Easy Arrangemets For Students - Hit The Road Jack

Today is my first day of the Easter holidays, so no work, no lessons for a few days. More time for family, walks and hive :) Maybe for making some covers and arrangements too.

Apart from classical music, the circumstances led me to play another kind of music too that is not strictly written for the piano. It is so popular now to play covers, yes, so thousands and thousands of youtube channels are growing thanks to that. And it is cool, to see creative people making up their own versions of already written music.

Some decades ago (don't ask how many) when I studied, we played almost just classical, and if we were lucky and our teachers were in some more flexible mood, we got something apart to play. Not that classical is not my favourite or I think it is not worthy of dedicating your whole life to it. No. It is just that one or two different genre songs can not make harm and can be motivating for a student to learn. The same happens now with my students, and it is not strange that my teenage and adult students ask sometimes to play a favourite song of a band or singer they like. Usually, the new mainstream music is what they listen to and attracts their attention. But look at this. One of my eight years old students asked for a song by Ray Charles. He asked me if he could play Hit The Road Jack... Sorry sweetheart, you are 8 years old and you know who is Ray Charles and you want to play a song?? Oh, great! I was so happy to know that so young man wants to play it, but, yeah, it is too difficult.

Feel free to download it and use if you need

I didn't want to leave it just that. What kind of teachers I would be if I didn't try to make him a super easy arrangement of the song. It is just the main tune, accompanied by one bass line in the left hand, but for his level it is perfect. It resembles the song, he was happy to receive it yesterday. Easter present hehehe.

As I made it yesterday, I recorded it immediately, to share it here too. I see in the Music community some users are learning to play the piano, so if you want to use it, I will leave the music sheet too. You can download it and use it for your learning purposes, or if there is another piano teacher, can be used for students.

So let us see what I did here. This arrangement is coming in A minor, as the easiest of the minors and to follow the chord progression. Although I made just one note line in the left hand, going down for the first degree, A, to G (seventh grade in natural minor) F# which I added here before the F (sixth grade) and the last not in the line is E which is the dominant (fifth grade). This line is the pattern for the whole arrangement for the left hand.

Starting hand position

The right hand will use the melody, and it requires just two positions of the hand. I know, one should not rely just on position, but what sometimes happens with young students, they like to play just in few positions until they get more confidence and start to use the whole keyboard. So just two positions, the first starting with the fifth finger on E, and the second position thumb in E and then go back to the first position. You can check it out in the video.

The video consists of two parts. The first part is the screen recording of the song in Musescore software. It is free, I use it to write music for students... it looks a bit old fashioned but it doesn't matter, it works and serves the purpose. The second part of the video shows my hands playing the song, to look at the positions and changes of it.

So that would be all for this post, I hope someone else will find use in this arrangement. I know my little student was happy with it and excited to receive it.

Ray Charles photo source