Practicing the left hand

Having gotten this far, and having been practicing the concertina a little, I can manage to play single notes in the key of G to some extent.  It's tough!  It's hard to switch directions, and I'm terrible at trying to put the left hand together with the right.  So, mostly I've just practiced with my right hand only - small steps for this guy!

But in thinking about how to practice the left hand, I'm reminded of when I was a wee lad learning to play the piano.  In those far-off days, the teacher would open the lesson book and there would be some kind of music.  Playing the left hand was pretty easy, and playing the right hand was pretty easy, but putting them together?!  What a chore - so I hated practicing, because it was so hard.  It wasn't fun.

I find the same thing with the concertina.  Practicing the left hand is pretty easy (but boring) by itself, but trying to put the left hand together with the right is really tough!

So I've been thinking of ways to make it easier - and the obvious way is to learn a song, learning both hands separately, and then trying to put them together and play "in time".

As a tip for other newbies, a helpful way to do this is to break down the song into blocks.  Practice just 4 measures or 8 measures at a time, reviewing them over and over (say 10-20 times).  Play each side separately at first, slowly and then faster to tempo.  Then play with both hands, comically slow so that you don't make any mistakes in the notes, and then play it faster and faster.

Repeat this strategy for the rest of the song, and eventually you will have played the whole song.  Now you try to play through the entire thing - but you've forgotten parts of it (because it takes a long time to practice this way).  A better method is to break the song into parts to practice completely by themselves.  Natural groups will be in repeat sections and in the bridge, or in the coda or the D.S.  This allows you to group the measures of 4 or 8 into a larger group that will make musical sense and can be practiced alone and still satisfy the ear.  Then these sections will make up the entire song.

If you're curious about why or how a song naturally breaks up into sections, you should check out "musical form".  Binary, Ternary and Rondo are the most common that you'll run across in popular music and concertina music.  Think "verse" (A) and "chorus" (B) - that's binary, or two sections: AB-AB-AB-...


However, you have to learn left hand patterns song by song.  I think that there is so much in common between most concertina music that it is possible to learn and practice bass chords and chord progressions and patterns in general.

On the other hand... I think that practicing playing with the hands together is something entirely different than practicing left hand lines and chords.  When you play together, your brain has to combine two different rhythms as well as different notes.  Any beginning piano player (or drummer) will tell you its easy to play with the hands together when the hands can play the same rhythm pattern.  It's when the rhythms are independent that it gets hard!

So, when I get to writing some beginning exercises (for myself) with the left hand, I will separate it into two kinds of exercises: left hand patterns to practice alone, and then easy (super-easy) songs to practice playing the left hand together with the right.  I hope in this way to make faster progress.