Tag Archives: piano arrangement

20.02.24 – Latest music releases

Hello, everybody!

For a while towards the end of last year, I didn’t release much music, as I had so little time to practise/compose/record. Thanksfully, I’ve had a bit more time recently and have managed to release four videos, three of them original music and one cover.

The first release was a piano piece of my own called ‘Let the Scheming Begin’. It’s a character piece and is related to a piece I released at the end of 2022 called ‘Inexorable Force’. It shows a different side of the same character.

Next up was the orchestral version of the aforementioned ‘Inexorable Force’. It’s the music that would play for the final battle with the main villain of a game. It took me a couple of months working on it every night to get the orchestration sounding how I wanted. I expect if I return to it with more experience, I’ll make some subtle changes, but I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Before I started work on that orchestral version, I’d actually made a prog-rock version of the same piece, largely inspired by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, as are many final boss themes in Japanese RPGs. I ended up releasing it a week later than the orchestral version as I’ got so focused on working on that one that I hadn’t thought to release this one. I hope this, the orchestral version, and the original piano solo will serve as an interesting example of how multiple arrangements of the same piece can be made.

Finally, I just released a piano arrangement of Motoi Sakuraba’s ‘Majula’, from Dark Souls 2. It took a while before I was happy with this and there’s still one section that I’m, unsure of. Generally, I’m pleased with it.

While I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up a schedule of one release a week, I hope to keep things more regular than before.

100 Subscribers on YouTube and some music previews

Hello everybody! It’s been quite a long time since I last posted as I’ve been very busy and have had little time for music outside of teaching.

I recently became aware that I now have more than 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel, so I made a video to say thank you and to share previews of a few of my upcoming projects! I’ll be glad to hear what you think of them!

Evanescence – Hello (piano arrangement)

Hello, everybody!

This week’s video is a solo piano arrangement of Hello from Evanescence’s first album, Fallen. It’s one of my favourite songs of theirs – it’s simple overall, being just piano, one voice and a cello solo, but is interesting enough that it doesn’t get boring. I transcribed just the piano part of this years ago, but decided recently to include the vocal and cello parts on the piano.

It’s emotionally very heavy and I tried to capture that with my arrangement. I didn’t want to harmonise or double the vocal part, as it’s a very personal song for Amy Lee, the writer, and the original has only one vocal track. I found that the song is so well arranged in it’s original form, that this piano solo version practically arranged itself! Let me know what you think of it!

Piano arrangement of ‘All That I’m Living For’ by Evanescence

Hi everybody!

Today I’d like to announce the release of a new video – this one is a piano arrangement of All That I’m Living For by Evanescence, based on the 2006 AOL Music Sessions performance. It was originally made for one of my pupils, who wanted to learn how to play it. That version was a little simpler, but also quite repetitive – I added a few things to create this version. Let me know what you think of it!

In the future I might do an arrangement of the song ‘Hello’, my favourite by Evanescence. I also have some other videos in the works, including some performances of my own music and some new compositions that got delayed due to the war in Ukraine.

Piano arrangement of an excerpt from Metal Gear Solid 3 Main Theme

Hello, everybody. I glad to post a new video – the first since having had to leave Kyiv due to the war. This one is a piano arrangement of the music from my favourite scene in the Metal Gear Solid series of video games.

I hope to have some more performance videos up soon, though you can imagine, a month without access to a piano for regular practice slowed me down with that.