Cactus Flower Bellows
Lovely old Hohner accordion courtesy of cactus flower...
ByConner
The story
I was egging some friends on in discord ages back to sample their instruments, and I got this lovely sampleset from cactus flower. It’s a nice old Hohner accordion with a lot of character in the tuning and a really unique sound.
It’s a sampled in mono with various velocity layers / intervals and a whole lot of fun to play. I’ve added width and reverb controls to the interface to give some more immediate options to spice up the sound a bit.
Enjoy, and please check out some of cactus flower’s work, its awesome:
Interface
Reviews
A super warm and mellow accordion!
I am personally very negatively biased when it comes to any accordion instruments, and rarely I get to really like one. This is one of the very few exceptions, because I find it absolutely lovely. It has a very warm sound, and combined with the included reverb it creates this very wholesome aesthetic. It's simple, yet very, very effective. I adore it!
Really unique instrument but others i prefer
This is a pretty awesome instrument and although i would rarely if ever use an accordion in my music, its always awesome to see people sampling less common instruments. I don't have any issues with this accordion, Its pretty warm and playable. i just think others on the site have a bit more character and "vibe" Its really fun to play with though and it works really well for both fast passages and long chords. I think with instruments that im generally not that into anyway, i prefer them to have more artifacts and imperfection. This is still great work though.
A 'warts and all' accordion
The instrument has a nice warm tone, especially in the upper register of the natural range, and a really good job has been done by Conner with the programming (with the exception maybe of the upper bass region around D2-B3 where velocities don't seem to match/overlap correctly with note volume). However there are a lot of imperfections in the samples (or instrument) themselves - out of tune reeds, leakage into other reeds/notes, some weird modulation of some of the bass notes, and some nasty artifacts or resonances on certain notes (looking at you, D3).
I know a lot of people seem to love the 'character' of imperfect instruments like this, so I see it working well in that context. I wouldn't use it for regular accordion sound except within that limited upper range, but if you're looking for a warty accordion with mostly good sound quality, this could be a good pick.