Song Bie
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?
Medium, 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
- 313 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 0
- Span
- 13
- Black keys
- 0%
per note, at 96 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, B3 to C5
it never leaves its key
- its quickest passage asks for about 313 ms a note
- it spans 13 semitones, wider than an octave
- it covers 58 notes across 9 phrases, which is how it is taught in the app, one breath at a time
What you can play it on
5 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 at written pitch
- Kalimba up 1 octave
- Violin at written pitch
- Accordion at written pitch
- Handpan not this one
- Guzheng not this one
- Drums not this one
- Xylophone not this one
Where this transcription came from
送别 "Farewell" - the melody is J. P. Ordway's "Dreaming of Home and Mother" (1851), given its Chinese words by 李叔同 in 1915; both are long out of copyright. Pitches from the score in the Chinese Wikipedia article, already in C. A whole-tone-free, white-key tune that happens to be one of the best known songs in the Chinese-speaking world.
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.