Tackling "The Decisive Battle"

[celes]

I've decided to continue my piano journey by tackling one of my favourite tracks from final fantasy 6!

Here it is! In all its beauty: https://musescore.com/user/28191026/scores/11226331

After not really vibing with the other arrangement I found I found this one and I'm so much happier with it. I made some tiny adjustments so that it matches more closely how it sounds to the original, but for the most part I kept it as is.

It's the first time I try a piece with where the right hand plays various keys at the same time! Sometimes it's just adding a note of the chord for emphasis, which I could skip, but I decided I'm gonna give it a go to learn yet another technique ^^

But then there's also this bit[1]:

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I couldn't help but annotate this bar with the completely accurate music annotation of "OMG" which is italian for "oh my god". I guess I'm new to musical arrangements and this shouldn't be as special but yeah fitting those three notes in there, that are definitely there, that I remember from the original SNES arrangement, in such a perfect way in a score that was already crammed... That's amazing!

Anyway! I may be posting more things as I progress, I've been working on this for about two weeks now and I've learned the right hand, which I can play somewhat consistently at half the speed. Still a long way to go but when you love the song it doesn't matter how tough it may be!

[1]: No you aren't supposed to recognize this bit just from seeing a piece of music score. That takes years of training. I can't do it either. You just click the musescore link, click on this bit of score and hit play so you can listen to it! "Normal" people like me only know how this bit sounds because I've been studying this music sheet for hours already.

[celes]

I'll also take the chance and recommend this extension if you want to print something from MuseScore: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ownloader/

I'd gladly pay them money for this but there were so many dark patterns in their sign-up process I was incapable of doing it

[Sugui]

which is italian for "oh my god"

I can't read this without imagining Luigi from Super Mario Bros saying it with an Italian accent while doing this gesture : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_vuoi%3F

But yeah, it's a very good theme, I'm playing FFVI lately and I love when a boss battle begins because of the great music

The arrangement seems challenging tho! I'll love to hear any news about this and seeing you progressing though it

[celes]

Haven't posted an update in a while, but I'm still in grind mode for this song

I can play the right hand at an acceptable speed, about 170bpm tho the target is 210, which I can somewhat keep up with on my most inspired days but definitely not there yet.

A funny thing I realized is that, for a song I've known since childhood, there are some parts I was clearly misremembering. Subtle parts, a note here or there being slightly different as to what I remembered. At first I thought the score I found was wrong, but stopping and listening to the original I realized how I had just been playing it in my head wrong all this time, *even* when the song was playing in my headphones. Kinda crazy to think about!

I feel the right hand in this song was the most difficult one I have tackled so far, so it's been a great exercise to gain some dexterity. Coming up with the fingering was also a very fun exercise, and I think I made a good job of making it rememberable and comfy. ^^ Usually I can learn the right hand for a song with one or two days of practice, so it goes to show how much this was above my skill level.

Anyway it is now time to do this with two hands. I have started that too. The arrangement I shared is quite simple-looking, but there are some subtleties that I didn't notice at first glance that make it much more difficult than I originally anticipated

The whole song uses the famous 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm, and for the majority of the song the left hand is just doing that: daan daan, daan daan, da-da... over and over! It's a very annoying rhythm because you're constantly switching between going with the beat or the off-beat, so it's the kind of thing that doesn't come out to me intuitively and I just have to grind it note by note, looking at the score and seeing how the left and right hands fit together.

I know from previous songs that this is temporary, though. Once you've played a couple songs that use a certain left hand pattern, like say an octave arpeggio, doing two different things with each hand becomes a lot more intuitive and less academic exercise

Or I guess we'll see! Because for now, it's back to the grind mines. I'm now at bar 11 and this is by far the toughest part of the song. Once this is over it'll probably be downhill from there... I hope

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[celes]

Oh, and another thing I realized! Maybe I'm a bit dense that it took this long for me to realize this...

If the score is well-written, the left and right hand pentagrams will be lined up so that notes coincide. I guess this is not mandatory, but it's good taste and it saves you from doing a lot of mental math when you have weirder rhythms.

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And this is even more helpful when notes *don't* line up:

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