Are a concertina and a button accordian the same thing?
In a way, yes!
are noel hill and jacky daly the same person?
And in a way, no! They’re both in the accordion family, and both have buttons instead of piano-type keys. You could call a concertina a form of button accordion, but all button accordions are not concertinas. Here’s what usually meant by the terms:
Concertina:
Button Accordion:
There was a recent thread in which we went through defining characteristics of the difference. I’d post a URL if I could remember which. You’ll notice that on the concertina the buttons are on the side of the bellows facing eachother, ie inwards. On an accordeon, they face the audience. The concertina, or at least typical concertinas, do not have dedicated chord buttons; every button plays melody although you can play chords by pressing several buttons at one.
A typical, although not defining difference, is that the concertina sounds one reed per button pushed or pulled while accordeons sound two or more. This gives the characteristic difference in sound. A good concertina has a dry, rasping, even barking sound; an accordeon has a chorus effect. An accordeon will sound dryish if the reeds are tuned the same but will sound very chorusy if, as happens with wet tunings, one reed is tuned a few cents sharp and the other a few cents flat.
Listen to John Williams (ex-Solas) who plays both. I believe he uses swing tuning on accordeon which is intermediate between wet and dry. Those who play both would not tend to favour a very dry tuning for accordeon becasue they would be able to get dryness when tehy want it using concertina.
Whoa Nelly, no!
Concertinas are not members of the accordion family, nor are they a kind of button accordion (again, they are not a kind of accordion.)
They are all free-reed instruments, a family including mouth-blown harmonicas and melodicas (also not accordions). To echo Wombat:
- On an accordion, melody buttons are only found on one end (the right-hand side), and the right hand plays melody while the left hand works the bellows. On a concertina, melody buttons are on both ends.
- On an accordion, the left-hand side usually has buttons for playing entire chords, probably the source of the name “accordion.”
- Accordions typically sound more than one reed per note, and often have switches to turn banks of reeds on and off
- An accordion sounds like swarms of angry bees, whereas a concertina sounds like a goose playing an oboe while being stepped on.
Caj
Over here this would be called a melodeon. A button accordion would need to be fully chromatic to get the name.
Thank you.
I do not remember this being talked about recently. I must have been practicing. 
I thought this was a windup. Concertina is a much smaller and more agile instrument. The reeds in a concertina are more like mouth harmonica reeds than accordion reeds. The buttons are organized in a different (quasi-random) way. Concertina was once a mass-produced parlor instrument, but these days there are basically expensive antiques, expensive handmade ones and cheap Chinese accordions that are shaped like concertinas but have accordion reeds in them.
Check out http://www.concertina.net
It’s hard to tell sometimes…
This is a one-voice (one reed per note) button accordion/melodeon with the reeds mounted directly on the sound board which makes it sound very much like a concertina (thus the name…).
-Brett
Cute!
The recent thread on the differences between concertinas and accordions is at http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=16951, where I wrote:
… the number of reeds per note is not the defining difference [between concertinas and accordions]. Bandoneons, which are closely associated with tango music, have multiple reeds per note; so do “chemnitzer” concertinas, which are found especially in the upper Midwest U.S. and are favored for polkas. Both bandoneons and chemnitzers are concertinas. See > http://www.klezmusic.com/sbx-info/sbx-bando.html > for more on these types of concertinas.
And there are some button accordions that have only a single reed per note. Sharon Shannon has been known to play one, a Castagnari Lilly.
What distinguishes concertinas from accordions? (1) Absence of prearranged chords; and, (2) buttons that travel in the same direction as the bellows (on accordions the buttons travel perpendicularly to the bellows).
Both (1) and (2) are true for all concertinas, to my knowledge. Except for “free bass” accordions, which lack prearranged chords, (1) and (2) are never true for accordions. So these two rules are all you need to determine whether an instrument is a concertina or an accordion.
All bets are off in the weird world of eBay, however, where small button accordions are routinely labeled concertinas, and vice-versa … usually because the seller hasn’t the foggiest idea of what he/she is selling.
–C#/D
http://www.miriamwebster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=concertina
Concertina 1: a musical instrument of the accordion family
I’ve heard them called accordion enough that I bowed to common usage. I’ll never let it happen again. In your presence, at least… 
[edited to add link to dictionary definition]
Now stop that! You’ve got me really craving a concertina.
(Anyone here play English concertina? I don’t have a problem with harmonicas, but when I tried an Anglo concertina, it confused the heck out of me.)
http://www.hmtrad.com/catalog/winds/sbx/sbx-org.html
I believe Colin Dipper also once made a concertina like this.
Caj
Like HMT says, it’s not a concertina – it’s an accordion masquerading as a concertina. (“Verdict: it’s just another weird double reeded button accordion.”)
–C#/D
It’s like piccolos and fifes… concertinas and accordions are different instruments, with independent histories. The fact that an accordion may sometimes look just like a concertina doesn’t make it a concertina. Sometimes you can’t tell by the shape alone. It’s a combination of the shape, the way the scale is set (concertina has notes on both sides, accordion has chords or basses on one side, notes on the other), the size and shape of the reeds and how the reeds are mounted.
Again: http://www.concertina.net is like a chiff&fipple for concertinas. Lots of good info there.
Well, then it’s a counter-example to rule # 2: you have an accordion whose buttons travel along the bellows.
Caj
Dang, caught up by one exception (or maybe two), because I was trying to make the rules cover every case. :roll: Thanks for the catch.
If there’s anyone out there still reading this thread besides Caj and glauber, the exceptions are the “organetto,” essentially a button accordion in a concertina shell; and the “franglo,” a somewhat similar instrument made (only briefly, I think) by Colin Dipper. From the only online description I can find of the franglo, it’s unclear whether the left hand has chords or simply bass notes. These are rare birds: Even though I’ve played concertinas for 20 years, I’ve never seen either one of these.
Hoping to bring this thread to a close (on my terms 
) I think it can be resolved in one of two ways.
The simplest way is to reduce the formula to rule (2) alone, buttons that travel in the same direction as the bellows. In this formulation, the organetto and franglo are concertinas; free-bass accordions are not.
Alternatively, one could keep both rules:
(1) Absence of prearranged chords.
(2) buttons that travel in the same direction as the bellows,
and specify that concertinas always satisfy both (1) and (2), but accordions never satisfy both (1) and (2) in a single instrument.
This would put the organetto and franglo in the accordion camp, while still treating free-bass accordions as accordions.
glauber wrote:
“… the size and shape of the reeds and how the reeds are mounted.”
glauber, I think there’s too much variation in these aspects to make them useful rules for distinguishing concertinas from accordions.
As for concertina.net, Caj and I both participate there (which is probably where we should have taken this discussion).
–C#/D
There’s also the cheap Chinese concertinas that sell for $300 on eBay, use accordion reeds and have long bellows. They look like bigugly concertinas, but are probably better called something else?