Sheet Music Guy !

Hey everybody,

I’ve recently figured out Jay Chou’s The Longest Movie, but I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting a good arrangement together for it.

When playing these types of pop songs in full, it is always a challenge to keep the repeated material interesting with a very limited palette. In other words, it’s better to play the verses and choruses differently every time they repeat, or else it might get boring, and all I have to work with is a lone piano, my two hands and my pedaling foot. No drum builds, guitars or string sections. What’s a poor pianist to do.

Some song genres, like pop-rock, are fun and catchy enough to just bash out playfully without too much variation. The Sunny Otaku track is a good example. Another way to escape this conundrum is with medleys, where you can just play the intro-verse-chorus once and creatively mix it into the next song. You don’t have to worry about variation at all, because nothing ever gets repeated.

This song, however, is one of those super-emotive Jay tracks, where it sounds like he’s going to burst into tears at any second, so you want it to have variety, to have some builds with peaks and valleys.  I chose not to medley it, and also, a lot of his piano songs aren’t in the same key as this one (E major) which would make things difficult. I guess I’d have to do things the hard way….ie properly.

I guess my main trouble with this is the chorus.  It’s repeated three times, once after the first verse, twice after the second, with a final fadeout.  In the real song, each chorus builds upon the previous one, by adding additional instruments like drums and guitar, and by progressively more impassioned singing (Jay-about-to-cry-very-aggressively).  I’m having a lot of trouble approximating this on piano.  The last time I had to do this was for Fairytale (Tong Hua), which built up and down a few times and worked pretty well, but back then I had the help of a few key changes to switch things up a bit.  Now I’ve got nothing helping me out, albeit the same pretty melody in the same E major key, which always seems to play either a bit too high at one octave or a bit too low if I move it down.

Ah well.  Don’t mind me, I’ll figure it out somehow

For those of you who want to take a crack at it, here are the chord progressions for the song.  Each chord is for two beats of the bar.

Intro: Emaj, E7, Amaj, Aminor

Verses: Emaj, E7, Amaj, Aminor / Emaj, C#Minor 7, F#Major 7, Bmajor

Chorus: AMajor, Aminor, Emajor, C# Minor 7, F# Minor, BMajor, Emajor, E7.  Same for second part of chorus, except without the last E7

This also works on guitar too, if you want to strum along to Jay.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everybody!