Ha, my piano teacher was also the pianist at a small Baptist church … it sounds like we've had similar piano experiences, although my main skill is in sightreading, with the disadvantage being that I don't think i've ever learnt to play a piece note perfectly because I always rely on winging it and can never put the effort in to actually learn something properly (the "play it correctly then get it up to speed" rule is like … in an ideal world lol. you want me to play through this more than 3 times?!)
I've played some of COE33 so far and I'm finding the music very unmemorable – I listened to the Verso track a few times there and I would suspect that was also written for a duet, I think it sounds like there are too many lines for a soloist. (Although the transcription on MuseScore really doesn't help in terms of spacing the lines across the hands … that and writing D♭ every time when it should be C♯ … makes it much harder to sightread than it needs to be aargh.) I find that Uematsu's music has really strong melodies that stick in my head after just a couple of listens, whereas I'd have to listen to this so many times to remember the tunes, I'm sure. And the piano pieces in Uematsu's soundtracks feel like they were really written to be played on the piano – transcribing the Treno theme from FF9 was so straightforward because the chords he used were the ones that just sat right under the hands. You can tell he draws inspiration from such a wide range of sources too, whereas I (too harshly?) suspect that some VGM composers are just taking inspiration from other video game music, so the style just gets clichéd and stale and becomes an increasingly dull parody of itself … it's just like how fanfiction writers need to read literature, I guess.
… sorry for this long comment which really boils down to "I'm a simp for Nobuo", I just love piano/music arranging talk …
anyway I was going to subtly link to my Treno transcription above but I forgot second-class citizens on this website don't get to use <a>, so here's the URL anyway: https://tre.praze.net/music/files/20220324-treno/Treno.pdf
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2025-07-23 09:14 pm (UTC)I've played some of COE33 so far and I'm finding the music very unmemorable – I listened to the Verso track a few times there and I would suspect that was also written for a duet, I think it sounds like there are too many lines for a soloist. (Although the transcription on MuseScore really doesn't help in terms of spacing the lines across the hands … that and writing D♭ every time when it should be C♯ … makes it much harder to sightread than it needs to be aargh.) I find that Uematsu's music has really strong melodies that stick in my head after just a couple of listens, whereas I'd have to listen to this so many times to remember the tunes, I'm sure. And the piano pieces in Uematsu's soundtracks feel like they were really written to be played on the piano – transcribing the Treno theme from FF9 was so straightforward because the chords he used were the ones that just sat right under the hands. You can tell he draws inspiration from such a wide range of sources too, whereas I (too harshly?) suspect that some VGM composers are just taking inspiration from other video game music, so the style just gets clichéd and stale and becomes an increasingly dull parody of itself … it's just like how fanfiction writers need to read literature, I guess.
… sorry for this long comment which really boils down to "I'm a simp for Nobuo", I just love piano/music arranging talk …
anyway I was going to subtly link to my Treno transcription above but I forgot second-class citizens on this website don't get to use <a>, so here's the URL anyway: https://tre.praze.net/music/files/20220324-treno/Treno.pdf