Für Elise
Loading the instrument… Pitch runs up the page and time across it. Touch a note to hear it, or play the whole melody. Sound could not load.
How hard is it?
Hard, and not because someone remembered it that way. These five numbers come off the melody itself, the same way the app grades its lessons.
- Fastest passage
- 268 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 30
- Span
- 28
- Black keys
- 13%
per note, at 112 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, C4 to E6
of the notes
- its quickest passage asks for about 268 ms a note
- 30 quick leaps of a fourth or wider relocate the hand
- it spans 28 semitones, wider than an octave
- it covers 94 notes across 22 phrases, which is how it is taught in the app, one breath at a time
What you can play it on
4 of the instruments in the workshop can teach this tune. Where the number differs from "all of them", the reason is the instrument, not the song: a diatonic kalimba has no sharps, and a pentatonic handpan or guzheng has no fourth or seventh at all.
- Piano at written pitch
- Guitar down 1 octave
- Violin at written pitch
- Accordion down 1 octave
- Kalimba not this one
- Handpan not this one
- Guzheng not this one
- Drums not this one
- Xylophone not this one
Where this transcription came from
Beethoven, Bagatelle in A minor WoO 59 (1810), public domain. From mutopiaproject.org/ftp/BeethovenLv/WoO59/fur_Elise_WoO59 - midi_read.py fur_Elise_WoO59.mid 0 94 --track 2 --scale 2 The whole first episode: the eight-bar A section everybody means by "Für Elise" (stage 0 - the first 35 notes, exactly the excerpt that always shipped), then the sunlit middle strain, the climb to the high E, and the A section's return. Written with the eighth as the beat, like the other 3/8 and 6/8 songs here. Its D sharp and G sharp are the piece - this one cannot go on a diatonic or pentatonic instrument, and is not offered to them. This was CUT from the catalogue once before, for the right reason: the only source then was a five-bar fragment in the Wikipedia article, and finishing it from memory is exactly what is forbidden here.
Every melody in this catalogue is public domain and was transcribed from a named source, then checked against it by a tool rather than by ear. None of them was written down from memory - which is the usual reason two versions of a folk tune on the internet disagree.
Learn it properly
Tapping the ribbon is not the same as playing it. In the app this melody arrives as a lesson: the notes fall in time on the instrument you picked, the board waits when you miss, and it counts the phrase again rather than moving on.