The hardest page in this library, and the only one marked advanced. It is kept in the original key of G minor — nearly a quarter of its notes are black keys and the key signature is the point. Every drill shows both hands on one grid, with the count on every attack.
Read the counts down the column: 1 is the downbeat of a bar, 2 3 4 are the other beats, and e & a are the sixteenths in between. Any two cells sharing a column are struck at the same instant.
The left hand does not play a single note until bar 29. That is well over a quarter of the piece for the right hand alone, sixteen attacks to the bar, unbroken. Start here — it is the least intimidating part of the arrangement and it teaches the pulse everything else sits on.
Bars 47–60 carry up to fifteen chord attacks a bar in the right hand over a bass walking into the bottom octave. Every other section is reachable if you can play those fourteen bars. Budget more time for them than for the rest combined.
Twenty of the 97 bars repeat a bar you have already played, and fourteen of those are in the opening section, where bars mostly come in identical pairs. Learn bar 1 and you have bar 2 free, and so on through bar 20.
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. Notes and rhythms are exactly as scored — nothing transposed, nothing simplified. Four things are worth knowing before you begin.
This is the one piece here where starting at bar 1 is actually right — the opening is a single hand and it teaches the pulse. But get into section D early and keep returning to it, because it will take longer than everything else put together.
| Order | Section | Bars | Why here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A · Right hand alone | 1–28 | One hand, and bars come in identical pairs. The pulse everything else rides on. |
| 2 | D · The climax | 47–60 | Start it now even though it is out of order. Half speed, hands separately, every session. |
| 3 | B · The left hand enters | 29–42 | The hands trade roles bar by bar. Count through the handovers. |
| 4 | E · Second theme | 61–76 | Easier than it looks once D is under your hands. |
| 5 | F and G | 77–97 | Sparse, then the final build. Sort out the two wide stretches in 88 and 89. |
| 6 | C, then joins | 43–46 | Four bars. Learn them last and use them to stitch B into D. |
Almost everything here is sixteenth notes, so unevenness is the failure mode, not wrong notes. Practise with the tempo slider well below full and only move it up when a section runs three times clean. A bar that is nearly right at speed is not learned; it is guessed.
Change on every bass note. In the opening 28 bars there is no bass at all, so use almost none — the pulse needs to stay dry or the repeated figure turns to wash. In section D, where the bass moves once or twice a bar, change with it exactly; a late pedal there smears the whole climax.