The Musicarta ‘left-hand-over style’ – bringing the left hand over to play chords in the treble – is a good way to fill out your sound, as well as being fun to play and looking good.

Equally important is the combination of playing the melody and the broken chord accompaniment at the same time - the real thing, when it comes to popular music style.

(Musicarta's stand-alone teach-yourself Chords for Carl and Marianne piano solos exploit the LH-over style sound and coach you note-by-note to two impressive and satisfying solo performances. Check them out on the home site navbar.)

Watch the module performance online. The full performance plays a 32-bar AABA version with plenty of suspensions and variations within the ‘A’ strain; this page explains the basics in a 16-bar A1A2 version.

Building the LH-over style

Play a left hand bass line with right hand chords alternating between root position and first inversion.

Then break up the right hand chords in six-eight, bottom-middle-top-middle-bottom.

Next, find the left-hand-over notes and practice the bass note-LH-over note jumps.

Next, play the bass plus right hand broken chords plus LH-over notes.

Now you have to figure out how to play both  the melody and the right hand broken chords. If you were to play all the broken chord notes and the melody as well, you would be playing this music.

(The LH-over notes are not played.) It is possible but difficult to play this. but it’s confusing to listen to. What the modern piano-styles player will do is drop or shift accompaniment notes around to give the melody room.

This technique will give you the 16-bar A1A2 version in your Workbook.

The 32-bar AABA performance MS is not given. You will gain infinitely more from simply ‘making it work’ – insisting your hand gets around the problem of playing both the melody and the RH broken chord – than from working your way through any number of performance transcripts.

There are multiple suspensions, and both the LH-over chords and which right hand notes are dropped are not as regular as in the workbook 16-bar version.

Trying adding some circle-of-fifths harmonic variation by dropping the bass note in the even-numbered bars a third.

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