A concertina and an accordion make their sound the same way: a bellows drives air past a thin steel tongue set in a slot, and the tongue vibrates. Both are free-reed instruments and both are worked by pulling and pushing. Almost everything else about them differs, and the difference that should decide which one you buy is not the size or the shape. It is what the left hand is holding.
An accordion’s left hand is a chord machine. One button gives you a complete major chord, another gives the minor, and a beginner can put a proper accompaniment under a song on the first afternoon. A concertina has nothing of the kind — every button on both ends is one single note, so harmony is something you assemble by hand while the tune is going on. That one fact separates the two instruments far more decisively than the weight or the shape does.
The accordion — unless the music is folk tunes or the instrument has to travel
It plays in every key, it accompanies a singer without any theory, and there is a century of published beginner material behind it. The Hohner Hohnica 1304 is the size to start on: 26 keys, a complete 48-bass left hand, and light enough to keep on your shoulders for an hour. Buy the concertina instead if you want Irish or English traditional tunes, or if two pounds versus twelve is the deciding number.
Side by side
| Concertina | Accordion | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Hexagonal, about 6½ inches across the flats | Upright rectangular box |
| Where the buttons are | On both ends, pressed in line with the bellows | On the front faces, either side of the bellows |
| Right hand | Buttons, one note each | Piano keys, or rows of buttons |
| Left hand | Buttons, one note each | Stradella bass — single notes and whole preset chords |
| Weight | About 2 lb | 9 lb for a three-row button box, 12–17 lb for a student piano accordion, about 20 lb full size |
| Keys it plays in | Anglo: two home keys plus accidentals. English and Duet: all of them | Piano accordion: all of them. Diatonic button: the three printed on the box |
| To start | ~$315 to try one, ~$450 for a full 30-button | ~$610 button, ~$860 piano |
| Where you hear it | Irish and English traditional music, sea songs, morris dancing, South African folk; tango, on the bandoneon | Polka, conjunto, norteño, vallenato, klezmer, French musette, cajun, folk, pop and classical |
The left hand is the whole argument
The grid of buttons under an accordionist’s left hand is the Stradella system, and it is closer to a machine than to a keyboard. Two columns give you single bass notes; the columns beside them give you finished chords, one button each — major, minor, seventh, diminished. You do not build the chord and you do not need to know what is in it. Press the button marked C, get C major, and a song has an accompaniment.
A concertina gives you none of that. On an Anglo, an English or a Duet, every button is a single note, on both ends, and a chord means finding three of them at once with the hand that is also working the bellows. It is entirely doable and traditional players do it constantly, but it is a skill rather than a button, and it is the reason the concertina is fundamentally a melody instrument while the accordion is a one-person band.
So the useful question is not which is better. It is whether you want to play tunes or accompany songs. If you picture yourself singing over the top of it, the accordion does that job on day one and the concertina will make you earn it. If you picture yourself playing the melody in a session, the concertina is built for exactly that and the accordion’s left hand is weight you are carrying for nothing.
Push and pull: the same button, two notes
Some free-reed instruments are bisonoric — a button sounds one note when you press the bellows in and a different note when you draw them out, the way a harmonica changes note between blowing and drawing. Others are unisonoric, and give the same note either way. The split cuts across both instruments rather than separating them: there are bisonoric and unisonoric concertinas, and bisonoric and unisonoric accordions.
The three concertina systems
The Anglo is bisonoric. It grew out of the German concertina of 1834 and its two main rows are tuned to the C and G major scales, with a third row carrying the accidentals and some doubled notes. That third row extends its reach without making it fully chromatic — it is a folk instrument and it works best in its home keys. The push-pull layout is why it suits Irish and English dance music so well: the bellows change does the rhythmic work.
The English concertina, patented by Charles Wheatstone in 1829, is unisonoric and fully chromatic. Consecutive notes of a scale alternate between the two hands, which is strange for about a week and then very fast. It plays in any key and takes classical, folk, jazz and song accompaniment equally.
The Duet is also unisonoric, and lays the low notes out on the left and the high notes on the right, like a piano. It is the concertina for someone who wants melody and harmony from the same instrument. Small duets are only partly chromatic; the larger ones cover everything.
Nothing transfers between the three. A tune learned on an Anglo is no help at all on an English, so the system is a decision you make once. For a beginner in the United States it is very often made for you: the Anglo is what is sold at beginner prices and what most tutor books are written for.
The two accordion families
A piano accordion is unisonoric. Every note is there, in every key, laid out the way a piano is, which is why beginner method books assume one and why it is the default across most of the United States and Europe.
A three-row diatonic button accordion is bisonoric, exactly like the Anglo concertina, and only plays in the three keys printed on the instrument. That is not a defect — it is the instrument of conjunto, norteño, vallenato and Tex-Mex, and a piano accordion will not make those sounds. It is also lighter and louder for its size. Our guide to beginner accordions goes through which key set to buy, which is the one choice on that instrument you cannot undo.
Two pounds against twenty
A concertina is about six and a half inches across the flats and weighs roughly two pounds. It goes in a rucksack, it can be played standing in a pub without a strap, and nothing about owning one is logistical.
An accordion is furniture by comparison. A three-row button box is around nine pounds, a 26-key student piano accordion about twelve, a 34-key one seventeen, and a full-size 41-key with 120 bass buttons runs to roughly twenty. All of that hangs off two shoulder straps while you play. Weight is the most underrated specification on an accordion because it decides how long a practice session lasts, and beginners need long ones.
For a child, for anyone small, or for anyone whose playing is going to happen somewhere other than their own front room, this is not a footnote. It is frequently the whole decision.
Which one is actually cheaper
At the very bottom the concertina wins, and it wins clearly. Around $315 buys a 20-button Anglo that is a real instrument with real limits, while $315 spent on an accordion buys something with eight bass buttons and no minor chords, which is the shape of an accordion with the instrument left out.
Then the two converge. A full 30-button Anglo is around $450, and the starter instruments the specialist concertina makers build sit near $500 — against roughly $610 for a three-row button accordion and $860 for a piano accordion with a complete left hand. Call that a wash, and note that the accordion is giving you far more notes for it.
Above that the concertina becomes the expensive one, and the reason is the reeds. Cheap and mid-priced concertinas are hybrids: they use mass-produced accordion reeds, which are cheaper to make and less fussy about what they are mounted in. A traditional concertina uses concertina reeds, individually fitted into chambers cut in a wooden reed pan, and their tone depends on the chamber and the materials around them. They are slow and expensive to produce. Intermediate hybrid Anglos run from about $1,700 to $2,700, the traditionally reeded instruments cost more again, and a comparable step up on the accordion side simply does not climb that fast.
The short version: a concertina is cheaper to try and dearer to be serious about. There is more on the accordion side of that ladder in what accordions cost.
Which is harder to learn
Neither is harder in general, and the honest answer is that they are hard in different places.
The concertina puts fewer things in front of you. Twenty or thirty buttons, one note each, no registers, no chord machine, nothing to configure. Simple tunes come quickly. What takes time is that on an Anglo the note under your finger changes with the bellows direction, so you are learning a layout and a breathing pattern at once, and building harmony means finding several single notes while that is going on.
The accordion front-loads coordination. The right hand is a keyboard you can see; the left is a grid of dozens of identical buttons you learn entirely by feel, because your hand is behind the instrument and you will never see it; and the bellows are a third thing happening continuously underneath both. But once the left hand knows where C is, the chord machine does the harmonic work for you, and you sound like an accompanist much sooner than you will on a concertina.
The practical difference is in the material. Accordion method books have been in print continuously since the 1950s and there is a large, standardised body of them. Concertina tutors are a smaller specialist catalogue, mostly written for the Anglo in C/G, and mostly excellent — but you will be picking from a shelf rather than a library, and finding someone local to teach you is a much longer search.
What each one is for
The Anglo concertina is the instrument of Irish traditional music, English country dance and morris, sea songs and — through a long and separate history — South African folk music. The English concertina has an original classical repertoire written for it and turns up in folk, song accompaniment and jazz. The bandoneon, the large square instrument at the front of every tango orchestra, is a German concertina system rather than an accordion: bisonoric, invented to stand in for a church organ, and absorbed by Argentina in the 1890s.
The accordion’s range is wider because there are more kinds of it. Piano accordions cover polka, klezmer, French musette, cajun, folk, pop and a real classical repertoire. Diatonic button boxes carry conjunto, norteño, vallenato and Tex-Mex. The Chemnitzer concertina, confusingly, is the American Midwest’s polka instrument and belongs to the German concertina family rather than to either of the above.
If a specific recording is what put you here, identify what is on it before you buy anything. The two instruments do not substitute for one another in any of these traditions.
If you have chosen the concertina
Both of these are Anglos in C/G, which is the layout every beginner tutor is written for. Both use accordion reeds, as everything at this price does.
Hohner D40
- Anglo, 20 buttons
- 40 reeds
- C/G
- About 2 lb
- Padded gig bag included
- ~$315
Twenty buttons is two rows: the C scale and the G scale, and nothing else. You can play a great many folk tunes on that and you will feel the edges of it inside a year, which is the deal on offer — this is an instrument for finding out whether the concertina suits you, not the one you keep.
The recurring complaint, and it comes up across years of owners, is buttons that stick when the instrument is new. It is a mechanical fault rather than a tuning one, and owners have cured it with a screwdriver and a drop of light oil on the button shafts. Play every button, in and out, the day it arrives rather than a fortnight later.
- Least money that buys a genuine Anglo layout
- Two pounds, and it comes with a bag
- Simple enough to service yourself
- Two keys, no accidentals
- Sticking buttons are common when new
- Manufacturer defects are covered for 90 days only
Trinity College AP-1230A
- Anglo, 30 buttons
- Three rows, C/G
- 8-fold bellows
- Laminated walnut-finish ends
- Padded bag included
- ~$450
Thirty buttons is the standard Anglo, and the third row is the difference that matters: the accidentals live there, so the tunes that were unplayable on a 20-button open up, and nothing you learn on it has to be relearned later. It sits about $135 above the Hohner and buys a genuinely larger instrument for it.
The weak point at this price is the button action rather than the tone — it can be uneven out of the box, the same complaint the cheaper instrument attracts, though it comes up less often here. The reeds are hybrids and speak a little more shyly than a hand-made set, which you will notice only if you have played one.
- Full 30-button layout with the accidental row
- Eight-fold bellows, so long phrases are possible
- Padded bag and an air-release button included
- Button action can be uneven when new
- Laminated ends rather than solid wood
- Hybrid reeds — the ceiling is real
Buy a tutor with it. Gary Coover’s Easy Anglo 1-2-3 is about $15 and holds 35 tunes in a tablature that shows which button to press alongside the standard notation. It starts on one row, moves to 20-button tunes and then to 30-button ones, so it fits either instrument above and keeps fitting after you upgrade.
If you have chosen the accordion
Hohner Hohnica 1304
- Piano accordion
- 26 keys
- 48 bass
- Two reed sets, 3 registers
- 12 lb
- ~$860
Forty-eight bass is where the left hand becomes complete: root, counter-bass, major and minor in all twelve keys. The 12-bass boxes below it have six major chords and no minor chords at all, which rules out a large part of ordinary music and makes it impossible to learn how the two relate. Twelve pounds is manageable for a teenager or a smaller adult through a real practice session, which the bigger instruments are not.
It is built to a price and the reviews are mixed, always about the same thing — a key or a spring wrong on arrival. That is a quality-control lottery rather than a design fault, and it is fixable, but play every key and every bass button on the first day.
- Complete 48-bass left hand
- Light enough for long practice and smaller players
- Gig bag and straps included
- Mechanical faults on arrival are not rare
- No low reed set, so one basic voice
- 26 keys runs out at the top eventually
Hohner Panther G/C/F
- 3-row diatonic
- 31 treble buttons
- 12 bass
- Two reed sets
- 9 lb
- ~$610
Designed in Germany, built in China, and the reason a real accordion company’s instrument lands near $600 rather than $1,300. G/C/F is the standard for Texas conjunto and Colombian vallenato and it is what most teaching material assumes; F/B♭/E♭ is the other common set, and if you have a teacher or people to play with, buy the set they use. Straps and Hohner’s own method booklet are in the box.
There are no register switches, so both reed sets sound together and that is your only voice. On a diatonic that matters much less than it would on a piano accordion — bright and wet is the sound you want — but it is the honest difference between this and the instruments above it.
- The best-rated accordion at anything near the price
- Nine pounds, so you can practise standing
- Method booklet and straps included
- Three keys only, chosen at purchase
- No register switches
- No gig bag in the box
Frequently asked questions
Is a concertina just a small accordion?
No. They are both free-reed bellows instruments, but a concertina has buttons on its two ends, pressed in line with the bellows, and every one of them plays a single note. An accordion has its keys and buttons on the front faces, and its left hand includes preset chord buttons. Neither the fingering nor the technique transfers.
Can you play chords on a concertina?
Yes, but you build them note by note — there is no chord button on any concertina. Anglo players do it constantly and there is a whole harmonic style devoted to it. It is a technique to learn rather than a feature to use, which is the opposite of the accordion’s Stradella bass.
Which is easier to learn?
The concertina gets you playing simple tunes faster because there is less of it. The accordion gets you accompanying a song faster because the chords are already made. Past the first few months the accordion has far more published method material behind it, and teachers are much easier to find.
How many buttons does a concertina have?
Twenty on a two-row Anglo and thirty on the standard three-row, which is the one to aim for. English concertinas are usually 30 or 48 keys, and Hayden duets start around 34. Thirty is the number at which the accidentals appear and the instrument stops closing doors on you.
Is a bandoneon a concertina or an accordion?
A concertina — specifically a German concertina system, built by Heinrich Band in the 1840s as a portable substitute for a church organ. It is bisonoric like the Anglo, square rather than hexagonal, and much larger. Argentina adopted it for tango in the 1890s and it has been the sound of that music ever since.
Which is louder?
The accordion, comfortably, because it has more reeds sounding at once and often several sets that can be switched in together. A concertina is bright and cuts well in a session, but it is a single voice and it sits higher — the low end of an accordion is not available to it at all.
Can I play Irish music on an accordion?
Yes, and plenty of players do — the two-row B/C and C♯/D button accordions are standard in Irish traditional music. What does not work is the piano accordion in a session context, where the repertoire and the ornamentation both assume a bisonoric instrument.
So which one
Buy the accordion if you want to accompany yourself, play in any key, or follow a method book without hunting for one — the Hohnica 1304 at 26 keys and 48 bass is the sensible size to learn on, and the Panther if your music is conjunto or norteño.
Buy the concertina if you want to play tunes rather than songs, if the music is Irish or English traditional, or if you need an instrument that weighs two pounds. Try it on the 20-button Hohner and buy the 30-button if you already know you mean it. Either way, get the C/G — every tutor you will pick up is written for it.