Sonokinetic proudly presents ‘Accordion’.

The accordion is an instrument that has been on our ‘to do’ list for quite some time. The instrument can provide you with a very nice ‘couleur locale’ whenever you need to give a song that French twist. The accordion brings a breath of fresh air and evokes feelings of romance, passion and nostalgia.

As with other Sonokinetic instruments, we focused on getting a ‘real’ sound instead of a ‘perfect’ sound, as you can hear from the demo tracks skilfully created by our demo composers. We are very proud of the finished product and believe that it will empower lots of people to make MIDI recorded accordion tracks that sound like they were played under a bridge along the river Seine.

We started by recording all tones the instrument made, in all registers. For the basses side we captured samples with and without the extra low octave. We also recorded short attack notes for all the basses, at different velocities.

Then of course came the challenge of making all of this accessible from a master keyboard, and that’s when we realised how ergonomically ingenious a real accordion actually is. The way the instrument is laid out allows for a great deal of flexibility, allowing you to play all kinds of chords with just one button in the left-hand section, and switching between bass notes along the cycle of fifths really easily. This method of playing explains the often quite complex and challenging patterns played with apparent ease by even mediocre accordion players. Making these patterns accessible to keyboard players would demand more than just mapping the recorded sounds to the keys, so we’ve integrated a sequencer into the Sonokinetic Accordion. The sequencer allows you to make full use of all the playing styles of a real accordion and do so very intuitively. The Kontakt script has a built in chord analyser, so it will automatically choose the right button sample for the chord you play. If you have the sequencer active, it will play one of the preset patterns, or you can program your own, using the interface.