New Song: Ordinary People for Piano and Voice

You can now learn to play and sing Ordinary People, made famous by John Legend, with Yousician. The song is currently available for Piano and Voice.

Ordinary People for Piano
by: Sunny Choi, Music Education Designer for Piano

Ordinary People, made famous by John Legend, consists of relatively simple but powerfully effective musical ingredients: the solo vocal that carries the melody and the piano accompaniment that supports the solo vocal.

The melody exercise (level 5) is referring to the vocal line that the artist sings. The vocal line for this song starts from a relatively low range but gradually escalates to higher notes as the song progresses. In order to prevent difficult note reading containing too many ledger notes in the bass clef in this exercise, the melody part has been transcribed to support the appropriate note range using both the bass clef and the treble clef. This makes playing the Melody exercise more fun and challenging as your note reading skill for both hands comes into play.

The chords exercise (level 6) for this song is a great exercise to get more comfortable with understanding the chordal structure of the song. The change of chord happens on the first downbeat of every bar, giving you enough time to play the notes while not feeling too pressured to prepare for a chord change that may occur in the middle of a bar. This is a great exercise to play before tackling the accompaniment arrangement that contains fuller information about the chord structure.

The full piano exercise (level 11) is a note-for-note transcription of the piano part that complements the artist’s vocal line. The left hand consists of a recurring syncopated rhythm pattern that lasts throughout the entire song. An interesting observation can be made as the Intro section of this arrangement already gives away the melody line from the Chorus section. Once the artist starts singing, the Verse section pulls back and emphasizes the chord and lets the vocals shine.

There is something fun to play with this song covering a wide range of levels. Give it a play with Yousician Piano!