Without doubt, being able to tune your own accordion is a very useful skill. Of course it takes a lot of practice and knowledge to properly tune an accordion, but every journey begins with the first step which is why we have included a compact little set of professional accordion tuning tools in our shop.
To make the best use of the accordion tuning tools, we have now published a video that demonstrates how to fine tune two reeds. For this tuning procedure only a tuning device, e.g. the Peterson Strobe Pro App for Android or iOS devices, and the contents of our tuning kit are needed.
The reeds are tuned inside the accordion in a fashion that does not require much of a workshop or any other special precaution. In fact, after watching this, you will know why we keep a set of accordion tuning tools in the front of our accordion gig bags. You never know, when you need to fix your own or somebody else’s accordion while being on the road… ;-)
A full transcript of the video can be found here.
If the reed that you are fine-tuning is a tremolo reed, then I advise extrapolating the target pitch from the neighboring reeds and check by ear if the resulting beating sounds good. For example, if you are measuring an A4 tremolo reed at 10ct but the neighboring G4 and B4 are coming in at 6ct and 5 ct, then you might want to tune down A4 5.5 ct for starters.