The Care and Feeding of Your Pet Accordion

Only a handful of trained accordion repair persons exist in the United States. Bookmans has two of them on board in our Musical Instrument Repair Shop. You can trust our highly qualified Musical Instrument Repair Department on the care and feeding of your pet accordian. Let’s take a look at this surprisingly complex and well-traveled instrument.

Accordions, colloquially referred to as “squeezeboxes”, are part of a family of box-shaped, bellows-driven, free reed aerophone instruments. Phew! These complex instruments go way back in history. The oldest name for this group of instruments is harmonika, from the Greek harmonikos, meaning “harmonic” or “skilled at music”.

Simplistically, accordions are a bunch of individual instruments lumped together to work as one. This plays an important role in their maintenance. Accordions typically have 40 to 161 buttons or keys on both sides of the instrument, each with a delicate mechanism attached. Each of these buttons or keys has from 2 to 12 reeds associated with it, all set to fine pitches and tolerances. With so many buttons, keys, mechanisms and reeds, accordions can go out of adjustment in a bajillion places. The instrument also has an airtight system that can spring a leak in many places like the key pads or the bellows corners. Ergo, the accordion requires attentive care and feeding.

Bookmans Musical Repair professionals understand the special needs of an accordion. A typical repair scenario consists of leveling the keyboard, freeing up the buttons to eliminate sticky or sluggish action, and cleaning the reeds so that they speak quickly and easily. We tune and voice the reeds as needed to restore the intonation to factory standards. The cost for these services is usually between $75 and $120 depending on the number of reeds in the accordion and the repair usually only takes a few days. It’s a good idea to perform these basic tasks for your accordion every year or two.

See? Accordion care is not so scary or complicated when you have pros on your side. You can pay for accordion maintenance with Bookmans Trade Credit–try that in Lithuania. If your accordion leans more toward repair than maintenance, bring it in to your favorite Tucson Bookmans location and let us give you a free estimate.

Accordions are not simply musical instruments. Many are glorious works of art with intricate craftsmanship and delicate pearl inlay. Playing one of these fine instruments means that not only will you bring the world your brand of harmonikos, but also you will look marvelous doing it. If you are interested in learning to play or acquiring a more advanced accordion, stop by any Bookmans. Our accordions await you sitting pretty, tuned and ready to play.