A lot of it has to do with where we grew up with the accordion and what we played when we were younger.
playing 1000's of gigs partly as a teen with my own Rock band,
and mostly as the gunslinger for 100's of local semi-pro
bands who worked day jobs but had their contacts and
practiced together maybe with a Piano player for some steady
work, but needed a "Box Man" for weddings and such
as long as you knew your Fake Book #1 you could call sets
for any pick-up band of this type and no-one in the audience
ever knew you had all just met for the first time out in the
parking lot
I grew up on the Cordovox. We bought one around 1983 and I played hundreds of gigs with it in my late teens and twenties. With the Cordovox the accordion is the primary sound, with the famous Organ underlying the tone very prevalent. You could mute the right hand accordion sound but I never saw anybody do that. So to me it's always been primarily the accordion sounds with a tasteful layering of organ underneath.
the Cordovox i started with was the tube job, and it was reliable
rugged bad-ass amazing power that could compete with the Guitar.and
thats right, never muted the right hand reeds, just use the Organ
underlayer and swell in the reeds with the Bellows for emphasis
or feather your squeeze and kick the Gas (Volume) Pedal to the floor
when needed
One thing that never left me from the Cordovox days is that marvelous string bass. For the prevalent walking bass lines on 60% of the songs I play it's incredible.
yep.. for us when people wanna learn how to play Accordion bass
we usually give them a Mel Bay Bass book because we never play
left hand like an accordion player.. ever.. we play like a Bass player
because we had that fat fundamental everything can ride on top of
Bass sound and modern "motion" of the notes.. nothing even resembling
"oom-paa" because our left hand is part of the Rhythm section,
part of the hook, part of the foundation of the song..
an example would be Sinatra's Angel Eyes.. i sang an entire chorus
over just the Bass line before i ever touch a key with my right hand,
and then i just add chord hits, counterpoints, etc. on the right..
that big fat huge Bass enables the entire song/performance..
it was the first thing i had to figure out how to re-create with a
MIDI accordion, and i ended up blending a fretless bass at about half
volume an octave lower with a String bass on the mark, and they
evolved differently over time which added a subtle bit of motion
to the final sound.. one synth in my rack was dedicated to this
sound alone.
i tried all the Bass synths over the years.. the 160, the Peavey Bass,
that little Alesis, but none of them could beat my Cordovox Bass
or my imitation of it using a Sound Canvas
I personally don't consider Reedless and Acoustic different instruments. If somebody comes over and asks me to play them an accordion song I'll grab either. I have them both out of their cases and sitting next to each other. The vast majority of people that listen are more intrigued by the fact it's an accordion than what type it is. I don't think they'd even care if I told them.
it is up to us to choose and use what works best, and our obligation to
do it in a way that makes "sense" to the eye and ear of the beholder
so that they are comfortable and can enjoy it without straining their brain..
Ideally for me the new Korg would have incredible bellows control, fantastic accordion registers, arranger-like capability on the left hand side, and a really nice string bass. A couple organs to layer, maybe some strings, and that's it.
actually MY ideal digital would simply be
(now that the Bluetooth technology has matured)
to have any old Digital Accordion with an accompanying
real time full time wireless Volume Pedal that controls all
the treble and chord orchestral/organ voices but leaves the
accordion reed sounds completely alone so that the box
"squeezes" like any old acoustic/electric accordion would,
and therefore would act/play like a Cordovox, Elkavox, Duovox,
Farfisa Syntaccordion, etc.
the problem with Digital Accordion has always been
the Tokyo at Night disconnect and the somewhat unnatural way
they must be approached
unless you come at it not as an old-school accordion player,
but an accordionist who switched to Keys for decades and
only now is switching back because it can do what the other
keyboards can do (in contrast to doing what accordions do)
The price might seem high but it is in line with high-end acoustic instruments, and digital models from other makers. Besides, you buy a lot more than an accordion with that sum!
