acordiansam said:
Sum times its just what you like. I have an old SS6 solola that I just love the keyboard. My honer vox 4 I can play just as well but I dont care for the keyboard. Still have played it for years. I would say my 3x is inbetween. I dont love it or hate it. It is nice to have a feel you like.
Its been a number of years that I went to an accordion presentation by Hohner and Beltuna, I think. I was playing an old 1960 Morino Artiste which I had been able to buy cheaply and get cleaned up (some bozo had used oil containing resins on the highly complex bass mechanics and everything was sticky) and tuned finally for an amount I could afford. The main adjustment and tuning job was done by a retired old accordion technician tuner in Klingenthal who did the stuff in his free time, did not work with an electronic tuner, and you sort of described/negotiated the kind of tremolo you wanted to have and he made illustrative sounds to give you an idea of what he understood. And if you did not like the resulting tremolo, he spent half an evening making it different, put the instrument aside a few days, then corrected.
At any rate, I was still annoyed afterwards by buzzing or unreliable bass response and refitted all the leather valves: they had shrunk over time and when they closed just
barely, they tended to cause response and/or sound problems. So lots of mucking around to get the thing to sound tolerable to my ears. At any rate, beggars cant be choosers and I had paid comparatively small amounts for the instrument itself as well as the cleanup/repair/tuning job.
So I finally decided to broaden my horizons and take a look at the state of the art, well-knowing that my money would not allow following up on any desires I might awaken. So I went to sort of a sales show of Hohner in some vicinity where also Beltuna happened to offer a few instruments.
What I had not actually expected was that I turned out seriously underwhelmed. Now one problem obviously was that I was playing CBA, and most of the accordions on show were piano accordions. But still, there was some Hohner Genius and some Beltuna accordions.
The Hohner Genius was reasonably easy to play with little noise and little key travel, but the keyboard felt very cheap. The Beltuna felt quite more sprightly and the keys felt nicely. Soundwise, however, both had me scratching my head. There was nothing even remotely comparing to the rather shallow 3-reed tremolo the old tuner had given my instrument. The bass/treble balance made it difficult to play anything using long bass notes while using a single reed in the treble:
most registrations had problems working well, whereas I was used to most registrations on my instrument being musically workable. Single-reed registrations in particular but also some multiple-reed combinations were
dead: when you changed the bellows pressure, the volume changed to some degree, but the tone quality did not unfurl and fold back into plain simultaneously with the volume changes: the tone quality was more or less rigid.
Took me a long time to figure out that buying the accordion that was brutally marked down because nobody wanted to buy something with as weird bass mechanics (and sticky to boot) and getting to an old retired tuner (may he rest in peace, I cannot avail myself of his services any more) without electronics and cent curves who went through some tuning three times faster by ear than the people with modern equipment took for a single iteration was, well, decidedly less compromising on the resulting quality than I had imagined it to be.
Now obviously, the whole Frankfurt trade fair should be a different kind of eye opener than a Hohner show with Beltuna side show had proven to me. For several years, however, it conflicted with my travelling plan, and in the mean time it conflicts with my pocket book.
Still I want to try out a larger range of instruments than I had the ability to at some point of time.
My experience probably reflects what you wrote above: Sum times its just what you like. Ive had a few instruments, and after all, I also bought a Maugein two-reed for show/chanson singing, and its pretty nice. But in the touted-as-magic class, Id like to try out a few more instruments, just to see whether Ill ever find something where Id say oh, Id swap my good one for this one without looking back.
