I need a major change. I’m getting tired of playing these same old tunes and the thought of adding 2 more hours of similar just won’t do. I need to do some major change, improv, originals, sing, something! I talked about this before and it hasn’t worked out. Got some wood chopping to do this morning, just put Arrigo Tomasi on “play all.” Way over my head, and I’ll not do it justice like Piotr but maybe a goal…..some of them seem approachable. This accordion playing thing is hard!
You know why I say I haven't gotten 10 minutes of repertoire? Because I keep reworking on the same old things. The more I play them, they worse they get. Or rather: the more I play them, they worse they
were.
I'll do a lot of presuming in the following, it may or may not apply. Take a good piece from your repertoire, preferably a slower one for the start. Put the melody hand away. Play just the left hand. This is your bass group. You have a picked acoustic bass. You have a rhythm guitar or a banjo (depends on your registers). Possibly a bass drum and snare. Now play the first 8 bars in your rhythm group. Your right hand (lead player) is tied up at the bar and you are bridging and trying to keep the tension. You are putting out a steady background that isn't smeared but sculpted. One can listen to it for hours and discover new details. The bass and guitar are entirely different instruments (if you have some electronic/MIDI setup, you can let the electronics do the job via the sound patches, but the art of the deal is to do it with the phrasing, and then it works on an accordion unplugged).
Don't bother with the right hand. You first want to get to the state where you can record the left hand alone, and when playing the tape to someone, have them say "oh wow, that is good". And you need to be very careful when eventually adding the right hand not to lose everything that you got to be good with the left hand. Try to listen in to the left hand for details while playing.
Essentially, it is the first challenge of an accordion player in reverse: as a beginner you struggle not to ruin what your right hand is doing when adding the left hand. But it is far too easy to ignore the problem in the other direction. And the "red hot button" advice only gets you so far since bass and chord buttons have different temperatures and the buttons have different air needs and different response and you use them to model different functional groups in a combo.
Once your play is at the level where people will stand and listen for two hours on end, you indeed need a larger repertoire. Can you put enough variety in your current repertoire that they do stick around? Find unique bass phrases or registrations or embellishments for some of them that would make them actually recognize when things repeat after a few hours? Get to the point where people recognize pieces by their
sound rather than by their
melody?
It's a beef I have with being in an accordion ensemble: it makes it too easy to forget how many instruments an accordion can and should be at the same time.
When I was taking lessons, a typical reaction of my teacher when I brought in something that I thought I had down pretty well was "you can do this
much better", sometimes without even bothering to get more explicit. Not that she was wrong. When you work out some wrinkles, you don't really focus on how much of a rough sketch the rest may look.
