The only piece in this library that needs no compromise at all — all 2,086 notes are white keys, in the original key, exactly as scored. It is also the first here in 3/4, so the counts below run 1 2 3 to the bar, not four.
Read the counts down the column: 1 is the downbeat of a bar, 2 3 are the other two beats, and e & a are the sixteenths in between. Any two cells sharing a column are struck at the same instant.
Every other page here is in four. This one is in 3/4, so a bar is twelve sixteenths rather than sixteen, and the grids are correspondingly narrower. If a passage feels like it is tripping, you are almost certainly still counting in four.
The right hand goes from three attacks a bar to four, then nine, then twelve — a note on every sixteenth. The notes never get harder; there are simply more of them. What the piece asks for is stamina and evenness, not technique.
Across all 156 bars, neither hand ever spans more than a tenth or plays more than five notes at once. That was measured, not assumed. Of the four pieces here this is the most comfortable under the hands — and only 87 of its 156 bars are new.
Hear the whole thing before you learn any of it. The drills further down teach the sections in printed order; what you play is a separate decision. Move the blocks below and the whole piece plays back in that sequence — every bar kept, nothing dropped, just resequenced. Sections A–D are the Journey to the West theme; E and F are where the arrangement leaves it.
Playback follows the tempo at the top of the page. Switch between as printed and with rolls to hear the difference the spread chords make: bar 8 becomes a single roll instead of seven hits, the four held bass chords in bars 17–20 spread bottom to top, and the last chord of the piece opens out slowly. Everything else is identical, so the comparison is clean. Both settings play the voices no pair of hands can reach in bars 5–7 and 39–40 — a synthesiser has no hands.
Built from the MuseScore file in your repository. Nothing transposed, nothing simplified, nothing substituted — the first page here where that is true without qualification.
This is the longest piece here and the easiest under the hands, which makes it a stamina exercise rather than a technical one. Start at the two places where the writing changes character — the left-hand takeover and the full-density climax — then fill in around them.
| Order | Section | Bars | Why here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | E · The hands swap | 76–96 | The left hand suddenly carries twelve attacks a bar. Practise it alone first. |
| 2 | G · Climax and close | 129–156 | Twenty-four bars at full density. Pure endurance — build it early. |
| 3 | C · Second step up | 35–56 | The first continuous-sixteenths stretch. Get evenness here and G gets easier. |
| 4 | F · The low build | 97–128 | Longest single stretch. Split it in half and learn each part separately. |
| 5 | A, B, D | 1–34, 57–75 | The sparse sections. Quick to learn, and they are where the piece breathes. |
From bar 35 onward the right hand plays a note on every sixteenth for most of the remaining piece. That is where this arrangement is won or lost. Keep the tempo slider well below full until a section runs three times clean; a bar that is nearly even at speed will not survive being joined to the ones around it.
Change the pedal on the bass note, which through most of the piece is once a bar. In the opening twenty-six bars use very little — the space between the notes is the whole effect. On dynamics, resist starting loud: the arrangement is built as one continuous rise across 156 bars, so section A needs to be quiet enough that section G still has somewhere to go.