I had a gig down in Charleston this past Saturday night. A young man from Connecticut was proposing to his girlfriend (she said yes, by the way), and he’d hired me to play a Lewis Capaldi song before he popped the question. It was a really fun, touching moment, and I’m grateful I could be part of it (he paid me pretty well, too).

In practicing for that little performance, I had fun flipping through my music, and came upon a piano arrangement of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” that I play on the saxophone. Since I’m playing unaccompanied, I don’t have to transpose the music (saxophone is an Eb instrument, meaning that if an Eb is played on a piano, it’s a C on the saxophone), so I just read the right-hand piano melody straight off the page.

I had fun with this version, which I’m sharing today:

Alto Sax Cover of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”

A quick little version of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyrie” on alto sax—with a surprise at the end!

I edited and recorded everything on my phone. To get that A major (concert C major) chord at the end, I recorded the other parts of the chord using the Voice Memo app on my 3rd Generation iPhone SE and combined them using YouTube Create. In the original video, I end on A (concert C), the root of the chord. I then recorded a C# (concert E) and E (concert G) in Voice Memo and dropped them into YouTube Create, tweaking the timing so that the notes aligned to create the full chord.

Happy Listening!

–_TPP