jonny (good kind)22h ago

So since I got my finger blowed up, I can't really play piano, and I have been taking on psychic damage ever since.

However it seems like I might be able to play an accordion, since my blowed up finger is on my left hand and accordion seems like it has much less "ballistic" hits to the finger.

But I can't make heads or tails about what in the fuck kind of accordion to try: I play mostly moody emo Chopin sadgirl tunes, and I love piazzola, so I was reading about bandoneons, but it turns out that you can't actually get one (like literally it seems like they were only mass manufactured pre WWII and now only for like $10k custom made) and the key layout means you can like only play tango on them. And then since its a folk instrument there are like one million other kinds of accordion and I can't tell how much each is specialized for a specific kind of music.

Is there anyone on here I reach who plays #accordion and can help me out knowing what kinda button bag to play? I would be a beginner accordionist but I have been playing piano my whole life and am looking for a long term romance I mean replacement, so I don't need the like "there are 5 notes on this one and you can't go wrong" kind. I would love to be able to play sea shanties and folk punk tunes, but if its also possible to play some Chopin or Debussy arrangements on the thing that would be extremely emotionally valuable to me.

Show threadLina16h ago

@jonny

dunno much about accordions, so can't help there, and not trying to do the classic mastodon "here, consider a different thing" but also you're into weird music stuff and I think you'll like the ride at least, if you're not already familiar with this stuff...

so, if it's the 2D note array of the accordion bass keys that helps – and if you're not opposed to weird midi controllers – you might be interested in keyboards with isomorphic key layouts. I've got one of these guys and it's a fun time https://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49

"isomorphic" implies transpositionally-invariant chord shapes, which is of nice compared to piano layout with altogether too many shapes for the same chord. keys for that board aren't huge, so one hand can span multiple octaves. it's designed for the Wicki-Hayden layout, which repeats horizontally so that in WH-mode the board effectively has two halves that are mirrors of each other, each with 49 keys spanning 4 octaves + 1...
https://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=layout_49map

but there's also a mode that maps midi notes 1-98 (in a less-ideal layout than WH, but allowing for getting weird), so you can remap that mode to a wicki-hayden layout but with left half shited 4 octaves below the right half and have a full 8-octave keyboard.

the company that made that particular board has been defunct for years, but it looks like there's some being resold https://reverb.com/item/91238990-c-thru-axis-49-controller-midi-keyboard

there's also other isomorphic keyboard options, but not many and probably most are in the >$1000 range. and there's other key/note layouts aside from wicki-hayden but pmuch the only other key layouts available would be orthogonal layouts (like a guitar fret board) - Linnstrument is a cool controller that supports MIDI MPE, the Harpejji is an acoustic string instrument. isomorphic keyboards also have a long history going back at least to Heimholtz iirc, with old cool guys like the Janko keyboard (think there was a Japanese janko midi controller at one point even).

The AXiS-49 USB music interface

AXiS-49 USB MIDI music interface, MIDI keyboard, USB keyboard.

C-Thru-Music.com
Show threadLina

@jonny
Wicki-Hayden also works well for syntonic temperament stuff, which is pretty nifty if you're into the regular temperaments/microtonals... there's a couple digital synths at least that support dynamically morphing between tonalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_diatonic_tuning#Syntonic_temperament_and_timbre

also there's a weird rabbit hole there, which appear to have been scrubbed from the internet... in the "research" section below that one you'll see "Guido 2.0 seeks to achieve a 10x increase in the efficiency of music education" ... and if the 10x smells funny it's because the link goes to the website of Eric Weinstein... yes, of Theil Capital, IDW, and physics/math crackpot fame. apparently he got into tonal theory through his math crackpottery, and of course he was as much of a crackpot there as he is anywhere else. I'm in a microtonal music theory group and they make fun of him a good bit. I'm curious if he scrubbed the microtonal stuff from his site because he got laughed out of those spaces.

Regular diatonic tuning - Wikipedia

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