When you wish upon a star

Growing up I can't count how many times I've heard the theme of this song. At Tokyo Disneyland, in Disney Movie jingles etc etc. Until recently I didn't even know it was originally used in Disney's Pinocchio. I have never watched the movie, yet I know the song. I think the tune might be more famous than the movie haha.

Anyways, when I was younger, this song was one of the tunes I could never copy by ear, simply because the chords were way too complex for me to "decipher". Sure, I could have worked with sheetmusic, but as mentioned earlier, I don't do sheetmusic ;)

So I had given up on this song since then. But then recently, I stumbled upon a video of this song on YouTube. I tried to copy the first chords and suddenly IT WORKED! My ears must have evolved over the years (yay)!
I kept going until I had the chords down, and then worked out an arrangement. Here's the result:

Doing piano arrangements is always challenging to me because you have to play the bassline, chords and the melody all by yourself, as opposed to ensemble arrangements where you can delegate certain parts to other players (or tracks, if you're using sequencers).

It's like 15 years ago when did my first attempt (and got stuck), but finally I'm able to play it!

Arranged a song I found on YouTube

So there was this video that was on the YouTube top page one day. It was in the "featured videos" list and I clicked the thumbnail.

It turned out to be a video of a Japanese girl (Sachiko) who filmed herself singing a song she had written. As of now the video has been played over 88000 times! Pretty nice. She has a very beautiful voice and I think the song suits her voice well.

This is the original video:

Then I had this idea to re-orchestrate the accompaniment of the song. Since the original accompaniment is kept rather simple (which is good too), I thought "How would it sound as a pop-version?" ...You know, like in Disney animated movies, you'd have a title theme (e.g. "A Whole New World" from Aladdin) that would be played in the movie as part of the storyline and again at the end of the movie as a pop-arrangement serving as background music for the credits.

So here it goes: my pop arrangement (without vocals though)

This was my first YouTube post by the way ;)
Thanks to Sachiko for allowing me to put the video up here!