Free Accordion Sheet Music for Oktoberfest!

People enjoying large glasses of beer

“Prost!” Source: Wikimedia Commons

Guten Tag!

From time-to-time I’ll be posting some of my own accordion arrangements for you to download and (hopefully) enjoy playing. Just my way of saying “thanks” for being a visitor to my website.

And what better way to kick things off than with something in honor of Oktoberfest, which starts today in Munich!

I’ve never been, but I hear that it’s in tents! (Ba-dum-psssh…)

Anyway, here’s the beer hall favorite Du, du liegst mir im Herzen

Click image to download…

Those of us who learned accordion using the excellent Palmer-Hughes method books will no doubt recognize Du, du liegst mir im Herzen as the basis for volume 1’s Dreaming. P&H just modified the melody a bit to simplify the fingering.

I’m using the Marlene Dietrich version as inspiration for the somewhat unusual chord progression here. I think it makes the song a lot more harmonically interesting.

Also, I’m only going through the “Ja, ja, ja, ja…” part once per repeat. But you often hear it played twice in a row, so feel free to repeat those bars if you like. It is, after all, the one part that even those who don’t know German get to sing along with!

Practice Tips from Itzhak Perlman

Do your musicianship a favor and take three minutes to hear what violin legend Itzak Perlman has to say about practicing:

“I always say ‘practice slowly,’ and the reason that I say ‘practice slowly’ is this: If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly.”

I’m a big fan of slow practice too, and I’ll probably talk more about it in later posts. In the meantime, give it a shot the next time you hit a troublesome passage. The slower, the better. A metronome can help “rein you in” if you need it.