9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

  Art Center  Music  Piano

 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

Great Left-Hand Accompaniment

Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard
RELATED BOOK
Piano and Keyboard All-in-One For Dummies

By Holly Day, Jerry Kovarksy, Blake Neely, David Pearl, Michael Pilhofer

One of the most important tools for your piano playing bag of tricks is a good supply of left-hand
accompaniment patterns. Any time you’re faced with playing straight chords or even playing
melodies from a fake book (which pretty much just gives the chord names), you’re left to your own
resources to supply an interesting-sounding bass line.

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

It’s important to practice these patterns again and again to master the right notes and the
way each pattern feels under your ngers. The more comfortable you are with the pattern,
the more easily you can apply it to any key, any chord, and any scale.

Fixed and broken chords

The easiest left-hand accompaniment is chords, whether you play them as straight chords or
arpeggios. Start with the basic chords and nd inversions that work well for you without requiring
your left hand to move all over the keyboard. Also, you should experiment with various rhythmic
patterns. For example, try playing quarter-note chords instead of whole-note chords. Or try a
dotted quarter and eighth-note pattern.

Here, the left hand plays a simple chord progression with several di erent rhythmic patterns. Play
these a few times and decide which rhythmic pattern works, sounds, and feels best to you.

You can change the texture and add some variety with a constant arpeggiated pattern in the left
hand. For every chord symbol, use the root, fth, and octave notes of the chord’s scale to form
an up-and-down pattern throughout the song. This pattern works for fast or slow songs.

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

Octave hammering

This easy (if tiring) left-handed groove is really fun and easy if your right hand is just playing chords.
But if you’re playing a melody or something more complicated than chords with your right hand,
this pattern may not be a practical choice.

To hammer out some octaves, you simply prepare your left hand in an open octave position, with
your pinky and thumb ready on the two notes, and make sure your wrist is loose enough to bounce
a bit with the appropriate rhythm.

When the chord changes, keep your hand in octave position as you move directly to the next set of
octaves. You can play the octaves using any rhythm that sounds good to you — try whole notes,
half notes, even eighth notes, depending on the rhythmic character of the song.

“Octaves in the Left” lets you roll out some octaves.

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

As you become more familiar with harmony, you can add to these left-hand octave patterns with
octaves built on the notes of the chord. For example, the octaves in “Jumping Octaves” move from
the root note to the third interval note to the fth interval note for each right-hand chord.

Bouncy rock patterns

In addition to slamming octaves, a nice rock and roll-sounding bass pattern may use other intervals
drawn from scale notes.

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

To play a song using the left-hand accompaniment, play “Love Me Like You Used To.”

Chord picking

Left-hand chord picking is a style well suited to country music. But even if you aren’t a fan of that
genre, you can apply this pattern to just about any song you like.

Most chords are made up of a root note, a third interval, and a fth interval. You need to know
these three elements to be a successful chord-picker.

To play this pattern, break a chord into two units: the root note and two top notes. Play the root
note on beat 1 and the top two notes together on beat 2. To make it sound even more impressive,
do something a little di erent on beat 3: Play the fth of the chord by itself but one octave Lower.

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Now try playing this pattern in the piece “Picking and Grinning.” After you get the feel of this
bouncy rhythmic pattern, you won’t even need to look at your hands. Your pinky will nd the two
alternating bass notes because they’re always the same distance from the root.

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You can create a great bass pattern using the octave, the fth, and the sixth intervals of each chord.
Try this rockin’ accompaniment along with “Rockin’ Intervals.” You can modify the pattern to t a
two- or one-measure pattern in 4/4 meter. After a few times through, your hands will know what to
do, and you can apply the pattern to any major chord.

The great Chuck Berry made the locomotive-sounding pattern demonstrated in “Berry-Style
Blues” very popular on the guitar. It was only a matter of time before some trail-blazing pianist
adapted this guitar pattern to the piano. All you have to do is alternate between playing an open
fth and an open sixth on every beat.

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

Melodic bass lines

Some left-hand patterns are so widely used that they’re better known than the melodies they
accompany. “Bum-ba-di-da” is one such pattern that was made famous by Roy Rogers in his show-
closing song, “Happy Trails.” All you need are three notes from each chord’s scale: the root, the fth,
and the sixth. Play them back and forth, over and over.

To play a song with the bum-ba-di-da bass line, play “Country Ri n’.”

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

Another melodic left-hand pattern played by every pianist from novice to pro is the “boogie-woogie”
bass line. It doesn’t even need a melody. This bass line uses notes from a major scale but lowers
the seventh note of the scale a half step (also called a atted seventh) to give you that bluesy sound.

For each new chord in the boogie-woogie bass line, you play the following scale notes up the keys
and then back down: root, third, fth, sixth, atted seventh.

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

  Art Center  Music  Piano  How to Play Country on the Piano or Keyboard

How to Play Country on the Piano or

Keyboard
RELATED BOOK
Piano and Keyboard All-in-One For Dummies

By Holly Day, Jerry Kovarksy, Blake Neely, David Pearl, Michael Pilhofer

Before there was rock and roll, there was country. And believe it or not, you can play country on the
piano or keyboard. This style often sounds relaxed, lyrical, simple, and grassroots-ish, but it ain’t
afraid to rock, roll, and rumble.

Artists like Keith Urban, Carrie Underwood, Shania Twain, and Brad Paisley put all kinds of musical
in uences in their country music, including elements of rock, blues, and even jazz. In uences aside,
though, the folks in Nashville still call it country.

Country-style cooking

To enhance your musical dish with the tastes of country on the piano, add some of these stylistic
avorings:

Intervals

Grace notes

Tremolos

Bum-ba-di-da bass line

A ten-gallon hat, a pair of boots, and maybe even a nice and shiny belt buckle (purchased from
a local Western store)

Finger-pickin’ good

This example is a nice, relaxed-sounding slice of the country music style. The right-hand intervals
are unique in that the melody notes are actually on the bottom while the top notes stay the same.
Grace notes and tremolos peppered throughout give this example the feeling of an Old West

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9/15/2020 Great Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns for the Piano or Keyboard

saloon.

The left-hand accompaniment pattern is challenging, so practice each hand separately until
you can con dently put them together. After this inspiring tune, you may nd yourself adding
a saddlebag to your piano bench.

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