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It is easy to dismiss or look down on the accordion as just a folk type of instrument. Perhaps not to be taken as seriously as an instrument such as a piano or violin, or even a guitar.

So it is a real inspiration to find an accordionist playing classical music with accomplishment, flair and style.

Just watch this video from AccCam on YouTube and prepare to be stunned!  He makes it all look so easy and relaxed – his fingers know just what they are doing and the sound is fantastic!

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It can be really inspiring to listen to different styles of music played by professional accordion players. So whether you are beginning to learn how to play accordion, or have already mastered the basic techniques and are ready to experiment with different styles, make it a habit to regularly seek out accordion music to listen to.

You could, of course, go to a music shop or an online store such as Amazon, and buy up a huge collection of CDs, but for most of us this is impractical and probably far too expensive.

Instead go hunting online!  Search YouTube and be entertained by some of the many videos on there. Look for other accordion sites that have samples of music.  Or listen to Accordion Radio, which is an online radio station that plays accordion music all day and night.

When you have listened to some of these free sources of accordion playing, you might decide on a style or accordionist that you particularly like. Then you will be better informed and can buy just one or two CD’s that you know you will enjoy and be inspired by.

To get you started, here is a link to Accordion Radio.

Happy Listening!

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Learning to read accordion sheet music is a really useful skill to master when you are learning how to play accordion.

Why? Because in a few lines of written music you get instructions that would otherwise take pages of written instructions. This is true for many other things – think of the difference between reading a whole list of instructions for driving from one town to another. Now compare that with reading a map and SEEING the route.

For most people, diagrams and pictures are instantly recognisable and easier to digest than reams of long winded written explanations.

So start learning how to read music and give yourself a huge advantage.

Accordion sheet music uses exactly the same lines and symbols as music written for piano, keyboard or any other instrument.

The musical notes are symbolised by marks made on a series of horizontal lines.

There are two clefs.

1. The treble clef for the treble notes which are the higher notes and usually the melody lines. These are played with the right hand on the keyboard.
2. The bass clef for bass notes and chords of the accompaniment. These are played with the left hand on the buttons.

The symbols for each note are placed in positions on or between the lines. Each line and each space between lines on a clef corresponds to a specific note.  Note symbols  have variations in their form that signify the length of time they should be played.

For accordion players, there are specific symbols that refer to bellows movement, and many pieces of accordion music have chord names written in, as well as the music notation for notes and chords.

For more detailed explanation of how to read musical notation, you can look it up on Google or find an inexpensive book. Many accordion tutor books devote their first few chapters to basic skills, and include information with diagrams and clear steps that show you how to read music.  The advantage to buying an acordion tutor book is that it takes you through the stages of learning musical notatation in the context of playing specific exercises and simple tunes on your accordion.

This makes a lot of sense, as you are learning from the accordion sheet music while playing your instrument – the best way!

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It’s a good idea to start performing in front of other people as soon as you feel confident playing a few simple tunes on your accordion.

Why? Because if you start performing to others while you are still learning how to play accordion, you are almost sure to make mistakes. This might sound bad, but no – it’s a good thing! If you can get used to making mistakes in public (friends and family to start with) you know that you can survive the experience. Knowing this, you will be less likely to suffer from performance anxiety in future performance situations. And more likely to enjoy playing in public.

So to get you started, here is a 10 step plan for getting through your first performance.

1. Make a commitment to yourself that you will play a couple of very simple tunes to someone else as soon as you have mastered them. The earlier the better.

2. Pick a friend or family member for your first audience. Someone you know who will listen, appreciate what you have achieved, and offer constructive feedback to help you develop further. Tell them that you have been learning how to play accordion and that you’d like to play them some of your tunes.

3. Practise what you are going to perform over and over again. If you really know your pieces well, you will hardly have to think when you play – your fingers will remember where to go. You can then relax with part of your mind free to introduce your pieces to your audience – and maybe even smile while you are performing!

4. Before you perform, do a mental visualisation of your performance. Find a quiet place, sit or lie with your eyes closed, and run through the whole performance in your mind. Try to imagine it vividly, with colours, sounds, the feel of your instument and the wonderful sound of applause as you finish playing. In your visualisation, have your self play your pieces perfectly every time.

5. When the time for your little concert comes, make sure you have everything set up ready. Music, music stand, accordion all polished and straps adjusted correctly.

6. Take some deep breaths, tell your audience what you are going to play – be confident, no stuttering and spluttering about how you are learning. Just tell them you are going to play “….” by “…”  and smile confidently – even if your knees are knocking together and you feel ready to faint from nervousness. Fake it!

7. Take your time.  Don’t rush through your playing. Make sure you are comfortable, that your instrument is positioned correctly. Then, when you are ready, play through your first piece.

8. If you make a mistake – don’t stop – keep on playing. It is entirely possible that your audience won’t notice a small mistake of a note or chord. But they will definitely notice if you cringe and apologise or get annoyed with yourself. One of the tricks of performing is to KEEP GOING no matter what. If you have practised your tunes so that you know them really well, you will find a place where you can continue correctly – and get back into the tune smoothly.

Of course, if you really make a total hash of a piece, it might be a good idea to stop. Tell your audience you are going to do a retake, take a deep breath, and start again.

9. Smile – whatever happens!

10 When you have finished, smile some more,  take a bow – and be proud of yourself. You deserve to be. Not only have you learned how to play accordion, you have also learned how to perform in public and have begun to shrink the performance anxiety monster!

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If you want to become proficient in any skill, you have to practise. Want to learn how to speak another language? Practise it. Want to run a marathon? Practice it. Want to learn how to play accordion? Practise it. Yes – I know that this can sometimes be boring, but if you want to succeed, it’s important to do it! I don’t know of anyone who can just pick up an instrument for the first time and play it beautifully without having first spent time and effort practising.

Try thinking forward to what you want to achieve. Imagine yourself being able to play brilliantly and how you will feel then. If you really want to feel good about yourself and bask in that lovely warm feeling of accomplishment, then you will need to practise on a regular basis.

A good plan is to play your accordion for a short amount of time every day. Even when you don’t feel like it. Why? Because it is by regularly doing small amounts that you build up your muscles – physical, musical and mental. It soon becomes a habit, and when you develop that habit, you also develop all the other skills that make up a proficient performer.

A Useful Practice Routine

Begin with some basic warm up exercises, for instance a few scales and chord patterns.

Then play a few tunes that you know. Perfect them. Play them over and over and get the fingers right, get the bellows movements right, get the chords right. This is important if you want to learn how to play accordion well.

Move on to a tune or exercise that you have tried before but you don’t know well. Do the same thing – play it over and over again, striving to get better each time.

Next, move on to something new and spend enough time on it to learn the basic melody and the chords. Practise it a few times and begin to see it develop.

Finally end up with one or two tunes that you feel are your best. Really enjoy the whole experience, then put your accordion away and tell yourself how wonderful you are!

I always think it’s good to end a session with a really good feeling about yourself and your playing. This will help to encourage the mindset that you do know how to play accordion and that you are improving.  So when you end your practice session with a few tunes you are good at, you are likely to feel good and want to come back for more.

That’s one of the secrets – set things up so that you always want to come back for more. Then practising becomes something that you look forward to, rather than a chore.

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It is possible to teach yourself how to play accordion using books, DVDs, online resources and so on. But there is much to be said for having a teacher who will structure your learning and provide a regular source of demonstration and encouragement.

An accordion teacher will show you the correct i.e. the best, way to do things, and will correct any mistakes you make that you didn’t even realise were mistakes!

I discovered this when I started to have some accordion lessons over three years after I had started learning on my own. I had managed to teach myself how to play my accordion well enough to accompany singing and play in a school folk band. I thought I sounded fine and other people said I sounded good, but I decided that it would be useful to get some help and tips to improve my playing. I wanted to progress!

In my first few accordion lessons, the teacher spent a large amount of time showing me how to use the bellows correctly. This was something that wasn’t covered in any of the books I had. And it made a huge difference to how I played when I was taught the correct way to “squeeze”!  You might think that it’s just a matter of pulling and pushing the bellows, and to be honest -  so did I! But I soon learned that it made a huge difference when I learned the best places to change from a pull to a push, and how to vary the volume by altering the pressure when I squeezed the bellows.

Another thing that my teacher taught me was how to press the buttons. Well I thought I was pressing them perfectly well. After all, a press is a press isn’t it?

But no – there are subtle and not so subtle differences in how you can press the buttons. And the difference in the effects you get from pressing buttons in a precise way, rather than sloppily, can make a tune sound amazingly better.

A good teacher will guide you through exercises that improve your playing; will encourage you; will demonstrate techniques. A good teacher will give you someone to be accountable to and will know if you do not practise!

I do think that the resources available to teach yourself how to play accordion are much better and more thorough than they were when I started learning. So yes – get a book, buy a DVD or online course and get cracking with teaching yourself.

But remember the advantages of having a personal teacher – and consider investing in some accordion lessons as soon as you can. It will be well worth it!

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Before you start learning chords on an accordion it is useful to know a few basic facts about chords.

Chords are made up of groups of notes that are played at the same time.  On a piano, a chord has to be played using different fingers to play the notes.

So a chord of C major would use the thumb and two fingers to play the notes C  E and G at the same time. The chord of G major is played by pressing the notes G B and D

Because a piano accordion has a keyboard similar to the piano keyboard, you can play chords just the same way with your right hand.

But there is another way!

The left hand side of the piano accordion has a series of buttons that play a variety of chords and bass notes. This means that you can play a melody of notes on the keyboard with your right hand, and the accompanying chords using the buttons with your left hand.

Learning How to Play Accordion Buttons and Chords

If you want to play the chord of C on an accordion, you press the button for the C chord. If you want to play a G major chord, you press the G major button. It’s just a matter of learning where these buttons are and how to find them without looking.

So as a prelude to learning chords on your accordion, lets begin with some bass notes. Find the button for the note C with the third finger of your left hand. Then use your index finger and 4th (ring) finger to find the buttons on each side of the C. These are the bass notes G and F

Notice that all the buttons in the same diagonal row are related to the Bass note.

Practise playing the single bass notes of C F and G  in different orders until you are sure you can find them easily.

Next we’ll move on to learning chords of C F and G major.

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One of the challenging things about learning how to play accordion is that you can’t actually see the keyboard or bass buttons while you are playing.

So when you are trying to learn how to play keyboard, you should start off as you need to go on – and DON’T try to look at it while you are playing.

When you play a piano, you can glance at the keyboard to make sure you have your fingers in the right place, but you can’t do that with an accordion – you have to do it all by feeling your way around. If you do try to look at what you’re doing, it just doesn’t work and you’re more likely to get muddled with the side you’re not trying to look at.

So it’s important to get used to learning how to play keyboard by touch and touch alone – right from the beginning!

Pick up your accordion and slide your arms through the shoulder straps. Lift the accordion into place and get it secure and comfortable. Now slide your left hand through the strap that lies below the bass button board and you should find that you can curl your hand up and over the bass buttons. Your right hand is free and can rest above the treble piano keyboard.

Somewhere near the hand strap on the left hand side, there should be a solitary button. Press this down and gently pull the accordion with your left arm. You should hear a hiss as air goes into the accordion and the bellows fall open. It is really important that you use this button to open and close the bellows when you want to move them without making any sound from the keyboards.

Now take your finger off the air button and instead start pressing on the piano keys while gently pushing and pulling the bellows with your left hand. Try a range of notes. Push harder then more gently and notice the difference in the sound. If you already know a little piano or keyboard, try playing a scale of C The scale of C starts on middle C, then moves one white key at a time until you get to the next C. The sound goes higher, but on the accordion the position of the keys goes downwards.

On this diagram, the numbers refer to the fingers you should use to play each note. 1 is the thumb, 2 the index finger and so on. Practise playing up and down this scale and get your fingers used to moving up and down the keyboard smoothly and confidently.

Once you have learned how to play keyboard, you can start learning about how to play chords. More about that next time.

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My favourite and oldest accordion

Obviously the first thing you need to do if you want to learn how to play accordion is to find an accordion to play.

But how do you go about it?

You could go out and buy a lovely shiny new 120 bass accordion from a music shop, but it probably makes more sense to start off with a smaller instrument. You can then look for a full sized accordion when you have mastered some chords and tunes, and are sure that you want to continue playing.

It also makes sense to start with a used accordion or one you can borrow. That way, if you find that it doesn’t suit you, you haven’t wasted money on something that will sit around in your spare room gathering dust. On the other hand, if you do find that you really love playing accordion, you will have some experience and will know just what you are looking for when it comes to shopping for a new or better instrument.

When I first started learning how to play accordion, I borrowed a little old  ”squeezebox” from a friend. It had just 12 buttons on the left hand side, so I didn’t have to remember much in the beginning. It was also very light and easy to control.

Once I had mastered the chords and a few easy tunes on this little accordion, my friend lent me another larger one with 24 bass buttons so that I could progress to more interesting tunes. It was enough to get me started, and I could accompany some songs as well as join in with a small school folk band.

So keep an eye out for second hand instruments. Many music shops have a range of used instruments for sale, or will be able to advise you about the best places to find them in your area. Look through classified ads in your local paper, check out ebay and other online auctions and sources to find an accordion for sale. You might even find that a friend or relative has an accordion stashed away in their attic.

When you do find an accordion you like, make sure that it is in good condition. It’s really frustrating when you start learning how to play accordion if the instrument makes wheezy noises, or the notes don’t play properly. The keys and bass buttons should all play freely with no sticking. The accordion bellows should be intact with no tears or air leaks. To test this out, press the air release button and pull out the bellows. You should hear a hiss and the instrument should pull out easily. Then take your finger off the air release button and try pushing the bellows shut. If the bellows are good, there should be firm resistance and no leak of air.

It is also important that the accordion strap is in good condion, as well as any other securing straps for the bellows.

It may take a while to find an accordion that you feel is the right one for you, so while you are waiting it may be a good idea to start learning a bit about keyboards and notes. Then, once you have found your first instrument you will be ready to begin learning some chords and simple tunes.

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