He should have got a Roland!🤔

[matagamasi]

I might be a bit off topic, but the trumpet + accordion video reminded me of this 16-hole chromatic harmonica + accordion video:

Chromatic harmonica and accordion (Filip Jers)

I've never played a digital accordion or a digital harmonica, but I'm guessing they lack the vibrations you feel when you play a "real" accordion or harmonica, unless the speakers are in the instrument.

 

[Tom N]

I might be a bit off topic, but the trumpet + accordion video reminded me of this 16-hole chromatic harmonica + accordion video:

Chromatic harmonica and accordion (Filip Jers)

I've never played a digital accordion or a digital harmonica, but I'm guessing they lack the vibrations you feel when you play a "real" accordion or harmonica, unless the speakers are in the instrument.

This dude can play the harmonica!

 

[Xiane]

The Roland V-accordion can produce very nice sounds, some more believable (to be the real thing) than others. A lot of the sounds are sampled from real instruments and are likely the same as used in Roland keyboards and digital pianos. The Roland is a wonderful and very versatile instrument. It is not "a bad accordion". It simply "is not an accordion", and people who can accept that can be very happy with it.
For these people the only disappointment that still remains is the price.
I own a really good digital stage piano (Yamaha CP-5, a bit dated by now). When I bought it the cost was about 2.000 (euro). I believe it can play very good imitations of the sounds of other instruments, likely about as good as the Roland. The 2.000 price point is therefore my benchmark number for what a digital accordion should cost. (I do know it is more of a niche market, therefore perhaps demanding for a premium, but I cannot see why the price should be 2 to 3 times that of the digital piano.)

I wonder if the Roland like your digital piano suffers from being older and having a smaller selection of samples? When you see the DAW or digital composition suites of today, they'll have a huge number of samples for any sort of note, played in various ways on various instruments, in various environments. Is the Roland that way? I honestly don't know.

 

[Ffingers]

I think it is typical to call something a "digital piano" if it looks and sounds like a piano but call it a "digital keyboard" or just "keyboard" if one uses different sounds. A Jankó piano does not look like having a piano keyboard but is still called a "piano". One would not call it a "keyboard". Things like clavichords and harpsichords are obviously not called "keyboards" nor "pianos" but run under "keyboard instruments" to insinuate that they are acoustic instruments with a keyboard as control. That logic would make "keyboard" a term just describing the human interface, but if a keyboard does not include a sound generator, it is not called a keyboard but a controller.

With that kind of terminology jumble regarding piano keyboards, it's hard to derive a "correct" term for classifying a Roland.

First one has to understand the vagraries of the English language with its memes, euphemisms, metaphorical expressions, regional variations in syntax, grammar and pronunciations, the occasional inversion of meaning, and misappropriation of words and phrases by social groups et-bluddy-cetera
No student who has been taught English as a foreign language has any hope of understanding Australian colloquialisms, inverted meanings and cultural references used in daily conversation without some assistance from someone who recognises the peculiarities of the local usage.
Now, in the USA ...

 

[dak]

First one has to understand the vagraries of the English language with its memes, euphemisms, metaphorical expressions, regional variations in syntax, grammar and pronunciations, the occasional inversion of meaning, and misappropriation of words and phrases by social groups et-bluddy-cetera
No student who has been taught English as a foreign language has any hope of understanding Australian colloquialisms, inverted meanings and cultural references used in daily conversation without some assistance from someone who recognises the peculiarities of the local usage.
Now, in the USA ...

Certainly an interesting cultural and linguistic experiment to ship the Puritans to one continent and the criminals to another.

 

[Xiane]

Certainly an interesting cultural and linguistic experiment to ship the Puritans to one continent and the criminals to another.

But which is which?

 

[dak]

But which is which?

Well, who ended up with Chicago and Las Vegas?

 

[Xiane]

Well, who ended up with Chicago and Las Vegas?

Fortunately it wasn't JUST puritans. Lots of well, almost everybody.

 

[Ffingers]

Certainly an interesting cultural and linguistic experiment to ship the Puritans to one continent and the criminals to another.

...but, the criminals were being deported to North America until that option was no longer available due to them, the criminals, acting unlawfully against the British authorities and declaring themselves independent and revolting ( ...which some non American folks claim that they have continued to be so.)

 

[debra]

I wonder if the Roland like your digital piano suffers from being older and having a smaller selection of samples? When you see the DAW or digital composition suites of today, they'll have a huge number of samples for any sort of note, played in various ways on various instruments, in various environments. Is the Roland that way? I honestly don't know.

There may have been some "sampled" updates, but the fundamental technique of the V-accordion is the same as what Roland used in its first generations of digital pianos: sound modeling rather than sampling. The accordion sound of the V-accordion can be altered in many ways by means of an editor that lets you set many parameters that are part of the modeling software. The reality of life is that no matter how you model the physics of the accordion, the modeled sound still doesn't quite sound like the real thing. My first digital piano was a (high-end) Roland with sound modeling and while it sounded OK-ish, it wasn't real. With the pianos Roland moved to sampled piano sound (many samples for each note to have different attack, sustain, decay, etc., at different volumes). I believe that generation used samples from the nice Fazioli grand pianos. (My sister had one of these Rolands, with really nice real piano sound.) A common technique was (and I believe still is) to sample just a selection of notes (like one or two from each octave) and transpose these samples to cover the other notes.
If Roland had used samples of real accordions it would likely have had a much more realistic accordion sound but would not have been able to offer as many editing possibilities. There are midi accordions and other digital accordions I heard (for instance at the Frankfurter Musikmesse when that still existed) that have a better accordion sound, but sadly not the best bellows control.
I don't know how the "Dallapè" sounds were created, using modeling or sampling. I fear the development of the V-accordion has stopped. Given the evolution I have seen in digital pianos (my sister was a piano teacher and enthusiastic about digital pianos) the V-accordion is currently at a similar stage of development as the digital pianos were 25 years ago. The simulations of other instruments are of course new (because they are essentially the same in the V-accordion and the digital pianos) but the simulation of accordion sound is lagging 25 years behind that of piano sound in digital pianos. Sure the small market for digital accordions may be a large factor here, but with digital pianos it was mostly the competition that drove the technology forward. That competition is lacking in digital accordions.
Still, it is very nice what we have today, and in the entertainment business the V-accordion is doing well. But for serious, classical, work the V-accordion really is not yet ready "for the stage".

 

[dak]

Still, it is very nice what we have today, and in the entertainment business the V-accordion is doing well. But for serious, classical, work the V-accordion really is not yet ready "for the stage".

Well, some would argue that neither is the acoustic accordion. Getting it across that threshold is not an easy task, so it isn't surprising that the setback from going electronic pushes it back again. I have to say, however, that the bass modes (not necessarily with accordion sound) are more than competitive with the usual internal microphoning of bass accordions in larger accordion ensembles. Even in smaller ensembles, some music styles warrant more bass presence than an acoustic instrument without amplification can easily deliver.

 

[debra]

Well, some would argue that neither is the acoustic accordion. Getting it across that threshold is not an easy task, so it isn't surprising that the setback from going electronic pushes it back again. I have to say, however, that the bass modes (not necessarily with accordion sound) are more than competitive with the usual internal microphoning of bass accordions in larger accordion ensembles. Even in smaller ensembles, some music styles warrant more bass presence than an acoustic instrument without amplification can easily deliver.

A bass accordion without amplification is hopeless in a larger ensemble (and even in smaller ensembles). Many accordion orchestras unfortunately use very bad amplification, with lots of bass frequencies but all overtones completely cut out. The resulting bass accordion sound is nowhere near what a bass accordion sounds like without amplification. My bass accordion has good internal microphones (from Caverna) and when it is combined with the Bose L1 (model 2) it can sound very loud without sounding differently from what the accordion sounds acoustically without amplification. This just goes to show that the actual amplification used for accordions and bass accordion is as important as the amplification used for a digital accordion.

 

[murathan]

About "digital" accordions. When it first presented to the market, I didnt think this kind of a thing would sell well. But its sold really well with that over price. Even a respectable Bugari (Bugari EVO) wanted to get a piece from the cake. It seems everybody "bought" the trick. That makes to come to my mind is a lot of things changed with the digital revolution, especially since 4-5 years some of us are not fully aware yet.

 

[dak]

The Roland V-accordion can produce very nice sounds, some more believable (to be the real thing) than others. A lot of the sounds are sampled from real instruments and are likely the same as used in Roland keyboards and digital pianos. The Roland is a wonderful and very versatile instrument. It is not "a bad accordion". It simply "is not an accordion", and people who can accept that can be very happy with it.

I just got reminded (my mind has a way of its own) of this kind of argument as the lady of the house threw a package of — let me check — "veganer Schinkenspicker", a veganized sausage speciality, on the table for the sake of eating it. Now if you are starting with vegan ingredients and unusual processing and spicing methods, you have a wide range of possibilities of what taste you achieve. And a lot of money gets invested in making it taste as much as possible as some spiced meat speciality.

Why? If you have full liberty, why would you try to make vegetables taste like some particular meat specialty? If you have full liberty, why would you try to make a digital instrument sound like some particular acoustic instrument specialty?

The answer is surprisingly similar: the audience. It has preconceptions about the spices and looks, and that pastes over bits of missing information in order to complement expectations.

So what do you call it? Since it is designed to evoke the sensations around a Schinkenspicker, is "veganer Schinkenspicker" a misnomer? It doesn't hide its origin in the small print. In a similar vein, "digital accordion" doesn't try to hide its nature, nor its pedigree.

Of course, the purists will be perfectly right in saying "this isn't a Schinkenspicker at all without containing pork" or "this isn't an accordion at all without containing reeds" and they will be right in the same manner as Magritte's painting "The Treachery of Images" that says (perfectly correctly) about itself "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". Because it is a painting. And in contrast to vegan pork, you cannot even smoke it.

 

[debra]

I just got reminded (my mind has a way of its own) of this kind of argument as the lady of the house threw a package of — let me check — "veganer Schinkenspicker", a veganized sausage speciality, on the table for the sake of eating it. Now if you are starting with vegan ingredients and unusual processing and spicing methods, you have a wide range of possibilities of what taste you achieve. And a lot of money gets invested in making it taste as much as possible as some spiced meat speciality.
...

There are many legal battles about what food can or cannot be called when it is not what the name originally stands for.
We recently had a battle here: there is a product called "Botergoud" (meaning "butter gold") which has butter and olive oil if I'm not mistaken. Then a different company came out with a product called "Betergoud" (meaning "better gold") which was completely non-dairy. The legal battle was whether or not the name was misleading customers into believing there was butter in the "Betergoud". There are many similar battles: if you make something that isn't really a certain product you cannot only not name it exactly like thr product, but you cannot even name it something that is misleadingly similar.
So far there has (afaik) been no action to forbid names like "digital accordion", "V-accordion" because they are not really an accordion, or to forbid a name like "digital piano" for an instrument that is not really a piano. Clearly musical instrument makers are not as critical about naming as the food industry is about naming.

 

[Zvon]

Things like clavichords and harpsichords are obviously not called "keyboards" nor "pianos" but run under "keyboard instruments" to insinuate that they are acoustic instruments with a keyboard as control. That logic would make "keyboard" a term just describing the human interface, but if a keyboard does not include a sound generator, it is not called a keyboard but a controller.

Keyboard is indeed the term describing the human interface and not the type of sound or how it's generated. For instance, in the acoustic world, pipe organs and acoustic pianos are both played with keyboards. But organs (and accordions) are aerophones, pianos (and clavichords and harpsichords) are chordophones. Of course aerophones and chordophones hold many sub-categories!

An electronic keyboard without a sound generator is a keyboard controller, not just a controller because there are other types of devices to control electronic sounds, like drum pads and various control surfaces.

I've attached the photo of the box of my Roland A-49 keyboard controller, the second photo shows my Quneo drum pad controller and the Korg Nanokontrol 2 mixer controller that Korg calls simply a USB control surface. There are also controllers that combine multiple ways of inputting the performance data, like the Arturia Minilab (3rd photo) that is defined by Arturia as "universal music-making controller".

 

[murathan]

FR 1055X "Natural" series... Now with vibration effect and no mute

 

[Dingo40]

My head is spinning!