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Hi everybody I just went to a 3 day Accordion Festivle Held in Harrisburg Pa(it changes every year)It reminded me of the tuba fest in DC,, there was an elephent room... with Venders of the Accordion only trouble is there were only two there!! and one was the roland co. that only sells digitles..Great novelties but go for very cheap price even though it has 888 sounds (Experts say 50's and 60's accordions were and still are the best!!)It's very sad we are dieing as a group... At one time in the 50's the accordion was the second most populer instrument in the USA(violin most populer) I started playing when I was six I still remember dragging that big accordion off the bus and hauling it to the music lesson (the case had wheels) There were 50 students waiting for the instructor to play... I remember I had nickers on and the accordion pinched my legs everytime I squeezed the ole box too hard just one of maney accordion groups around the Ohio area where I was raised......Like I said now only two venders showed up and almost everyone was old!!Great music went on from polkas to modern jazz interpritation and beleive it or not Rock and roll and bach haha and work shops there were some kids but the majority was my age or older It's soooo sad to see this beautiful and popular instrument die off so fast..... I have to say the best part of the night was when all the accordionist got together at the Bar and played all the old songs that us old fogies liked But again sad not a one of them was under 55 I just hope that this great instrument(and they are beautiful)doesn't go the way of the dinosaur

The biggest problem with accordions is that they just die naturally. A few years ago I started getting requests for accordion repairs from some of the music stores I work with. In this tri-state area of about 300,000... there was one old fellow who still did accordion repairs and he died a few years ago. So... I decided to 'dig' around for information and bought a couple of 'clunkers' to fool around with.

Boy! ... you talk about 'Old World' technology! Once you take on apart and see that about the only thing keep them together is beeswax and shellac, it's easy to understand why they are a dime-a-dozen on the auction sites. Twenty years is about the life of these things before they need to be completely overhauled. NOT playing the instrument contributes much to the death of one if it's not stored properly. Leaving one in a hot car will spell instant death. A just a bit over 100 degrees, the beeswax/rosin mix softens and all of the reed plates fall off the manifolds. Leaving one in a damp area even for a short time will also mean death. Even stored in good conditions, and played regularly, the wax mix dries out and hardens to the point where the reed plates become detached and either fall out or leak. The reeds are normally steel and mounted in aluminum plates. Just a slight bit of rust or dirt will cause a reed to not sound. Since outside air is constantly draw into the accordion and expelled, even playing the accordion in high humidity conditions will kill it.

No... don't send me your accordions for repair. I get enough work that I don't really care to do from the locals around here. These things are a real pain to get right and the only REAL way to make one as 'good as new' is to do a complete overhaul... which means removing sometimes hundreds of reeds, cleaning them, reattaching all the leather valves, repairing cracked bellows, and figuring out which reeds go back where. Those reeds aren't marked so they all have to be sorted for their tuning. The few guys on the web who advertise an overhaul for $300 are really earning their money!

This one is only a 25 key 12 bass accordion. This is a tiny student accordion and it contains over 100 reeds!

Not to worry, accordion is looking better than it has for ages.

I am not really up on all the latest trends, but I see it showing up in the hands of younger players. One genre that cropped up in the last several years is basically a string band - banjo, fiddle, mandolin, washtub bass, stuff like that, and almost always an accordion, usually played by a female member of the group who also sings. They usually look like they can barely afford shoes. I don't think they're likely to show up at accordion conventions. It isn't mainstream, and for all I know may be local to the Pacific NW, but I've seen at least a half dozen of these bands, so something's going on here.

And of course none of the younger accordion scene I'm thinking of is mainstream at all, but it's immensely bigger than it was 30, 40 years ago. Maybe part of that is availability, lots more used accordions on the market right now than there are buyers, so it's a good time to pick it up, but maybe not such a good time right now to be making them.

I've had my accordion apart, and manage to fix a dead note that turned out to be a button linkage problem. Maybe just a temporary fix, as I don't really understand what holds the linkage together, but it's better for now. It's a full size, 4 bank, 4 row chromatic button, with an extra hearty 2 bank bass side. Got to learn to play it by tomorrow evening, when I sub for our regular accordion player.

if it died we know where it went....

Yes, we all know the old joke: an accordion player was late for an appointment downtown and forgot to lock his car. Coming back down he saw a guy slam the car door and run. Fearing the worst, he ran up to his car with great anxiety to see if his beloved accordion was still there. You guessed it: the perpetrator had put another accordion in the back seat!

Personally, I do not think it's dying. Being from Texas, you see them all the time amongst Mexican- and German-music players. When Garibaldi says they're shutting down, THEN I would be worried about them dying.