Electronic Sonic Experiments with Accordions

[Zvon]

As I mentioned previously, this year I became very interested in the accordion as a source of sonic textures and great sounds for my sound design. I will post in this thread various examples. More specifically, examples of manipulating accordion samples that have been imported in a synth or sampler.

Here’s a first one: a sample from a vintage Excelsior accordion in Humbletune Tardigrain granular synth to create a deep drone sound. This sampler is available on the iPad and is mainly played and controlled via the touchscreen.

The stripes (keys) at the bottom of the screen are the playing surface. The lighter grey ones are those that are held. The synth responds to the movement of the fingers on each key. This movement is shown by the black thin crosshairs.



https://youtube.com/shorts/BSj7BfyaZwA

 

[Tom]

Way out of my league but very interesting what you can do with these sounds. Thanks!

 

[Zvon]

Way out of my league but very interesting what you can do with these sounds. Thanks!

Thanks for your comment, glad you found it interesting!
In this example, the result is still close to the original sound. I will post wilder transformations in upcoming posts.

 

[Zvon]

Spectral Audio Editing - An Example

The spectral view showing the frequencies is the orange background and the standard amplitude view is the blue foreground. Lower frequencies are at bottom of the window and zones where specific frequencies have more amplitude are in brighter orange.

With traditional audio editing, when a time region is selected, any edit is applied to all frequencies. With spectral editing, specific frequencies can be edited, for instance cut or boosted, without affecting the other ones that are at the same time. But of course the overall level of the processed region will change accordingly.

Here, I am using iZotope RX Advanced audio editor but there are others too that have spectral editing capabilities.

The sample is an Excelsior accordion from my Patreon Reward sample pack #38.