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The Musicarta 'Greensleeves' series of creative piano lesson aims to get an arrangement of this beautiful, well-known piece into your repertoire efficiently and easily.

Here's the Concert Variations performance the series of lessons builds up to.

An introductory video

Here's an introductory video about the Greensleeves lesson series.

Greensleeves as a 'BMP' piece

If you're around here at www.musicarta.com for any length of time, you can't fail to hear about the 'Basic Music-making Position'. It started life as Musicarta's attempt to make playing the piano 'more like guitar playing' - where the guitarist just picks up the guitar and bashes off a few chords from memory or from chords symbols and well-known fretboard diagrams.

Here are the guitar chords for Greensleeves.

The Basic Music-making Position gets you playing chords on the piano just as easily. Here is the BMP diagram and the five Greensleeves BMP chords.

Most of the notes in Greensleeves - the melody as well as the chords - are easily found from this two-hand position. Here's a video demonstrating Greensleeves' strong BMP origins.

How the arrangement evolves

Another advantage of the Musicarta approach is that you come away from every lesson with a complete performance – even if it's just being able to play the tune in Lesson One.

The Greensleeves arrangement evolves over the series of lessons. Essentially, the left hand gets more complicated as the right hand continues playing the tune.

Each new version builds step by step on the one before - so you always have something you can play and something to work on. Here is a video explaining the stages.

This is completely unlike frustrating traditional lessons where you work away at one piece - but until you can finally play it, you have nothing to show!

Who is 'Greensleeves' for?

Complete beginners  You don't need to be able to play the piano already to learn Greensleeves with Musicarta. The video resources ensure anyone can learn, at their own pace. Try the first lesson free to see if you agree.

Lapsed learners and adult re-starters taking up the piano again will find Musicarta's Greensleeves ideal for easing back into playing without opening those dusty beginner's books again. And if you want to get back into reading music, learning something from video then seeing what it looks like in written music is the least painful way to do it. Watch the scrolling MS video below - all the lesson performances have one of these.

Classical pupils will appreciate Musicarta 's help becoming more creative musicians, able to 'see the music in the keyboard' and play by ear without notes.

Non-readers too are amply provided for. All the performances, and how to practice them, are demonstrated in the videos, which you can slow down on the video platforms, and are shown on the MidiPiano virtual keyboard with lighting-up, colour-coded keys. Try the first lesson for free and watch it work!

With patience and application (not included!), you can't fail to learn.

A scrolling MS video

Here's a video showing the music (MS - manuscript) scrolling over the simultaneous virtual keyboard performance. Even if you've never read written music before, you can see how the dots represent the sound - which is all written music does.

What you'll learn

As the arrangement evolves, you'll find yourself progressively able to do all of these things.

• Name the piano keys.

• Learn the melody with the proper fingering.

• Play chords from chord symbols.
• Play the melody and chords together.
• Break up chords to make broken-chord accompaniments.
• Tackle hands-together difficulties and syncopation with Musicarta's super-effective 'together-left-right' (TLR) analysis.
• Make longer medley performances by joining versions together, like the impressive crossed-hands medley version in Lesson Five.
  
• Harmonise with thirds/tenths/sixths in the bass line counter-melody.

And depending on how far you're able to proceed, you'll weave all these skills together in the full Concert Variations performance, explained in detail in the final lesson.

And along the way, you'll pick up a veritable who's-who of 'really useful music theory':

Chords, chord symbols, chord tones, chord roots, triad inversions and chord voicings, added-note chords, melody and bass lines, passing notes, harmonising with intervals (thirds, sixths, tenths), counting rhythms, playing off the beat (syncopation)...

Ready to give it ago?

Jump through to Lesson One and get started!

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