Learn the Exterior Conditions of Accordions

Video Transcript

All right, so when you're looking for accordions, certainly there are accordion manufacturers, several that are still active today. And, you can spend thousands of dollars on a new instrument. If you're just getting into it, you're probably going to be looking for a used instrument, and there's all kinds of places you can find them: garage sales, pawn shops, Craig's list, E-bay, those kinds of places. But, accordions have a lot of moving parts in them. They have a lot of reeds. There are a lot of components to them, so you want to careful and not just buy any old accordion that you find. And so, I'm going to walk you through just some of few the steps into how to sort of choose an accordion that's in good enough shape where it might be worth purchasing. I mean, when I'm looking at a used accordion, the first thing you can do is just kind of look around the outside and just see that there's no like visible damage, pieces falling off. I mean, a lot of accordions have, actually these two already have some damage. Sometimes the veneer that's on keys will come off, so this one here, it might be hard to see, but this is actually already lost a piece of the veneer. It's not a big deal. It's kind of a decorative thing, but this one, some of the veneer is starting to chip. You can see on this one behind, I don't know if you can see that, but this one key right here is starting to fall off. But, I mean, it's no big deal. I've had these two instruments for a while, but if you're going to buy something for yourself new for the first time, you might want to make sure that everything is kind of in tact. You're going to want to look at the shoulder straps. They're usually made of leather. Often times they get a lot of wear right here. If they look like they've had a lot of wear, they've been weakened, that doesn't mean you shouldn't get the instrument, but it means you're probably going to want to have to think about getting replacement straps. You're certainly going to want to open the bellows, open and close the bellows. Do it obviously with the bellows, actually this has got some keys out, OK. You want to do it with the air release down, and just kind of see if the bellows move sort of smoothly. You can play it with a key, too. See if they move sort of smoothly, but it seems sort of airtight. One way you can check for whether it's airtight is to just very, very gently move the bellows without the air release screw and see how easily it moves or doesn't move. So, you want the bellows sort of reasonably airtight. And so, those are a few things to think about, and I'll tell you about some of the other ones, next.

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