Why Are Accordions Tuned To 442Hz These Days?

[Geoff Wooff]

As one can see ,I live in France where Accordéon is the ever present squeeze box. I'm not sure about the Melodeon (Diato) types... I appear to play along with these on my 440hz Concertinas without noticing the difference... but the Chromatique Accordeons and the Bandonéons appear to be tuned a little high.

 

Any ideas ?

 

[adrian brown]

Geoff, I think ever since a-440Hz was adopted as a standard in 1939, there has been a pressure (mostly from string players) to push it higher. Certainly people who play recorders regularly with modern orchestras ask me to tune their instruments at a-442Hz. I've even heard that some marimbas and vibraphones are tuned as high as a-444Hz. I guess modern makers of Accordions and Bandonéons just follow the trend too. This is a great book on the history (including post 1939) of pitch.

 

Adrian

[Geoff Wooff]

Thanks Adrian,

 

good explaination and book reference.

 

I found another thread from earlier this year which explains it in a similar way... with some clasical soloists deliberately tuning sharper than the orchestra when playing a concerto so as to appear to be 'brighter' or louder.... a 'better sharp than flat' syndrome comes to mind. However this can cause unnecessary problems for us ordinary people who play with a variety of , somewhat, fixed pitch instruments.

 

One of our band members likes to play his 1928 accordéon that gave me no end of ear ache before its pitch was raised somewhat from the original 435hz to somewhere closer to 440hz , and now I have found a more modern accordéon, better in tune with itself... only to find it is tuned to 442hz...!!. That is something like 20 cents sharp of my concertinas...... Ahggggggg!

 

Geoff.

[Jody Kruskal]

I guess you could call this "intonation inflation"... and it seems to have been going on for hundreds of years. Perhaps longer. The sharpest player at the session wins!

 

A few years ago, I booked a nice studio with a fine grand piano and paid good money to the studio regular piano tech to have the piano tuned before the recording session. After we played for a few hours, everyone commented on how the concertina sounded kind of dull... what was going on? We got out a tuner and sure enough, the piano was a few cents sharp - hardly enough to notice. We contacted the tuner and he refused to retune it, saying something that amounted to... "That's the new standard. Everyone does it. The concertina does not really play in tune anyway... blah, blah, blah" What an expensive boondoggle. Talking with this tuner guy was like a lost ball in the high weeds and we gave up recording at that studio.

 

This freshly tuned piano was only a few cents north of A=440 and at first we did not hear the problem. It seemed like it was my concertina that was the problem, but no. It was only after the third tune that the fiddle player complained of fatigue. We took out the electronic tuner and discovered why. The poor fellow was trying to compensate between the tuning of the concertina and the tuning of the piano and had become completely exhausted by the effort to reconcile the two.

 

These days, I have been tuning my own baby grand at home. While it may not be as good as a pro job, I've found that I'm able to make it sound sweet in about three hours at A=440. Like mowing the lawn, you can look back and say, "My, my... see what I've just done! It's a beautiful thing. Now let's enjoy it. Everyone out for croquet!"

Edited September 8, 2014 by Jody Kruskal

[Geoff Wooff]

Nice story Jody.

 

Yes that fatigue effect of trying to compensate between two slightly different pitches for the Fiddler is what my wife was suffering trying to blow her Cornemuse in tune with either the accordéonist or me... it does not make for good relationships!

 

This morning I used three electronic tuners to measure just how far sharp this 'new' accordéon is, and it looks to be 444hz , or 17 cents sharp of 440hz. Luckily the offending box was bought from a music shop ( last week) where its owner is the Accordéon technician.

 

Now I need to check the pitch of the local Melodions before an approach is made to that music shop for a resolution of some sort.

[ceemonster]

Are you saying, you find the chromatiques and bandos to be tuned "high" even on a bone-dry, single-reed setting? I'm thinking you are not saying that, or, you're actually not hearing a single reed tuned off.....I'm thinking you're hearing bandoneons or CBAs on two-voice (or more) settings. And those are "high" because they are tuned a tad wet, see? Bandos are two voices. A middle set ad a low set, tuned 442 (Chemnitzers are SEVERAL voices, not talking about those).

 

So, in bando or CBA, one of those reeds IS to regular concert pitch. The other is a smidge high. 442 is the classic Bando tuning. Now, there has been a trend in some quarters to tune them drier, but 442 is classic. And it IS a tad sharp. But you can play it with 440 instruments because that other reed IS to pitch. (this is different from Cajun one-rows, which are tuned off enough that fiddlers and everybody else has to re-tune to them. you can't take them to an irish sesh without being off-key).

 

Lots of accordions people think are "dry" tuned, are tuned like what you are talking about. They're not wet enough that you hear wah-wah. But they are a HAIR wet, to give it a little soul, or bite, or growl. and what gives it that tone personality is, one reed is a hair sharp. Jackie daly, case in point. everybody thinks he went "dry," 20 or so years ago, but he didn't. he went, "a teensy, iota of an electron of a smidge" wet.

 

If you go onto Harry Geuns' site, he sells a "student" bando with only one set of reeds. Components are Asian made, but the reeds are Harry Geuns "real" hand-made bando reeds. That bando is a "true" one-voice. There is a sound clip there, you can go check it out. That yearning, growling, "reaching" sound typical of the 442 bandos with 2 reeds tuned a hair off, is not there. It's quite lovely on its own merits, but it is not "the" bando sound. And the big reason it's not, is that slightly sharp voice is not there........I have thought about purchasing one, thought it might be a cool one-voice concertina with all the notes you could ever want, and all the ranges you could ever want. But I've hesitated because I miss that growl......

 

Interestingly, concertina-concertinas, DO have a growl, with only one voice.....

Edited September 8, 2014 by ceemonster

[ceemonster]

here's some more....it isn't really a new, "these days" phenom, it's more the other way round. the 442 thing is more old-style. there has been a trend in some quarters to tune all reeds to concert. I personally don't like this, I think it denudes the soul, too classical and polite sounding, but to each his own. very perceptive of you, Geoff, to grok that you can indeed play along with these instruments---the reason is that as I mentioned above, one reed IS to pitch, so there is anchoring to concert (again, not on the Cajun one-rows--that is why the non-Cajun one-row melodeons like Brendan Begley plays do not sound pukka for "true" Cajun).

 

free-reed instruments have historically anchored both the rhythm and the melody for "the people's" dance music. and probly the"sharp" thing evolved to cut through in dance halls and (in the case of musette & tango) brothels, speakeasies, gangster caves, drug lairs, & other dens of iniquity.... and as we know, the tunings and the music, suffer if we stray too far from the dens of iniquity....

Edited September 8, 2014 by ceemonster

[ceemonster]

here is a puzzle piece I left out of my little disquisition. what accordion tuners sometimes call "true" musette, is THREE reeds---one to concert pitch, one sharp, and one flat. you may be familiar with that, and it may have misled you into not realizing the bandos and cbas you are hearing as "sharp" are actually a different form of "wet" tuning than the classic three-voice, one concert/one sharp/one flat config.

 

when TWO reeds rather than three, are present (as with bando and two-voiced accordions or multi-voiced accordions that have a two-voice switch option), how you tune two voices "wet" is, one reed set to concert pitch, one reed set sharp. that flat set that you have in a three-voice musette won't be there. this may have misled your ear. tony macmahon, joe cooley, that kind of irish musette, is the three-voice musette with a flat reed in the mix. this is different.

 

HOW sharp you tune the sharp voice in a two-voice bando or accordion, determines how wet, when you are dealing with only two voices. that's bando, and that is many, many accordions---they will either have only two reed sets for lighter weight, or they will have a bunch of reeds, with a switch to give you a two-voice wet setting. a big ole PA or a CBA with a whole bunch of reed sets, and a bunch of switches for many sound choices sometimes has a switch labeled "Bandoneon." when you push that, you get two reeds, a low reed and a high reed, one tuned....slightly SHARP.

 

sorry I forgot that puzzle piece. this whole explanation kind of doesn't make sense without it: two reeds, (rather than 3 or more) are tuned wet, by tuning one reed set SHARP. like, say, 442......

Edited September 8, 2014 by ceemonster

[Geoff Wooff]

Many thanks for all this Ceemonster!

 

OK so, what I have here is a two voice CBA, switchable between one and two voices. The single "flute" voice sounds at 443-444hz... adding the "wet" voice ,which as you say is sharper, does not really pull the whole tuning effect up much further (according to my ear) but adds the wow-wow.

 

So far I have not looked Inside, but I will this morning, to see how many reeds are playing for the "flute" voice... it certainly sounds like one reed but the tone is intriguing and very beautifull, really different to my Concertina trained ears.

[Lester Bailey]

Ceemonster is correct that melodeons will sound sharp due to the tuning to achieve the desired wetness. But there is a method to overcome this by using Viennese tuning where, instead of tuning to concert and concert+ the box is tuned to concert- and concert+ with the 'wetness' offset being split either side of concert pitch.

[Geoff Wooff]

Thanks for that Lester.

 

So, the Castagnari 'Diatos' that our local band members use ( the Handry models I think) appear to be 'in tune' with the rest of us at 440hz.... and I guess they are tuned like you say Lester.

 

So, I come back to this little CBA, which I have just peered Inside of, it has only two reeds per melody note....switchable for one or both reeds going.... the One reed voice is consistently + 17 cents sharp ... I assume the Wet reed is sharper. This is an annoying amount of difference.

 

Maybe the CBA's made by Castagnari, Saltarelle and etc that are made to look like Melodions, are tuned to 440hz ?

 

Thanks again,

Geoff.

[Lester Bailey]

Geoff - I seems unlikely that the sharp reeds are all +17 cents as the normal tuning schema requires the number of cents sharp to decrease as the pitch of the notes increase to maintain the same beat frequency between the two reeds. So, for instance, when I'm tuning to 'normal Hohner', the C4 offset is 21 cents,C5 is 15 cents and C6 is 9 cents.

 

The reason the Castagnaris may sound better tuned is 1) they are better tuned 2) they are normally tuned much drier so the effect of the offset is much smaller (the offsets for C4, C5 and C6 are more like 12, 9 and 5).

[wayman]

Yes, it's exactly as Lester says: across the range of a wet-tuned instrument, the difference as measured in cents varies -- much wider for very low notes than for very high notes -- so that the beat frequency is the same. For an instrument like a Pokerwork or an Erica with two reeds per note, after tuning the lower reed of a pair in isolation, the process of wet-tuning is less a matter of tuning the higher reed in isolation so the readout on the tuner says it's correct (though this gets you at least partway there of course if you're following a chart that tells you how many cents to deviate each reed), and more a matter of counting the beats between the two reeds until your ear says for each note that the higher reed is correct relative to the lower reed.

 

Er, this veers into Mel-net-land, but it does speak to the question (Granted, there are wet-tuned concertinas, Stagis mostly, but let's not talk about them! )

[Geoff Wooff]

Yes Wayman, and thanks!

I agree that it might appear to be 'over the border' into Mel-net land but it is, I think , pertinent to concertina users who play with accordions.

 

I can see the point about the wet reed offset changing through the range to maintain a steady beating sound BUT what I am measuring is the pitch of the DRY note ie; when I run only the one voice (this accordion has two reeds per note and a switch to play one or both reeds.) It is not a Melodion but a Chromatic Button Accordion.

 

So Lester, it is the overal tuning that is too high to play comfortably with instruments tuned to 440hz... as in the Irish Trad and I assume,the English Trad scènes.

 

I've just contacted the Accordéon dealer/tuner from whence this instrument came and he says that the normal pitch of accordeons, in France ( perhaps all of Europe then) is anywhere between 442 and 445hz....... I have asked him if he would measure the pitch of the Melodions he has in his shop.

 

I've also contacted our principle Diato player, who has just finished her studies as a teacher of Trad music, during her studies one of the projects was to restore and tune an old Melodion... so I've asked her to measure the pitch of her Castagnaris and Hohner Pokerwork boxes....

 

Perhaps it is not that important to some people, but where we use a variety of instruments like Fiddles, various bagpipes, accordions and concertinas of different types ,Hurdy Gurdies, electric Bass etc etc and in various combinations.. it is preferable that a standard of pitch exists.

Edited September 9, 2014 by Geoff Wooff

[Lester Bailey]

All melodeons I have come across (Castagnari, Saltarelle, Dino Baffetti, Hohner etc) have all been tuned to A440 if they are in concert, I have met a lot on old pitch which come tome for retuning. I have not recieved any in A442 or higher.

[Theo]

I've been at the melodeon tuning for a while now and it is not unusual for Italian boxes to be tuned sharp of 440, usually not more than 442 for modern instruments. Older instruments from the 50s and 60s sometimes as high as 444. I've heard from PA players that their instruments are tuned sharp in order to sound "brighter", usually this applies to very wet tuned instruments.

Edited September 9, 2014 by Theo

[Geoff Wooff]

My local Professional Melodion player tells me her boxes are all tuned to 440 and that is normal in France today.

 

Reading the website of one accordéon dealer who has a very usefull lexicon and FAQ section, it says 440 is the norme today but if requested they can tune an instrument up as far as 442 for added brightness.... but any further than that and some disquietitude will start to creep in when playing with other instruments that are at 440.

 

So, the instrument that is 444 dates from the '60's. So that ties in well with your comments Theo.

 

Thanks everyone!!

 

Geoff.

Edited September 10, 2014 by Geoff Wooff

[ceemonster]

[[[so, I come back to this little CBA, which I have just peered Inside of, it has only two reeds per melody note....switchable for one or both reeds going.... the One reed voice is consistently + 17 cents sharp ... I assume the Wet reed is sharper.]]]

 

remember when i said there is a trend to drier? 440 is the "modern" trend. that is more "tasteful" tuning. 442 is "old-style," though not the really THICK old style....

 

well, if you don't like your 17 cents, you could have it cut it in half, to 8-ish. I personally love the 6-8 cents range. still a tremolo there, but light.

 

or, cut that a bit, to like, five cents. or even less, to three--that would sound "dry" but much better than literal bone dry. more rounded and full. there are jargon words for these degrees of wetness, though you have to take them with a caveat because not everybody from all parts of the globe means the same thing by them...You might like the range here denoted as "Semi-Dry" or "Demi-Swing"---those are sort of, three cents on the dryer end, five cents-ish on the Demi-Swing end....

 

Of course, the terms below, "Irish Musette" and "Scottish Musett,e" don't mean much anymore, because of the trend to go drier, including in Ireland and Scotland. But back in the day, that Jimmy Shand sound, like someone gurlging a malted milkshake with a straw....was quite the thing for a big ceili party...

 

Dry

Semi-Dry

Demi-Swing

Swing

American Tremolo

Old Italian/French Musette

Irish Musette

Scottish Musette

Edited September 10, 2014 by ceemonster