March of the Wooden Soldiers
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
- 341 ms
- Ornaments
- 36
- Quick leaps
- 0
- Span
- 11
- Black keys
- 39%
per note, at 176 bpm
notes shorter than a snap
of a fourth or wider
semitones, G#4 to G5
of the notes
- nothing in it moves faster than about 341 ms a note, so the hands are never rushed
- 36 notes are shorter than a snap - it is built on ornament
- 39% of its notes fall on black keys
- it covers 126 notes across 24 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
Tchaikovsky, Album for the Young Op. 39 No. 5 (1878) - the toy soldiers' march, written FOR children learning the piano. Public domain, from mutopiaproject.org/ftp/TchaikovskyPI/O39/05MarchOfTheWoodenSoldiers - midi_read.py 05MarchOfTheWoodenSoldiers.mid 0 126 --track 2 --scale 2 The whole piece as its repeats play it: first strain twice (closing on A at its double-bar), middle strain twice (the same close), and the return, whose second pass finally lands the tonic D - three double-bars, three growth pages. Written with the eighth as the beat for its 2/4. D major with Tchaikovsky's chromatic neighbour notes (B flat against B, G sharp, D 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.