Trippy keyboard exercise

Tonight I stumbled upon a trippy little keyboard exercise: switching hands.

So far I’ve mostly been playing bass clef with the left hand and treble clef with the right hand as is normal. But then I thought why not try switching hands so that the left hand is playing the treble part and the right hand is playing the bass part.

Its actually really fun and makes me wonder if any composers ever messed around with this or other similar things in their music. For example another idea might be to invert arpeggios – I think I read that that actually happens in some pieces by Bach, that some pieces are inversions of other pieces.

Since bass clef is something much newer to me – much of my process of learning keyboard at the beginning stage seems to be related to really getting used to reading and playing the bass clef – suddenly switching the part to my dominant hand actually felt good, as though it gave my brain some kind of relief.

Because the dominant hand is so much more comfortable with sight reading and also because its used to playing the treble clef which I have no problem reading, using it for the bass clef makes the bass clef seem easier.

Conversely, playing the treble clef with my left hand is really interesting. It gives me a chance to see how much my left hand ability has developed.

Another interesting thing about switching hands is that the fingering completely changes and passages where I’m very familiar with the fingering with normal hands suddenly becomes very interesting because, yes, it is inverted or reversed in this interesting way.

Finally, there’s an aspect of site-reading exercise in this because suddenly each hand is playing the other clef. It means I have to get my brain out of being always locked into one clef or another when reading.

Another similar exercise I like to do now is to play bass clef stuff on violin and just transpose it all as I’m reading it.

I wonder if any instructors ever surprised their students with such a request: One day the student is sitting down ready to play a piece for the teacher and the teacher suddenly says “Switch hands.” The student gives the teacher a somewhat puzzled, perplexed look and the teacher just grins and nods. The student begins to play…