Reply To: Accordion basics for the new guy

[Dick Rees]

1. Monitors. Being able to hear yourself clearly without blowing out the bellows. Believe it or not, the accordion is highly directional and to be able to hear yourself play amongst the other stage sound really does require some foldback.

2. What the player wants… is what you should try to do. Work WITH the player and avoid over-thinking the situation and laying a tech trip on him. The job of the sound man is to be able to make it work from any given situation, not to “teach” the miso’s their job. If they’re lousy, shut up and do your best. But ideally, they’ll know the idiosyncrasies of their presentation…or not.

3. Separate channels for the “money” channel is SOP. If you just think about it for a moment you might realize that having the ability to EQ the mains and monitors separately is fairly necessary. There are some other considerations as well regarding possible parallel processing, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

4. Relative volume. Do you really think a small diatonic accordion is louder than a drum kit or guitar/bass amps? Really? Wait until you have to do a zydeco band…