And complete dry tuning (all reads "dead on" pitch) isn't that great either. My pref would be dry with one of the middle reeds barely sharped (or flatted whatever the case) so there's a certain "chorus" effect such that it just mixes in and sweetens the sound.

I guess this is pretty much the typical cajun sound and that's what I expect out of an accordion.

Marc Savoy uses an old Korg guitar tuner with a an analog needle to set the pitch on his. I think he puts the middle reed about 5 or 10 cents off for that barely wet sound. We should call it DAMP tuning lol. By I like the idea of the graduated tuning. Therefore you get the same amount of beats across the board.

If you want to hear some wet tuned accordions, listen to most of the old (pre-1950) stuff like A Ardoin, and Iry Lejeune to name a few.

Is there an absolute value as a percent wavelength that is a 'cent'? I understand the stuff about beats but not how to get different tones to beat at the same time based on the degree of wetness (expressed in 'cents') the the tuning varies from dead on. Thanks for the info.
Leslie

__. There are 100 cents in the interval between one note in a scale and the next. The kicker on this is that the number of Hertz (vibrations per seconds) varies between adjacent notes. So, 1 cent is one percent of the distance between one note and the next but the "true distance" varies based up whether they're low or high notes.

__. Um, this isn't a very good explanation, is it?

There are some sound files illustrating degrees of wetness at the bottom of this web page:

http://www.accordionpage.com/wetdry.html

I looked up on the link to listen to the samples.
There isn't a huge difference. It's very interesting anyhow.