Accordion Lesson 2.

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Piano Keyboard.

In this second accordion lesson, we will try to familiarize more with the right side piano keyboard. I hope that after the first lesson you are able to associate notes to keys. Let us try to play a well known song called "Twinkle, twinkle little star". We will use only the piano keys for that. The score for the song is below.

Image source http://en.wikipedia.org
Click on the picture to see a larger version.

If you don't know how to read it, you might want to stop here for a while and learn some basic theory from the Music Theory course. Click Music Theory or check the menu from the left.

If you find it hard to find the corresponded keys, here is the picture below to help you out.

While playing try to use a constant and continuous movement of bellows. 7 notes air out, 7 notes air in. The movement of the bellow is very important on accordion, and bad habits like jerking bellows will be problematic while playing with both hands. So try to use this exercise, for coordinate your bellow movement with playing the keys.

Sharps and flattens.

OK, so every white key, as we learned before, correspond to a note. But, what about black keys?
Well, each black key is related to the white keys near it. It's sharpens the note before or flatten the note after. For example the back key between C and D it is either a C#(C sharped) or Db (D flattened or D bemol). So, the same black key can have 2 different names.

At this point you may notice that some white keys don't have a black key in between, so how can we sharpen or flatten the note. For example let's take E and F, they don't have a black key in between. Well it is actually like this: E# = F and Fb = E. Nice! So as a general rule we can say like this: to sharpen a note we play the next key, no matter if it is black or white. The same with flatten a note, we play the key before.

Fingering.

While playing on the right keyboard of accordion use all five fingers.
Always try to hold you fingers in positions that feel comfortable. So as far as it's possible don't put one finger over another while jumping one key to another. Instead change fingers according to arrangement of hand and keys; different keys should be pressed by different fingers.

The order of alternation fingers it is called fingering.

In the notes the fingers are designated by the numbers:
1 - thumb (first finger)
2 - pointing finger (second finger)
3 - middle finger (third finger)
4 - ring finger (fourth finger)
5 - little finger (fifth finger)

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