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[Viljo]

Hi!

Finally I was able to access my old account here, yey.

First of all, some of you might have noticed that I have posted a survey link to many accordion groups in Facebook. Because I want as much answers as possible, I'm putting the link here, too. Case is that I am in education for handcraft mastership and my subject is accordion making. I am an accordion luthier but my work is mostly about fixing accordions. Now, for my study, I would like to know what kind of instruments are played around the world. I ask you to answer the survey. Link is bellow.

https://goo.gl/forms/8gb15dl2jaZOsOis1

So far I've got over 150 answers. Top 4 countries are: USA, Finland, UK and Canada. I would like to have answers from all countries, so even if you were an accordion playing vampire in Transylvania, please do answer. Tell also to your friends about this survey. There is two weeks time to answer.

[Chris]

Answered and I would be interested by the results.

[Viljo]

I have informed that the results are confidential so I am not putting results online. However, I have said how many and from how many countries answers are from. And at the moment there is 167 answers from more than 30 countries.

I would like to have as much much answers as possible. I've put information about the survey to accordionists.co.uk and several Facebook groups. I did register to reyesforo.com, too, but can't put any message there because my account haven't been verified. Only if I knew more forums to put message. Any help?

[Theo]

http://buttonbox.org.uk

[melodeon]

Cannot complete as unable to choose a country...
Unable to scroll down.

[Sebastian]

Only if I knew more forums to put message. Any help?

https://www.musiker-board.de/forum/akkordeon-forum.319/

In the survey you ask: "How many notes are you having on melody side". - What do you mean?

An example: On one Club accordion I have 25 buttons. Every button with one exception produces two different notes, so in toto 49 notes. But some notes are accessible via more than one button, so that the melody side offers only 33 distinct notes. What number do you expect me to insert?

[Henry Piper]

Sebastian.... I assumed he meant Number of Buttons, rather than actual notes.

[Sebastian]

Sebastian.... I assumed he meant Number of Buttons, rather than actual notes.

He said that a russian bayan has 64 notes. I had no idea of bayans, so I did count the buttons. A bayan has 106 buttons, so I suppose he doesn't want the number of buttons.

The buttons of a bayan are arranged in five rows: 21, 22, 21, 21 and 21 buttons. I guess the two last rows are only mechanical repetitions of the first two rows. If I count only the first three rows I get: 21 + 22 + 21 = 64 buttons. Every button gives only one note, regardless whether pushed or pulled. Therefore I inferred that a bayan has 64 different tones or notes. Because he seems not to differenciate between push and pull on the bayan, I'm inclined to think that he doesn't want to differenciate the bellows direction on a bisonoric instrument either.

If I calculate the number of notes in this way, a one row with 10 buttons will have 19 "notes", a normal two row with 21 buttons and accidentals will have 28 "notes" (and with low notes instead of accidentals 26 "notes"). If I didn't miscalculate. I did never count notes of a melodeon this way. It seems to me rather odd, too. Some "notes" I have in both directions, some "notes" only in one direction.

-------------

  On the next page he asks about the number of notes on the bass side. How do I calculate the number of notes in a chord? Do I have to open the bass side to see if some octaves are doubled? Should I subtract the bass note from the number of notes in the chord, because it is already calculated with the bass button?

Sorry, too complicated for me.  

[squeezy]

Oh dear ... I gave the numbers of buttons ... but frankly with respect to diatonic instruments this survey made very little sense.  Even thinking about it as relating to unisonoric instruments it was a very poorly worded survey and I have no idea what it hopes to achieve.  The fact that I got to the end probably is only an indication that I'm addicted to squeezeboxes!

[playandteach]

Really sorry but lost the will to continue with survey. If I could see the reason behind it I may have persevered but there is a reason I advise my students not to use surveys.

[playandteach]

Vijo
I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve here, although 150 responses is not a bad start. Part of my job is supporting students with independent learning projects using research either towards creating an artefact or an essay. Perhaps you'd like to email me with what you would like to achieve with this, because I can see some issues with collating information for example. Your survey is already out there, so perhaps it is too late to refine that. If your course includes a reflection document then you could always highlight intelligently the problems encountered and how you might have tackled it next time around.
Sorry if this sounds critical, but I don't know what you are trying to find out with your survey.

[Viljo]

Hi,

I try to answer as good as I can. The survey is not the most accurate, I know, but let's make it a bit better.

Countries: I used official list of countries. This rules out many details as Scotland, Wales, states in USA or in Germany as well Åland in Finland and so on. There is many areas which are having their own beautiful culture and laws. I just needed to use an official list of countries. I hope this don't make people upset. To fix the matter, I added option "other" to country list. You can click that one and write your country to the last writing box on page five. I was thinking to put more detailed list of countries and habited areas, but if doing so, I cannot be sure that all areas in the world would be noted. It would have been awesome to know the biggest market areas more detailed, but USA is enough at this point. I can go to state level later on if focusing more on markets in USA. And please, let's not start to talk about differences of states, independent countries, autonomous regions and so on. It leads nowhere in this survey.

Notes: I fixed the survey so now it is more clear for diatonic accordion users. Inform buttons. This is one case where it can be seen that I don't play diatonic accordion. In general people have answered the amount of buttons. However, when it comes to free bass accordions, the players do inform automatically the notes, not the buttons. So there is cultural differences between instrument types. People have answered various ways so I need to go trough the survey extremely detailed after I have taken it offline. So if you think you have put it wrong, no worry. Most likely I am able to figure out the correct number afterwards.

Scrolling: blame Google. I can't do a thing for that.

Playandteach: I am not sorry for your point of view. Actually when giving feedback, it puts me to think and do things better. So I should thank you for your reply - thank you. I knew already when this survey was put out that it isn't perfect. When using only one language in a survey, it rules out huge amount of people. Therefore I am not able to figure out too good accordions world wide, but basically countries where English is spoken. There is no need to me to make a survey reflection to teachers, however, I'll do it for myself. And as I said earlier, I don't play diatonic accordions and that can be seen in the survey.

Now there is nearly 200 answers. As you know, it is not wise to change the survey after it is put out. Now I've done few changes to keep people happy and which doesn't make the result to go worthless. The answers are giving me a lot of information: what kind of instruments are played, where, what kind of music people are listening and so on. These informations can be used to categorize customer groups - and that is one part of service design.

Actually there is two surveys going on at the same time. One is for professional players and teachers and one is this general survey. The other survey is done as interviews and it includes different things than this survey. If you Playandteach want to participate on this one, we can take a skype call some day soon. We can continue with personal messages in this matter.

[Viljo]

Only if I knew more forums to put message. Any help?

https://www.musiker-board.de/forum/akkordeon-forum.319/

Thanks for the tip!

[playandteach]

I would be happy to help with an interview, but I have to point out that I am neither an experienced melodeon player, nor belonging firmly to a particular tradition -- I play a bit of French and a bit of English style on two different boxes with buttons changed to a slightly different system that almost nobody else uses.

[melodeon]

"Scrolling: blame Google. I can't do a thing for that."

No, not a Google problem.  Scrolling works every time, all the time except your survey.

The survey is awkward and if the purpose was more clear, it would be easier to answer.

[Corinto]

Myself did the survey several days ago, when announced on the other forum.
A friend of mine did the survey this afternoon.

We did not experience problems with scrolling.
Don't know if survey is awkward or not ... can't judge that.
Clear purpose? Don't know either.
Hope he can do "something" with the results, although, from a pure mathematical point of view, still believe one would need thousands of answers for this to be maybe significant ...
Life is almost always trial and error, ... so he tries this, ... why not ...

[Graham Spencer]

Really sorry but lost the will to continue with survey. If I could see the reason behind it I may have persevered

Me too.....

[Winston Smith]

I don't usually do surveys and the like, but after the OP seems to have had such a hard time on here I thought that I would, on this occasion. It only took a couple of minutes to fulfil the OP's request, and didn't really have a detrimental effect on my day.
I hope it helps, Viljo.

[Graham Spencer]

I don't usually do surveys and the like, but after the OP seems to have had such a hard time on here I thought that I would, on this occasion. It only took a couple of minutes to fulfil the OP's request, and didn't really have a detrimental effect on my day.
I hope it helps, Viljo.

If you could complete it in a couple of minutes, especially with several different boxes to account for, then the proforma must have changed hugely since I looked at it. For instance, one section said something like "If you have more than one accordion please enter each on a different line". How?  There's no protocol for doing that (or wasn't a few days ago).  And what's a "normal"bass? Stradella?  If so, it should say so. Also, I didn't feel inclined to open up half a dozen or more boxes just to count the number of bass voices and work out which bass reeds were shared...........    I couldn't have answered the questions accurately for one box in a couple of minutes, never mind a dozen or more.

Sorry, but a survey like this needs to be much more carefully, logically, meaningfully and above all understandably structured.

Graham

[Grape Ape]

Aw c'mon guys- I just took the survey (and i hate surveys) and it took all of 3 minutes.  No I did not list every last box, nor count notes- I agree that there are questions that seem unrelated to the task, but I get what the OP is trying to accomplish and think it's great that he is trying to do so.  Whether or not it will yield anything that we don't already know is another question.