"never use the bellows to produce punch to your notes"

Well that's certainly does NOT apply to a piano Accordion, but then the reeds are different (except for those concertinas that use P/A reeds - where you WOULD use the bellows for the punch!).

Indeed - there is a P/A 'bellows shake' technique, produced entirely by the bellows.... and only rank beginners cannot do it, as it takes a fair bit of practice to get the hang of it.... and you have to build up the muscles and tendons to keep it up :-)

Further, I have stunned some experts would be knowalls who obviously have little real experience/training with the instrument by the ability to play a series of keyboard notes with some accented and thus louder than others... also this can produce interesting results on the bass side, depending on how well matched the bass reeds sets are... :-)

Real fast staccato is easier with the P/A bellows than trying to get the fingers working that fast, especially at my age... ;-) of course, the smaller the instrument, the less weight and inertia, and the easier the 'shake' and related techniques are...

As far as getting an 'anglo sound' from and 'English box', there are players around who have been doing this for years, and they are all better than me... :-) and I once heard a 'diatonic button box' player play so smoothly that if you closed your eyes, you thought it was a P/A....


QUOTE
If you compare with string instruments like guitar,banjo etc as you say down strokes are naturally stronger, if you compare with bowed string instruments like violin down strokes are stronger and analogous the *movement* by the arm(s) with a squeezebox means that pull resembles down stroke or down bow and would adapt to the strong musical beat that way. etc
UNQUOTE

Sorry, this may often be gibberish as far as a piano accordion is concerned - but then the internal construction is a little different... I can usually get stronger emphasis on the "pull" than the "push"... once again, this is the case with my smaller boxes, anyway... :-), oh, and by 'twisting' or pulling the bellows not straight out, but 'swivelling' in the vertical plane, you get a higher leverage, and thus more 'punch' on the pull than you can get on the 'push'... if some 'expert' tells you than you should not play that way, just smile, nod, say 'yes dear' and ignore them... :-) like the 'expert' who told me that it was 'wrong' to ever play a P/A with only one set of piano side reeds engaged at a time... just because all those buttons and switches are there, you don't HAVE to use them all at once :-P


I'm certainly not an 'expert' on the concertina, but my Duet (with concertina reeds) works pretty much exactly like my P/As in terms of most 'bellows expression'....