Poor man's cassotto.....What a friend we have in Gsus

[craigd]

I think you got this the wrong way round. High quality reeds have very narrow gaps between reed and reed plate (when "hand-made reeds" were still hand-made, they were filed/adjusted until they just stopped buzzing). That gives them light response and good dynamics. It also gives them lots of harsh (if you want to, brilliant) overtones. You can use a cassotto and other constructs to carve a rather individual sound from what is a rather wide frequency spectrum. That kind of common sound envelope helps reeds of different pitches to be formed into a blended sound.

"Lesser" reeds, apart from worse response and dynamics, have less of an overtone spectrum for the accordion maker to work with.

The sought after Gola models in the heydays of Gola himself are fitted with an internal adjustable "jalousie". Which would work like an adjustable "steenkin' felt strip inside the grill." Masking tape tends to, well, "mask" a lack of registers or other means of maintaining balance between left and right side for different accompaniment styles. Several older models (I think both from Scandalli and in Morinos) indeed have a separate control just for disabling the highest reed in the bass for all registers, saving you the masking tape.

I actually often just use a single bass reed and a single chord reed, a registration that is not really typical for "standard" accordion music.

No, Ventura got it exactly right. I have owned at least two non-cassotto accordions with hand-made reeds, a Guerrini w Binci and a Titano w Baldelli. They sounded terrific and neither had a sordino. I have owned a number of accordions w cheaper reeds and man, I tried everything from felt to my kids cloth diaper to mellow their sound.

 

[John Doe]

has the highest reed bank (octave) included in all bass registers. I have used masking tape (under the reed block) to block that reed bank permanently. The bass sounds less sharp and high now and for my taste that's a lot better.

Same situation on a "Super Salas". The tape surely cut out the vaguely irritating high reeds (as implemented in that specific accordion- clearly not all high reed LH banks blend as poorly). One mans "bright accents" is another man's "fingernails on a chalkboard".

I removed the tape and instead placed a strip of felt under the high reed block on top of the existing toneholes and foundation chamois (had to adjust the hold down clearances a bit to avoid it being too tight). The big worries were: First, hindering the air flow would cause the reeds to run flat. The high reeds use little enough air in the first place that any reduction was not significant enough to affect pitch. Second, air would leak through the felt under the block (clearly only when the pallets for a given tonehole were open) to either affect bellows feel or somehow cause adjacent reeds in the block to try to sound. Neither was an issue in practice. The felt squished down by the block probably allows some air through sideways under the edges but it seems to be a negligible with no detectable effects in practice. On the LH side a lot of air goes through those large reeds when a note is played- any leakage is chump change.

The idea is that the felt layer, specifically in the path of the sound from the high pitch reeds to egress (and only affecting those specific reeds) from the LH side would dampen some of the brightness while still allowing a less strident contribution to the tonal pallette.

It, in this case, seems to have worked well with no noxious side effects.


PS As an aside, I would not be willing to try this on any of the other blocks, LH or surely, RH.