In the Hall of the Mountain King
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
- 4
- Span
- 24
- Black keys
- 35%
per note, at 112 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, B1 to B3
of the notes
- its quickest passage asks for about 268 ms a note
- 4 quick leaps of a fourth or wider relocate the hand
- it spans 24 semitones, wider than an octave
- 35% of its notes fall on black keys
- it covers 52 notes across 8 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 up 1 octave
- Violin up 2 octaves
- Accordion up 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
Edvard Grieg, "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt, Op. 46 No. 4 (1875), public domain. From mutopiaproject.org/ftp/GriegE/O46/Dans_l_antre_du_roi_de_la_montagne - midi_read.py Dans_l_antre_du_roi_de_la_montagne.mid 1 53 --track 2 The theme's first two periods, exactly as the piano score's right hand states them after the opening held fifth (note 0, the accompaniment's fermata, is not the tune): four bars in the cellar, then the same four answered an octave higher - the famous creep upward, one floor at a time. Stage 0 is the first period alone, the excerpt that always shipped. It lives at B1 - the song that made the Sheet view learn the bass clef. B minor, and the answering bars walk chromatically (E sharp spelled F by the source's own MIDI, C natural against C sharp) - keyboard, violin and guitar territory, like the Moonlight.
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.