piano blather
Jul. 22nd, 2025 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaClair Obscur got me to hit the keys again lol. it's been a while!
right, so i was never an excellent pianist, but i did take lessons age 6 through 18, and i was pretty serious about it probably age 12 through 15ish, 16ish or so? i remember a high school recital that involved a chopin nocturne + the ff7 piano collections arrangement of ff7's main theme lol, and my memorized "party trick" songs for a long time were the ff5 piano collections arrangement of "battle with gilgamesh" (...played EXTREMELY uptempo, lol, it's so fun to go fast with that one) + "to zanarkand."
anyway, every few years i go through a phase where i dust off the ol' piano. last time i was unemployed i played a lot of gershwin. during the pandemic i very ineffectively threw myself against a piano arrangement of ffxv's "apocalypsis noctis" (possibly this one?), but sorta flaked out halfway through because i was being so slow learning it & i sorta despaired at the idea of ever getting it up to speed, as exciting as it is. (i love... to Bang Loudly On Lots Of Keys...) like it wasn't even hard for any interesting reason, just... doing large leaps at sixteenth-note-speed in a brisk time signature seems... really tedious? maybe if i were better i would not think so but i certainly thought so lol
anyway, Clair Obscur has a lot of piano-centric tracks and i was like hell yeah, if they were designed for piano and sound not-too-bad surely that's doable right
(i say with the tone of a middle-aged guy who played football in high school like "YEAH I STILL GOT IT" 0.8 seconds before i have a heart attack from doing yard work too hard)
ANYWAY. pieces i've been piddling with:
* "Verso" — this is probably the one i've spent the most time on so far. it's not even like THAT memorable of a song, in the context of the game, haha, but i kinda got lowkey obsessed with it the more i've been playing it? something about that 3/8 meter, man, it just sounds so shifty and cool, and it feels really interesting under the fingers even though it's also... hmm...
so i played a lot of Nobuo Uematsu's stuff in high school, right? and his pieces really feel like "a decently skilled pianist who enjoyed pop music physically tooled around at a keyboard to write this song." like, just in how natural they feel under the hand. "to zanarkand" and "rose of may" are dead-easy and have very straightforward fingerings and break up chords in ways that are pretty familiar if you've ever played something out of a church hymnal or a pop music catalog. Uematsu's on the record saying he got into piano because he wanted to be Elton John, so like, this checks out! (and this was Exactly Ideal for 12-year-old me who, yeah, the whole reason i went from "piano is a thing i do sometimes" to "oh this shit rips actually" was the realization of I Can Download Sheet Music By This Random Music Major? I Can Play The Music From My Video Games? Holy Fucking Shit. his stuff is very playable!)
anyway, i know less about Lorien Testard's musical background, so i don't know how much of a keyboardist he is or isn't, but man some parts of "Verso" feel... unnatural? like, just goofy ways of breaking up chords that feel like they'd only occur to you if you were arranging this stuff for a synthesizer instead of a poor living breathing human on the other end LOL. but i don't entirely trust my instincts there, right. i was never THAT good of a pianist and maybe if i were simply better, some of these leaps / weird bits would feel natural to me...
...but i did feel a little Seen when i found some Polish chick performing this piece on Youtube, with the note: "I'm honestly not sure if this track was written to be played by human hands. Unfortunately for me, it got stuck in my head so I had to learn it anyway LOL" OK GIRL I WAS THINKING THE SAME THING. AND YOU ARE MUCH BETTER AT PIANO THAN ME SO. AT LEAST I'M NOT ALONE haha
anyway, i can now play the first page mostly-without-error, albeit quite a bit downtempo. don't... don't ask me how long it took me to get to that point. and there's three more pages. urk. i'm starting to worry that i made a mistake obsessing over this one so much; it'll be a shame if i end up flaking out before i can play the thing through even once, and it'll be an even bigger shame if i learn it but can't ever quite get myself to play it at tempo. (though the saving grace here is i do think this piece would sound OK a bit downtempo... maybe that is just cope, but, idk, it is an ethereal-mysterious-woo-y piece, unlike "apocalpysis noctis" which is just SAD if you're not BANGING THE KEYS AS FAST AS POSSIBLE lmao)
* i found this arrangement of "Lumiére" a little lacking—i get it, it's trying to take a piece meant for ensemble and translate it to piano, and it does a very literal job that nonetheless doesn't sound very good lol. then i remembered there's a slow, sad reprise of "Lumiére" later in the game, titled "Révérence", and since it's DESIGNED for piano and a pretty straightforward-sounding song, surely it won't be too weird...
...uhh wow why are those chords such thick chonks. again, yeah, i'm pretty confident i could learn those—more confident than i am that i can learn "Verso", lol, it being a much slower tempo helps a lot—but like, why. what piano arranger would make that choice.
well, i was gratified to learn via the arranger's youtube that apparently the original piece (as played in the game) was arranged for duet pianos. what the fuck. who even does that. there's another arranger who pared it down a bit more, while still retaining the feel/vibe of the original, so if i'm going to put in the time to learn one of the versions, it'll probably be that one, but right now i've just got them both printed out for periodic-piddling-purposes, since besides "Verso", the other track i'm putting time in for at the moment is...
* "Une vie á t'aimer" — it is good to have a few pieces memorized as a nerd party trick. because i go to a lot of nerd parties. and this is one of the more iconic songs in the game, right. everyone spent a while throwing themselves at Renoir, right.
to be clear, i'm only planning to learn the first ~2min or so, and then i'm... either making up some Big Final Resolving Chord + leaving it there, or i may pick and choose a bit from the later sections and/or arrange my own little version of the bridge or whatever. i enjoy the song a lot in the context of the game, but everything that's not the main chorus + verses i think are relatively forgettable, melody-wise? like The Good Part is RIGHT THERE UPFRONT lol, and the bridge / longer "violin go cray here" sections just don't make the transition to solo piano very well, so. you only really need those 2min you don't need the whole damn rock opera
the main appeal of this one is that it's pretty easy to play so EVEN IF i flake out of my present piano kick, i'll hopefully have one more nerd party trick added to my arsenal. i've already got those ~2min learned, just need to get them up to tempo, but they're not crazy or weird or anything
* "Alicia" — is a very iconic and memorable song from the game, so it checks the "nerd party trick" box! and it mostly feels like it's meant for piano. harder than uematsu, but like, yeah a real human is meant to be able to play this. i actually already went and learned measures 20-34 & got them up to speed because... they're SO bombastic and feelsy, haha, it's my shit. but the piece overall is still tricky enough that i'm gonna have to practice a decent amount to learn it well, and i was like... okay i should have one (1) hard piece and one (1) easy piece at the same time, i don't want to spread myself thin by working on this and "Verso" at the same time, and "Verso" won. alas. but if my kick lasts i hope to learn this one too.
anyway i've been wondering if i should get a one-off lesson with a piano teacher or something? the problem is i know that's not a market piano teachers really want to be in, right, like "hi i'm an annoying amateur who wants to show up a couple times, play the repertoire i want to play, and you give me some hot tips before i disappear again" is... not as appealing as a regularly-recurring student lol. but it's been so long since i had any formal instruction, and the formal instruction i had back in the day was... pretty mongrel-ish:
* the piano teacher i had ages 6-18 was the pianist at a small baptist church. lovely woman, but she didn't really believe in piano competitions or things like that, and really believed in being encouraging/warm over really "pushing" me, so i was probably "behind" where i should've been, technique-wise
* i freaked out about said behind-ness starting around age 13, but loved my piano teacher so much i couldn't stand to break up with her, so... i was double-dipping on piano teachers for a while LOL. preparing for two different lessons every week without telling the other. i managed to convince them both to let me work on the same piece for a while and i was like "oh, this will be so much easier, now i only have ONE set of stuff to learn"... except it was WORSE because they had DIFFERENT OPINIONS ABOUT HOW I SHOULD BE PLAYING IT and i kept getting confused which way i should play it for which person lmao. god being a teenager was so much fun and also such a fucking mess. anyway that guy was serious fucking business but i could only keep that up for a few years
* and i did go to a piano camp in middle school where i got a few one-off lessons with each of the piano professors there. and that was really cool because they each focused on such different things (chick who was very Classical Bitch With Flawless Technique; old guy who was very Jazz Guy Who Plays In A Very Embodied Fashion, etc)
this was all sufficient to make me pretty confident i can learn most pieces you put in front of me. but i'm pretty bad at... knowing what i don't know? like, when i'm staring at something like "should this be hard," "am i relying too much on just Rote Memorizing + Muscle Memory-ing This Shit," "is there some easier fingering to do here," "is there a more efficient way to practice," i'm like... uhhh... i just have no idea lol.
i remember feeling like i learned a lot in my piano lessons but when i think about them now all i actually remember is a grab-bag of techniques / random heuristics lol. it's like:
-> Intense Guy always had me warm up with Hanon exercises and insisted i practice that shit regularly. i should, uh, probably resume that tbh (though now i'm actually curious how useful IS that... he said something about building up hand strength + reach but DOES it actually do that?)
-> if something is hard, try practicing it syncopated & then unsyncopate once you get it up to speed. idk why this works but it really fucking works, it's kinda nuts
-> "wow this is hard; maybe i should try learning each hand separately first" — this is the voice of the devil speaking. you can practice a little hands apart (it's the only way to learn some tricky runs) but try to get the hands playing together ASAP
-> a bunch of body/posture shit i learned from Jazz Guythat i am presently being very lazy about oops
-> (cardinal rule) Play It Correctly, Then Get It Up To Speed. (if you burn the wrong note into your muscle memory because you were like I Gotta Go Fast, you are fucking hosed, it's going to be so obnoxious to unlearn that. whereas if you play it very boringly slow a quadrillion times, well, at least you haven't learned anything wrong! just gotta paint the go fast stripes on later)
-> oh right i also conned a cool guy at the guitar store once into giving me "music composition"-y lessons because he was really good at improvising and i was writing a lot of my own stuff back then. he gave me a fake book & taught me a couple cheat-y tricks / cool-sounding chord progressions you can just memorize & then lock & load whenever you gotta accompany someone on short notice lol. very useful stuff but i do actually want to learn the repertoire more-or-less as written rather than just vibing into new territory lol
uhhh are there other things. is that really it. lol
anyway whatever. i'm having fun! that's the main thing! but i also like hearing myself talk, hence this post LOL happy tuesday
right, so i was never an excellent pianist, but i did take lessons age 6 through 18, and i was pretty serious about it probably age 12 through 15ish, 16ish or so? i remember a high school recital that involved a chopin nocturne + the ff7 piano collections arrangement of ff7's main theme lol, and my memorized "party trick" songs for a long time were the ff5 piano collections arrangement of "battle with gilgamesh" (...played EXTREMELY uptempo, lol, it's so fun to go fast with that one) + "to zanarkand."
anyway, every few years i go through a phase where i dust off the ol' piano. last time i was unemployed i played a lot of gershwin. during the pandemic i very ineffectively threw myself against a piano arrangement of ffxv's "apocalypsis noctis" (possibly this one?), but sorta flaked out halfway through because i was being so slow learning it & i sorta despaired at the idea of ever getting it up to speed, as exciting as it is. (i love... to Bang Loudly On Lots Of Keys...) like it wasn't even hard for any interesting reason, just... doing large leaps at sixteenth-note-speed in a brisk time signature seems... really tedious? maybe if i were better i would not think so but i certainly thought so lol
anyway, Clair Obscur has a lot of piano-centric tracks and i was like hell yeah, if they were designed for piano and sound not-too-bad surely that's doable right
(i say with the tone of a middle-aged guy who played football in high school like "YEAH I STILL GOT IT" 0.8 seconds before i have a heart attack from doing yard work too hard)
ANYWAY. pieces i've been piddling with:
* "Verso" — this is probably the one i've spent the most time on so far. it's not even like THAT memorable of a song, in the context of the game, haha, but i kinda got lowkey obsessed with it the more i've been playing it? something about that 3/8 meter, man, it just sounds so shifty and cool, and it feels really interesting under the fingers even though it's also... hmm...
so i played a lot of Nobuo Uematsu's stuff in high school, right? and his pieces really feel like "a decently skilled pianist who enjoyed pop music physically tooled around at a keyboard to write this song." like, just in how natural they feel under the hand. "to zanarkand" and "rose of may" are dead-easy and have very straightforward fingerings and break up chords in ways that are pretty familiar if you've ever played something out of a church hymnal or a pop music catalog. Uematsu's on the record saying he got into piano because he wanted to be Elton John, so like, this checks out! (and this was Exactly Ideal for 12-year-old me who, yeah, the whole reason i went from "piano is a thing i do sometimes" to "oh this shit rips actually" was the realization of I Can Download Sheet Music By This Random Music Major? I Can Play The Music From My Video Games? Holy Fucking Shit. his stuff is very playable!)
anyway, i know less about Lorien Testard's musical background, so i don't know how much of a keyboardist he is or isn't, but man some parts of "Verso" feel... unnatural? like, just goofy ways of breaking up chords that feel like they'd only occur to you if you were arranging this stuff for a synthesizer instead of a poor living breathing human on the other end LOL. but i don't entirely trust my instincts there, right. i was never THAT good of a pianist and maybe if i were simply better, some of these leaps / weird bits would feel natural to me...
...but i did feel a little Seen when i found some Polish chick performing this piece on Youtube, with the note: "I'm honestly not sure if this track was written to be played by human hands. Unfortunately for me, it got stuck in my head so I had to learn it anyway LOL" OK GIRL I WAS THINKING THE SAME THING. AND YOU ARE MUCH BETTER AT PIANO THAN ME SO. AT LEAST I'M NOT ALONE haha
anyway, i can now play the first page mostly-without-error, albeit quite a bit downtempo. don't... don't ask me how long it took me to get to that point. and there's three more pages. urk. i'm starting to worry that i made a mistake obsessing over this one so much; it'll be a shame if i end up flaking out before i can play the thing through even once, and it'll be an even bigger shame if i learn it but can't ever quite get myself to play it at tempo. (though the saving grace here is i do think this piece would sound OK a bit downtempo... maybe that is just cope, but, idk, it is an ethereal-mysterious-woo-y piece, unlike "apocalpysis noctis" which is just SAD if you're not BANGING THE KEYS AS FAST AS POSSIBLE lmao)
* i found this arrangement of "Lumiére" a little lacking—i get it, it's trying to take a piece meant for ensemble and translate it to piano, and it does a very literal job that nonetheless doesn't sound very good lol. then i remembered there's a slow, sad reprise of "Lumiére" later in the game, titled "Révérence", and since it's DESIGNED for piano and a pretty straightforward-sounding song, surely it won't be too weird...
...uhh wow why are those chords such thick chonks. again, yeah, i'm pretty confident i could learn those—more confident than i am that i can learn "Verso", lol, it being a much slower tempo helps a lot—but like, why. what piano arranger would make that choice.
well, i was gratified to learn via the arranger's youtube that apparently the original piece (as played in the game) was arranged for duet pianos. what the fuck. who even does that. there's another arranger who pared it down a bit more, while still retaining the feel/vibe of the original, so if i'm going to put in the time to learn one of the versions, it'll probably be that one, but right now i've just got them both printed out for periodic-piddling-purposes, since besides "Verso", the other track i'm putting time in for at the moment is...
* "Une vie á t'aimer" — it is good to have a few pieces memorized as a nerd party trick. because i go to a lot of nerd parties. and this is one of the more iconic songs in the game, right. everyone spent a while throwing themselves at Renoir, right.
to be clear, i'm only planning to learn the first ~2min or so, and then i'm... either making up some Big Final Resolving Chord + leaving it there, or i may pick and choose a bit from the later sections and/or arrange my own little version of the bridge or whatever. i enjoy the song a lot in the context of the game, but everything that's not the main chorus + verses i think are relatively forgettable, melody-wise? like The Good Part is RIGHT THERE UPFRONT lol, and the bridge / longer "violin go cray here" sections just don't make the transition to solo piano very well, so. you only really need those 2min you don't need the whole damn rock opera
the main appeal of this one is that it's pretty easy to play so EVEN IF i flake out of my present piano kick, i'll hopefully have one more nerd party trick added to my arsenal. i've already got those ~2min learned, just need to get them up to tempo, but they're not crazy or weird or anything
* "Alicia" — is a very iconic and memorable song from the game, so it checks the "nerd party trick" box! and it mostly feels like it's meant for piano. harder than uematsu, but like, yeah a real human is meant to be able to play this. i actually already went and learned measures 20-34 & got them up to speed because... they're SO bombastic and feelsy, haha, it's my shit. but the piece overall is still tricky enough that i'm gonna have to practice a decent amount to learn it well, and i was like... okay i should have one (1) hard piece and one (1) easy piece at the same time, i don't want to spread myself thin by working on this and "Verso" at the same time, and "Verso" won. alas. but if my kick lasts i hope to learn this one too.
anyway i've been wondering if i should get a one-off lesson with a piano teacher or something? the problem is i know that's not a market piano teachers really want to be in, right, like "hi i'm an annoying amateur who wants to show up a couple times, play the repertoire i want to play, and you give me some hot tips before i disappear again" is... not as appealing as a regularly-recurring student lol. but it's been so long since i had any formal instruction, and the formal instruction i had back in the day was... pretty mongrel-ish:
* the piano teacher i had ages 6-18 was the pianist at a small baptist church. lovely woman, but she didn't really believe in piano competitions or things like that, and really believed in being encouraging/warm over really "pushing" me, so i was probably "behind" where i should've been, technique-wise
* i freaked out about said behind-ness starting around age 13, but loved my piano teacher so much i couldn't stand to break up with her, so... i was double-dipping on piano teachers for a while LOL. preparing for two different lessons every week without telling the other. i managed to convince them both to let me work on the same piece for a while and i was like "oh, this will be so much easier, now i only have ONE set of stuff to learn"... except it was WORSE because they had DIFFERENT OPINIONS ABOUT HOW I SHOULD BE PLAYING IT and i kept getting confused which way i should play it for which person lmao. god being a teenager was so much fun and also such a fucking mess. anyway that guy was serious fucking business but i could only keep that up for a few years
* and i did go to a piano camp in middle school where i got a few one-off lessons with each of the piano professors there. and that was really cool because they each focused on such different things (chick who was very Classical Bitch With Flawless Technique; old guy who was very Jazz Guy Who Plays In A Very Embodied Fashion, etc)
this was all sufficient to make me pretty confident i can learn most pieces you put in front of me. but i'm pretty bad at... knowing what i don't know? like, when i'm staring at something like "should this be hard," "am i relying too much on just Rote Memorizing + Muscle Memory-ing This Shit," "is there some easier fingering to do here," "is there a more efficient way to practice," i'm like... uhhh... i just have no idea lol.
i remember feeling like i learned a lot in my piano lessons but when i think about them now all i actually remember is a grab-bag of techniques / random heuristics lol. it's like:
-> Intense Guy always had me warm up with Hanon exercises and insisted i practice that shit regularly. i should, uh, probably resume that tbh (though now i'm actually curious how useful IS that... he said something about building up hand strength + reach but DOES it actually do that?)
-> if something is hard, try practicing it syncopated & then unsyncopate once you get it up to speed. idk why this works but it really fucking works, it's kinda nuts
-> "wow this is hard; maybe i should try learning each hand separately first" — this is the voice of the devil speaking. you can practice a little hands apart (it's the only way to learn some tricky runs) but try to get the hands playing together ASAP
-> a bunch of body/posture shit i learned from Jazz Guy
-> (cardinal rule) Play It Correctly, Then Get It Up To Speed. (if you burn the wrong note into your muscle memory because you were like I Gotta Go Fast, you are fucking hosed, it's going to be so obnoxious to unlearn that. whereas if you play it very boringly slow a quadrillion times, well, at least you haven't learned anything wrong! just gotta paint the go fast stripes on later)
-> oh right i also conned a cool guy at the guitar store once into giving me "music composition"-y lessons because he was really good at improvising and i was writing a lot of my own stuff back then. he gave me a fake book & taught me a couple cheat-y tricks / cool-sounding chord progressions you can just memorize & then lock & load whenever you gotta accompany someone on short notice lol. very useful stuff but i do actually want to learn the repertoire more-or-less as written rather than just vibing into new territory lol
uhhh are there other things. is that really it. lol
anyway whatever. i'm having fun! that's the main thing! but i also like hearing myself talk, hence this post LOL happy tuesday
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
no subject
Date: 2025-07-23 09:48 pm (UTC)there are a few tracks in COE33 that have catchy melodies, i think, but unfortunately they're pretty heavily backloaded in terms of where they appear in the game and, yeah, overall the soundtrack is *much* less melodically-focused than Uematsu.
i do still enjoy it more than the median game soundtrack, which i often feel has a... static-elevator-music-y-mediocre-elctronica-y-"blah"-background-sound vibe? (like e.g. i think the assassin's creed soundtracks historically sound like Boring Ambient Sound, and it's hard for me to think of other specific examples because they're so... SAME-y... meant to vaguely evoke an atmosphere but never so much that you actually notice it...)
anyway, Testard's tracks *do* have a bit more of a "notice me" & a coherent/interesting thematic identity than aforementioned median soundtrack, imo... i haven't gotten Super Deep into breaking it apart, but there's some riffs/motifs/tracks throughout that kind of gave me renaissance motet/polyphony vibes which i think work very satisfyingly with where it goes with the overall story, and he's doing kind of Opinionated Things With Strings at points in a way that got satisfyingly under my skin... it's not Uematsu but it did get its hooks in me a few times lol. but uematsu really is just so so good sighs into hands
> 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
nah i don't think you're too harsh lol that's def A Thing i've noticed in modern video game music. (plus i suspect the lack of technical constraints from earlier eras has been bad in enforcing discipline/thoughtfulness about What Should Go Into The Game, in certain ways? like i've seen some internet commenters make a big deal out of "omg the coe33 soundtrack is EIGHT HOURS that's SO MUCH music that's SO impressive" and i'm like... i mean, one, a lot of that length is "this is actually five variations on the Same Basic Idea because there's the battle/quiet/etc version of the same song for different scenarios," which is fine to have but isn't *in and of itself* impressive; older games had to be judicious about making the same track work in a variety of situations due to space constraints! and yeah having an 11-minute-long track that's Perfectly Matched to a bunch of cutscenes and battle moments etc is cool and all, but like, "One-Winged Angel" is a Beloved Gamer Fave Track™ without needing all that length—it was just really smart about effectively using the space/instruments/etc available to it.)
ETA: ohhh and ty for the Treno arrangement! it does look so fun to play... i printed it out just now lol, may add it to my lil repertoire over here...!