Moolodeon Electric Accordion

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc1a5ig_M94]

[Lee] wanted an electric Melodeon to use with his band. A Melodeon is a chromatic accordion and there are people who already make electric versions but they are a little too expensive for him. Instead, he bought a toy accordion and added electronics to it.

After being thwarted by forgotten PIC skills of yore, he went with an Arduino as the controller. Two pressure sensors are used to detect the squeezing and pulling of the instrument’s bellows. His did some solid work. The video above uses 8-bit sounds like we’re used to from video games and the one after the break sources more traditional accordion sounds.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQV-FeRlYAA]

23 thoughts on “Moolodeon Electric Accordion

  1. That’s cool that he used pressure sensors to trigger the notes rather than some sort of slide or bend pot. I’m curious if this requires any sort of skill to play or being a chromatic scale already, if you can just hit any series of notes you want and it will fall into some decent scale.

  2. Thanks for the info.
    The problem I had was getting it to not to make a sound when there was not motion. I used Motorola MX4115 pressure sensors(I think, bad memory). I used two. One inside and one outside. The one outside was for compensating changes in atmospheric pressure. Had a problem with stability. It’s winter time and I am looking for things to do so my interest is up again.

  3. hi lee !

    It would be soooo amazing if I could know how you did your hack like this I could try to play with my old small piano accordion ……
    Is there somewhere I could get some technical plans/codes ? ( the link up there dont work anymore )
    thank youuuuu so much great music by the way :)
    Lyla

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