Beat The Mersey (Décryptage)

Music Lesson Transcript Formatting

In this piece, you may have noticed that the left hand consists of thirds all the way through. This means that you can figure out just the bottom note, and then the next note is going to be a skip away in the right hand.

Pattern Recognition

There's a pattern that repeats itself several times throughout the music. It sounds like this and can be seen for the first time in:

• Bars 1 and 2
• Bars 3 and 4

You'll also notice that there's a sharp that appears in the left hand in this piece. You'll see that in:

• Bar 15
• Bar 22

The bottom note of this third is a D. We know that all we have to do to make a third is to skip a note and go up to the next one, which would be F. Because we've got that sharp symbol, we need to make sure that we're going up to the rightmost black key, F sharp.

Practice Tips

Remember to practice this with separate hands and in small chunks.

Demonstration

I'll play it for you first so you can get an idea of what it sounds like:

1. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
2. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
3. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
4. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
5. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
6. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

(This pattern continues through every repetition.)

A Section and B Section

This piece of music has an A section and a B section, which means that they sound quite different. It is depicted in the sheet music by an A with a little box around it and also a B.

This is useful for musicians to discuss which part of the music they would like to play.