I started off with an accordion at age 4. (Yes, before I actually went to school!) I got good enough at it that by age 16 I got 4th place in a Baden-Württemberg state level championship.
But before that, at around the age of 8, I’d actually paused at the accordion (for complicated reasons stemming from how early I’d started and the workload that was expected of me at the music school) and started playing the organ instead, with home lessons. I got pretty good at it before a move to Germany (and subsequent re-uptake of the accordion) ended that around the age of 12.
While I was in Germany, parallel to continuing with my accordion, I joined my school band. There really wasn’t a place for accordion in that curriculum so I picked up the saxophone and got almost as good with it as I was with my accordion.
I then, in my final year of school, at age 17, I had to make an important choice for my future: basically did I want to study music and go pro, or did I want to study business and marketing? I chose the latter because I had this inkling that I would not do well as a pro musician.
That being said, I still played music. I still had my accordion (the saxophone was the school’s and I wasn’t going to spend the cash to buy one for myself: them things are EXPENSIVE yo!), and I had a knack for picking up other instruments. Even in school I’d already picked up the clarinet because it was similar enough to a saxophone I could get to the point of playing decently with little effort.
I did drop the accordion after about ten years, though, because it was just too big to constantly lug around as I bounced around from apartment to apartment and city to city. I donated it to an old man who was a pro player (retired) and bored in his old folk’s home.
Since then I’ve picked up the following woodwinds to the point that I can reliably play simple tunes at least:
(This may sound ridiculous, but really the fingerings are so similar that it’s trivial to learn a new one’s and instead you focus on the embouchure.)
I’ve also picked up a couple of woodwind-adjacent instruments:
ocarina (one “serious” transverse one and a bunch of cheap novelty pendant ones, most of which I give as gifts to students)
xun (another fiendishly difficult one; a clay 8-hole, a clay 10-hole, and three 10-hole bamboo ones in various keys)
Finally I’ve lately become quite enamoured of the kalimba and have five of those (17-key box, 17-key solid acrylic, 24-key, 34-key chromatic, and 42-key chromatic, the last three in solid wood). I initially got the first one while bored during the COVID-19 lockdowns and it was so much fun I got a few more.
Accordion always seems to me like it has a crazy amount of stuff to do at once. Not only have both hands got all the complexity of a piano, the left hand is doing it in a much smaller space, you have to manage the bellows as well and you also can’t really see what your fingers are doing
The left hand has all the buttons on a piano accordion, but also has cheats. The second line from the top is the tonic and the top line is the third from that tonic. The tones go up by fifths along the length.
The third gives you the major chord of the tonic, the fourth gives you the minor chord, the fifth gives you the dominant 7th, and the sixth (on the one I owned) gives you the diminished 7th. So you have automation for chord accompaniment and rarely have to play anything of significant complexity on the left.
Which leaves the bellows and half a piano on the right. 🤣
I started off with an accordion at age 4. (Yes, before I actually went to school!) I got good enough at it that by age 16 I got 4th place in a Baden-Württemberg state level championship.
But before that, at around the age of 8, I’d actually paused at the accordion (for complicated reasons stemming from how early I’d started and the workload that was expected of me at the music school) and started playing the organ instead, with home lessons. I got pretty good at it before a move to Germany (and subsequent re-uptake of the accordion) ended that around the age of 12.
While I was in Germany, parallel to continuing with my accordion, I joined my school band. There really wasn’t a place for accordion in that curriculum so I picked up the saxophone and got almost as good with it as I was with my accordion.
I then, in my final year of school, at age 17, I had to make an important choice for my future: basically did I want to study music and go pro, or did I want to study business and marketing? I chose the latter because I had this inkling that I would not do well as a pro musician.
That being said, I still played music. I still had my accordion (the saxophone was the school’s and I wasn’t going to spend the cash to buy one for myself: them things are EXPENSIVE yo!), and I had a knack for picking up other instruments. Even in school I’d already picked up the clarinet because it was similar enough to a saxophone I could get to the point of playing decently with little effort.
I did drop the accordion after about ten years, though, because it was just too big to constantly lug around as I bounced around from apartment to apartment and city to city. I donated it to an old man who was a pro player (retired) and bored in his old folk’s home.
Since then I’ve picked up the following woodwinds to the point that I can reliably play simple tunes at least:
(This may sound ridiculous, but really the fingerings are so similar that it’s trivial to learn a new one’s and instead you focus on the embouchure.)
I’ve also picked up a couple of woodwind-adjacent instruments:
Finally I’ve lately become quite enamoured of the kalimba and have five of those (17-key box, 17-key solid acrylic, 24-key, 34-key chromatic, and 42-key chromatic, the last three in solid wood). I initially got the first one while bored during the COVID-19 lockdowns and it was so much fun I got a few more.
Accordion always seems to me like it has a crazy amount of stuff to do at once. Not only have both hands got all the complexity of a piano, the left hand is doing it in a much smaller space, you have to manage the bellows as well and you also can’t really see what your fingers are doing
The left hand has all the buttons on a piano accordion, but also has cheats. The second line from the top is the tonic and the top line is the third from that tonic. The tones go up by fifths along the length.
The third gives you the major chord of the tonic, the fourth gives you the minor chord, the fifth gives you the dominant 7th, and the sixth (on the one I owned) gives you the diminished 7th. So you have automation for chord accompaniment and rarely have to play anything of significant complexity on the left.
Which leaves the bellows and half a piano on the right. 🤣