The gentle way into this piece. Where the full arrangement sits in four flats at ♩=86 and reaches five notes at once, this one is in G major with a single sharp, moves at ♩=65, and never asks for more than three notes at a time. Same tune, far less to manage.
This page is in two-four, so the counts run 1 2 to the bar rather than four. Bars are half the usual length, which is why there are 136 of them. Read the counts down the column: 1 is the downbeat, e & a the sixteenths between.
Each bar is two beats, not four, so 136 bars is about the same music as 68 ordinary ones. If a passage feels like it is lurching, you are almost certainly still counting in four.
Across all 136 bars neither hand ever plays more than three notes at once or reaches beyond a tenth. That was measured, not assumed. Whatever else this piece asks of you, it will not ask you to stretch.
Because the right hand rarely plays more than two notes together, the melody sits plainly on top almost everywhere. You do not need marks to find it here — just voice the upper note and keep the lower one softer.
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.
There are two Ye Qu pages in this library, built from two different files in your folder. They are not the same arrangement in different clothes — they are genuinely different pieces of writing.
nocturne-jay-chou — 136 bars of two-four in G major, one sharp, ♩=65. Only 15% of its notes are black keys, against 39% in the full version, and it never exceeds three notes in a hand. Range C2 to G6.ye-qu-fang-wen-shan — 81 bars of four-four in the original A♭/F minor, four flats, ♩=86, up to forty-five attacks a bar. Much closer to the record, and considerably harder. Start here, move there.This one you can genuinely learn front to back — there is no section that is dramatically harder than the others, which is unusual in this library. The only real work is stamina and evenness.
| Order | Section | Bars | Why here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | B · The tune arrives | 17–32 | The melody proper. Learn to hear it before anything else. |
| 2 | A · Opening | 1–16 | Short and sparse. Sets the tempo, which matters more than it looks. |
| 3 | F · The fullest part | 81–96 | The busiest bars. Still only three notes at once, just more of them. |
| 4 | C, D, E | 33–80 | The middle. Steady throughout — read and play through. |
| 5 | G and H | 97–136 | Thinner, then the close. Easiest part of the piece. |
♩=65 is genuinely slow and the slider starts you lower still, at 50. Resist speeding up: the piece is written slow and the notes have time to ring. If it sounds thin, that is usually the tempo being too fast rather than the writing being sparse.
When you can play this through cleanly at ♩=65, the full version becomes a realistic target. It is the same music: what changes is the key, going from one sharp to four flats, and the density, which roughly doubles. Learning it here first means you will already know how the piece goes, and only the hands will be new.