Music Creation :: Re: Tackling "The Decisive Battle" :: Reply by celes

no_email@example.com (celes) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:33:49 +0000

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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Music Creation :: Re: Tackling "The Decisive Battle" :: Reply by celes

no_email@example.com (celes) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:06:44 +0000

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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Carrot Games

Music Creation :: Re: Tackling "The Decisive Battle" :: Reply by celes

Music Creation :: Re: Tackling "The Decisive Battle" :: Reply by celes