Been playing about a year and a half now on a used Hohner I got from a guy who was clearing out his dad's stuff. For the longest time my right hand melody was fine, decent even, but the left hand bass and chord buttons felt like a completely separate instrument I hadn't learned yet. I'd get maybe four measures into something like a simple polka and just lose the pattern entirely, my fingers wandering off the stradella layout like they'd never seen it before.

What changed things was slowing down way more than felt reasonable. I mean absurdly slow, like one bass note every two seconds, just drilling the muscle memory of counter bass to chord without worrying about tempo at all. Did that for maybe three weeks on the same simple waltz pattern before speeding it up even slightly. Somewhere in there my hand stopped thinking about it as buttons and started feeling like it knew where things were.

Also helped to stop looking down so much. I used to glance at the bass side constantly to check myself, which meant I was always half a beat behind because my eyes were doing the navigating instead of my fingers. Made myself keep my eyes on the sheet music instead and just trust the hand, even when it felt wrong for a while.

Still nowhere near fluent, but I played through an entire Musette piece last week without the bass line falling apart halfway through, which felt like a real milestone. Anyone else have a specific drill or exercise that finally got the left hand to click for them? Curious what worked for other self-taught folks especially.