How Long Does it Take to Learn the Button Accordion

How Long Does it Take to Learn the Button Accordion

How long is a piece of string? How long does it take to learn the button accordion? This is a difficult topic to discuss. I will endeavour to give a guide on how long it may take a student to learn the button accordion. The following blog post will give some tips and structural guidance on how to progress faster. These tips are built up from years of experience directing students on putting their best foot forward.

Philosophy

It might help you the reader to understand the philosophy behind the lessons on irishbuttonaccordionlessons.ie. In a normal year of teaching the button accordion, a teacher may hit roughly 25 lessons. This would be quite a good year to receive that amount of lessons. Each course on irishbuttonaccordionlessons.ie will have roughly 25 lessons. In theory, a user should progress from complete scratch to playing traditional music at a professional level in 3 years.

3 Years?

How long does it take to Learn Button Accordion? 3 years? I don’t think 3 years is a realistic expectation for a student. Ask yourself, is it realistic to play like this after 3 years of the accordion – Cork Folk Festival – Derek Hickey & Macdara Ó Faoláin | Bunch of Green Rushes & Seán Frank | TG4. Most likely, the answer is no. But it is possible to get to this level within 3 years if you can manage to do the following key strategies

Good Practise

This will seem obvious but practising is the only route to your goal, coinciding with lots of listening. From nearly 20 years of teaching though, students don’t practise smartly. I didn’t practise smartly, but I learned to change my ways. Over the course of a week, an accordion player should be hitting a minimum of 20 minutes 4 times a week. Within that 20 minutes I recommend spending 3 minutes playing your favourite tunes, 12 minutes going over your new tune and techniques from the latest lesson and 5 minutes playing a set of your favourite tunes. The 12 minutes in the middle is the important portion. Playing the tune from start to end is where most people fall. Accordion players play the tune from top to bottom and make the same mistakes as the same points, over and over again. Whereas within the 12 minutes, play the tune from start to finish, then on your sheet music, mark out the bar(s) where the tune doesn’t sound as good as the best parts of the tune. This is normally in the second parts of tunes. These bars that need development, focus your 12 minutes of time playing these bar(s) or sections of the music, over and over. Play these difficult sections very slowly, and build the pace of the bars slowly over time. If this happens 4 times over the week, you will reach your goals.