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 for Cactus Flower Bellows
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
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.
Bags of character
Really like the tone of the mid and upper registers. As other have said, it's quite uneven as you venture lower which sometimes makes it hard to achieve a consistent sound, if that's what you're after. Loads of character though, so well worth a look.
