Accordion World: Button Accordions and their basses

My Irish Dancemaster B/C button accordion

I play a 2 row B/C button accordion by Irish Dancemaster -- it's a great box -- I love its dry tuning... but the basses on diatonic button accordions give you one note on the push and another note on the pull. This makes bass accompaniment somewhat difficult.

There are a lot of players out there who use the left hand and sound great. The left hand accompaniment can be done, I'm just saying it isn't especially intuitive or easy.

In the C/F or D/G button accordion world the bass layout doesn't seem to pose as much of a problem. I'm not sure why this is, but I have a friend who plays Scandinavian music on two row button accordions and he sounds great with his bass accompaniment.

In Irish traditional music, the left hand basses often times left out because of the nature of Irish trad -- the bass accompaniment can overpower or cover up other voices. So for this reason, a lot of Irish button box players just don't bother to use the basses.

When playing solo, however, it is desirable to have the ability to add the bass accompaniment. I recently came across a type of button accordion which uses the stradella bass layout found on piano accordions. People refer to it as the British chromatic, Scottish chromatic or Hibernian chromatic button accordion.

Scottish musician, Jimmy Shand, used it and it is still widely used in Scottish traditional music.

I would love to get my hands on one of these just to give it a try and see if I could add the bass accompaniment to the tunes I know. As one poster on thesession.org said, "Anyway this stradella bass (unisonoric) with a bisonoric (push/pull) treble gives kind of best of both worlds I think."

A Hohner 3 row B/C/C# Trichord or Gaelic IV