How wide a range do the single-note buttons cover?
The single-note range is only an octave. In fact, it’s less than an octave. It doesn’t produce an actual scale, as you have on the piano or the free-bass accordion. Some people have tried to give the illusion of that through skillful changing of registers, but that’s not the same thing really. Our registers on the left hand allow you a soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. But it’s really an awkward thing, because you have to switch among them while you’re in movement. And the free bass solves that problem? It solves all that without necessarily relying on switches. So before you started on the free-bass accordion . . . I was on the standard accordion. The kinds of things I actually played on my recital in ’65 were contemporary pieces written for standard accordion. I was always partial to contemporary music. I was raised on polkas and waltzes, and I played all the transcriptions, the mutilated versions of orchestral works of the nineteenth century, badly transcribed. I used to play all thes
