woods or surfaces in an accordion, none, nada, nothing, zip

to get good Accordion Bass from reeds back in my Rock n Roll days when
the Cordovox could not be used, was to Mic the bass, EQ Pedal out ALL the
treble frequencies leaving ONLY the bass frequencies then boosting and
amplifying that and sending it out through a 15" JBL or a pair of 15" Altec's
depending on what i felt like rolling in to the gig

point 2: the reason big fat reeds are sluggish when on their own
is because they just are.. the way you get them to sound quickly is to
pair them with a small and nimble reed that is in tune with the big one
and can "start" it through sympathetic vibrations the small reed induces
in the tongue of the big reed.. there are many cool ways to do this, but the
most significant is a bass section with what they call a Heilikon setup
which is even bigger more sluggish than usual accordion reeds with
an itty-bitty reed hidden in the same airpath of the reedblock..
i am sure someone can explain it much better, but it works great
and you don't even hear the small reed

if you want an accordion with this kind of fat Bass, there are a few people
here like Rylundo who can probably give you some tips on what to look for..
most of those kinds of boxes seem to be button-treble keyboards though
but maybe you just need an accordion made for the purpose you described,
rather than figuring out how to get a normal PA to sound more like a Folk box

 

[losthobos]

Speak to @saundersbp
He baffled out his accordion I think with caravan insulation.....and has a post somewhere with before and after audio
Seem to remember it was successful
Hope that helps

 

[Monty [IIIII]]

Speak to @saundersbp
He baffled out his accordion I think with caravan insulation.....and has a post somewhere with before and after audio
Seem to remember it was successful
Hope that helps

I read the thread. Good info even though some of the links to sound were no longer functional. Thanks for the tip