I originally tried creating an arrangement of this piece about two years ago at my aunt’s house in the bay area. The source material is one of Jay Chou’s most famous songs, Simple Love (Jiandan Ai). Most of what I came up back then was the syncopation between the left and right hands. It ended up sounding a bit too repetitive.
Anyway, this Saturday evening, I decided to take a new approach. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to capture the syncopation and drums of the original but decided in the end to write the piano in the spirit of the song. The chords sound a bit more classical. I also bring out the ballad aspect of the song, and less of the rhythmic hip-hop influence from the drums. I found if I tried to capture the verse melody too much, it just felt robotic. You’ll hear that I did recreate the syncopation in the second verse, but less in the melody and more in the chords. I also smoothed out the verse melody in order to allow the song to flow a bit better. And yes, some of the tinkly pretty stuff is me emulating the chinese pop ballad style Jay Chou is famous for.
I recorded this on my MotifES6. I’m interested in playing this on a full grand to see if, when improvising, I’ll add a little bit more to the range of the arrangement. Only having 61 keys is kind of annoying. I really need to save up for that baby grand and a couple of AKG 414s.
Would you happen to have sheet music for this? i would love to play this on the piano seeing as how i don’t really like the original version but this one sounds really nice. I wanna play it for a friend ^^
OMG, it’s soo good! can i have copy of this sheet music for this? my girl friends birthday is in November and i really want to play this for her.
Thanks for the compliments! I’ve got a lot of different projects, but this sounds pretty important to you so I’ll see what I can do. No guarantees yet though :).