You had three versions of this piece. This page is built on the fullest one — the complete solo arrangement in the original key — and adds something none of them has on its own: the melody is marked. A gold bar along the top of a right-hand cell means that attack was verified as the sung line, checked note by note against the vocal staff in your other file.
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.
437 right-hand attacks are marked as the tune. In a texture this busy the hardest thing is knowing what matters — the marks tell you. Everything unmarked in that hand is accompaniment, however elaborate it looks on the page.
A♭ major and F minor — 39% of the notes are black keys. There is no useful white-key version of this one. Sit the hand forward so the thumb reaches the white keys from above rather than reaching in for the black ones.
Bars 57–71 run up to forty-five attacks a bar across the two hands. Everywhere else sits between twelve and thirty. Budget more time for those fifteen bars than for the rest of the piece combined.
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.
Your Ye Qu/sheets/ folder holds three different things, not three copies of the same thing. Here is what each is and why this page uses the one it does.
ye-qu-fang-wen-shan — a full solo piano arrangement, 81 bars, 4/4, in the original key of A♭/F minor. 2,159 notes, the widest range of the three at C1 to G♯6, and the only one that is both complete and untransposed. Everything on this page comes from it.Jay_Chou_Ye_Qu — not a solo arrangement at all but a voice-and-accompaniment score: its upper staff is the sung line, its lower staff the left-hand part. Useless as a piano piece on its own, but its vocal staff is exactly what was needed to identify the melody inside the solo version. Only pitches were taken from it.nocturne-jay-chou — a simplified version transposed to G major, in 2/4, with only 15% black keys. Genuinely easier and a reasonable place to start if the four flats defeat you, but it is a different key and a thinner texture, so mixing it in would have meant two arrangements fighting each other.This is the second hardest page in the library after Tron. The density is relentless — there is almost no bar under twenty attacks except section D — so build it in the order below rather than front to back.
| Order | Section | Bars | Why here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | D · The quiet stretch | 40–48 | Half the density of everywhere else. The one place you can learn the harmony without fighting the texture. |
| 2 | B · First verse | 9–23 | The tune. Play only the gold notes first, then add the rest underneath them. |
| 3 | F · The climax | 57–71 | The hardest fifteen bars. Start early, go slowly, and expect it to take weeks rather than days. |
| 4 | C · Second verse | 24–39 | Section B with more underneath. Easier once B is secure. |
| 5 | A, E, G | pickup–8, 49–56, 72–80 | Opening, ramp and close. Learn last and use them to join everything up. |
This is the whole battle. In a texture running thirty notes a bar, an unvoiced melody disappears completely and the piece turns into wash. Practise each section twice: once playing only the gold-marked notes with the right hand so you hear the tune bare, then again with everything, keeping those notes noticeably louder than what surrounds them. If you cannot hear the melody in the second pass, the accompaniment is too loud, not the melody too quiet.
Change on the left hand’s bass note, which is roughly once or twice a bar. With four flats and this much motion, a late pedal change smears two harmonies together and the result sounds wrong rather than blurred. In section F, where the bass moves fastest, consider half-pedalling rather than full changes.