The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #57809 Message #912988
Posted By: Bernard
18-Mar-03 - 07:17 PM
Thread Name: Accordion Repair - please be kind
Subject: RE: Accordion Repair - please be kind
Leather valves are fine when they are new, but they harden and curl with age, causing those silly farting noises when you change bellows direction.
As they don't do anything other than stop unwanted air flow, they certainly don't 'alter the timbre' - that would be caused by something else changing during the process of removing and replacing the reedplates, typically not seating the plates properly on the wood. The wax is only there, again, to stop unwanted air flow, and the reed plays best when it is entirely in contact with the wood of the reed block. If there is wax between the wood and the reedplate, it dulls the sound.
The only change to the sound, perhaps, is the ability of the reed to sound more precisely as it would have when its leather valves were new...
My main instrument is a Swiss Hohner Musette IV 120 bass, which has an unusually mellow sound for such a big box. Interestingly, the inside is as well finished as the outside - all the woodwork is polished (yes, inside! Where you don't normally see it!), and I'm sure that it must help the air flow. Even though it's such a large instrument, it is very easy to play, and the reeds are very well regulated even after over thirty years of me playing it.
The best test of a secondhand instrument is to hold down a chord without moving the bellows, then gradually start to move the bellows and listen to see if all the reeds of the chord start to speak at the same time.
What causes reeds to speak differently is the amount of air gap at the tip - the opposite end to where it is fixed to the plate. The size of the gap differs according to the size of the reed and the note that it sounds, but if the gap is too small or too great, the reed won't speak at all, or will be very 'lazy'.
Giving the tip a very slight curl upwards helps to take some of the 'edge' off the note, too, making it a little more 'mellow'. This is one of the techniques used to voice harmonium reeds to give the different 'timbres' for the various stops.
Before this turns completely into a thesis, I'm going!
BTW, those soldering irons are also available from Electrovision for around 23 quid... I've just ordered a spare!
TTFN
B
Nature has given men one tongue and two ears,
that we may hear twice as much as we speak.
--Epictetus