Tortured Accordion

Last week my coworker Brad and I tortured an accordion.




This thing was old, beat up and had a hole in the bellows, which made it awesome! We bent it, flicked it, hit it and dropped it.

I went a little atypical on the miking setup. Left channel in the recording below is an AT4050 about 5 feet away. Right channel is a Schoeps CMC6/MK41 about 3 inches away.

The intent was not to create a stereo image, but rather to preserve to separate mono perspectives in on stereo file.

Here are some excerpts:



*update* and here's a little composition that Brad made exclusively using the sounds of that instrument.

Antique Accordion - Design Example by MoleculeMusic

This thing was just great fun to record and we got tons and tons of material out of it. We even managed to keep the thing intact throughout, so it's still basically performable if we need it later on.

Many thanks to Tim Prebble for providing the inspiration for this kind of endeavor.

Here are some more pix.