LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Accordion: Reeds
built 656 days ago
The accordion has a very rich, reedy and organ-like sound. The accordion has the ability to play single or multiple notes on the keyboard (right side) as well as chords on the left side. The tone quality of the melody notes can be altered by changing between the combinations of reeds (treble shifts) as discussed above. A universal system of labels has been given to these treble shifts for the composer to designate specific sounds.
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The accordion is a very important musical instrument. In ASCII art, it is usually represented {:|||:}, although this looks absolutely nothing like a real accordion. An accordion is a reed instrument with a keyboard of some type, and a big bag containing air that goes through the reeds when you squeeze or stretch it. It is ubercool.
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When the accordion goes out of tune, there are a number of causes, all of which may very likely necessitate complete cleaning of all the reeds and application of new wax. If only a few notes are out of tune, if it is relatively new, it just might be possible to fix those few reeds individually without a complete reed overhaul, but the best solution is often a complete reed renovation.
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Featured in the folk music of many countries, the accordion is a hand-held instrument that first became popular in early 19th-century Austria and Germany. The accordion is classified as a free-reed wind instrument, and as such, it produces sound when air from the bellows flows over the reeds contained within the casing.
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The accordion's basic form was invented in Berlin in 1822 by Friedrich Buschmann. The accordion is one of several European inventions of the early 19th century that used free reeds driven by a bellows; notable among them were:
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The keyboard on the right side of the accordion typically contains 41 keys but the smaller models can contain as few as 25. The full "concert accordion" will typically have four sets of reeds called treble shifts, one set tuned in unison, a second set tuned one octave higher, a third tuned one octave lower, and the fourth set, the tremulant, tuned slightly higher than unison.
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