As shown in my previous post, there is nothing different between the accordion’s right-hand keyboard and the piano keyboard, but the left-hand keyboard of accordion is unique. This makes the sheet music notation for the accordion’s right hand same as standard stave notation but left hand slightly different from it. I will introduce this different here. We assume accordions has Stradella bass system.
Left-hand Stave Notation
We have learned that the Stradella bass system has bass buttons producing single notes chord buttons producing multiple notes. If we use the standard stave notation to represent the left-hand of the accordion, first, it’s hard to tell if a note is a from bass or chord buttons; second, if it’s a chord, it’s also hard for many people to tell the chord and the corresponding button to play from a stack of notes immediately. Therefore, a special, simplified stave notation is designed for the accordion left hand:
- Split by the middle line, the notes below the middle line (included) are single notes, and the notes above belongs to chords. Note that the accordion left hand does not distinguish octaves, so there’s no problem doing this.
- Chord are simplified as the root note of the chord on the stave, and a symbol to indicate the chord type. This is a straightforward representation telling the chord and the corresponding button to play. There are only 4 chord types in accordion chord buttons. Their symbols are:
- Major triad:
M,大(Chinese),Б(Russian) - Minor triad:
m,小(Chinese),м(Russian, not to be confused with Latin letterM) - Dominant 7th:
7 - Diminished 7th:
dim,减(Chinese)
- Major triad:
- Underlined fingering numbers on bass notes indicate playing the button in the counterbass row.
With this notation, one can know exactly which button to play by reading it.
Most of modern accordion sheet music use this notation, but some may use the standard stave notation, such as the old Russian accordion sheet music books. In addition, sheet music in the music notation softwares like MuseScore typically use standard stave notation. That’s because many want to use the playback feature of the softwares to listen to the sheet music whereas they are not tailored for this simplified accordion notation. A chord note in this notation will be recognised as a single note like in the standard stave notation.