Piano accordion — a graded beginner curriculum

A technique-graded course for the piano accordion (right-hand piano keyboard, left-hand Stradella bass, bellows in between). Like the ukulele, harmonica and bongó tutors there is no public-domain score corpus, so the curriculum is built from the skills themselves — bellows control, the treble keyboard, the Stradella bass, registration, then bellows artistry. It is grounded in the established piano-accordion method tradition (Deiro, Galla-Rini and Magnante schools of the 1930s–40s) and the standard Stradella / free-bass systems. The advanced levels also note the free-bass converter and organ/orchestral emulation of the Roland FR digital accordions.

The five levels

• Level 1 · First steps — posture, bellows, the treble keyboard — holding the instrument, opening and closing the bellows evenly, your first right-hand melody
• Level 2 · The Stradella bass — bass note and chord — the left-hand bass rows, the bass-then-chord (oom-pah) pattern, coordinating both hands
• Level 3 · Registration and bellows shaping — the treble/bass register switches, dynamics and accents through the bellows, minor and seventh chords
• Level 4 · Bellows artistry and free bass — the bellows shake, broader bass vocabulary, faster passagework, and the free-bass converter
• Level 5 · Polyphony, orchestration and the digital accordion — free-bass counterpoint, fine bellows dynamics, registration as orchestration, and the Roland FR voices

Sources

• established piano-accordion method tradition (Deiro, Galla-Rini, Magnante schools, 1930s–40s) — the graded right-hand keyboard → Stradella bass → bellows-artistry progression
• the standard Stradella (fixed-bass) and free-bass left-hand systems — left-hand layout, bass-and-chord patterns, and free-bass polyphony
• Roland FR digital-accordion register and free-bass documentation (archive.org) — register/orchestral voicing, the free-bass converter, and organ-emulation crossover