Swedish engineer creates playable accordion from 2 Commodore 64 computers

Enlarge / Linus Åkesson playing his homemade "Commodordion" in a YouTube video. (credit: Linus Åkesson)

In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Åkesson unveiled a playable accordion—called "The Commodordion"—he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Åkesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

Åkesson—a versatile musician himself—can actually play the Commodordion in real time like a real accordion. He plays a melody with his right hand on one C64 keyboard and controls the chord of a rhythm and bass line loop (that he can pre-record using the flip of a switch) using his left hand on the other keyboard.

The Commodordion.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Åkesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

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