Understand Bellows & Straps on Accordions

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Okay, just--then a couple more extra things about an accordion. Obviously, every accordion has a bellows. A bellows is basically accordion-shaped appropriately, wind chest that--if we open it up, it can actually expand quite a bit. When you're playing accordion, you're never really going to stretch it out this far but this is just to show you like how much you could stretch out the bellows. And that's about maximum stretch but I would never stretch it out that far. But what this does is it basically provides the wind pressure inside the instrument that gets forced through the reeds, okay? So every squeeze box has a bellows like this. And one thing we'll learn when we talk about maintenance that it's important that the bellows is somewhat airtight that it's not too leaky. And then, there are a couple other things on an accordion here, the shoulder straps, right? You actually kind of put one over each shoulder. It's sort of like wearing a backpack in reverse. Accordions often, will also have little closure straps like these. Sometimes they snap here. This one here snaps and will kinda keep the instrument closed when we kind of just start moving it around. So it kinda keeps the bellows in control. The other side will have one too. All right. And I'll just go ahead and you can see there's one there also. I have a little pick-up installed in this one. Sometimes an accordion will come with a pick-up or not. And then there are a couple other little features I'll show you and then we'll kinda talk about what's inside one of these."