Heidenröslein

How hard is it?

Easy, 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

259 ms

per note, at 116 bpm

Ornaments

0

nothing to decorate

Quick leaps

1

of a fourth or wider

Span

10

semitones, A4 to G5

Black keys

18%

of the notes

• its quickest passage asks for about 259 ms a note
• it covers 44 notes across 6 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 at written pitch
• 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

Franz Schubert, Heidenröslein D 257 (1815), public domain - the Goethe setting, one whole verse of the vocal line. From mutopiaproject.org/ftp/SchubertF/D257 - midi_read.py SchubertF-D257-Heidenroeslein.mid 0 44 --track 2 --scale 2 Written with the eighth as the beat. The piano's right hand doubles the voice and fills over it between phrases, so the backing takes the left hand alone (track 4). Its C sharp against C natural (and later A sharp) is Schubert's own chromaticism - keyboard, violin and guitar only.

Mutopia Project

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.