Piano reductions!

An unproductive night and morning, coupled with my discovery that Finale needs a .PDF writer in order to export to .PDF, has yielded a piano reduction, and allowed me to save it and an older one in a file format that a regular computer can actually read. Hooray!

So, without further ado, the two pieces. Also links to Youtube, so if you don't know the song, you can have a listen, and a .MID taken from the musical score, if you want to know how I arranged it. And apologies for any Skydrive popups that bug you (but if they do, you need to get Firefox. Srsly.) Huh, I guess there was further ado. Never mind.

 Kamelot - Epilogue [ YOUTUBE / MIDI / PDF ]
Bonus track from their 2005 album, The black halo. Note Finale Notepad (ie. the free version) doesn't allow for ritardandos, acciacaturae, or changes in tempo - I had to enter them as text - so the .MID doesn't reflect that. My workaround for a similar limitation can be seen on the last page. Bleh.

The song closes with variations on a repeated musical theme (original, four slight variations, original), and begins to fade out on the fifth iteration (or final variation). Obviously, you can't do this in real life, and it does get kind of boring about halfway in (for me as the pianist, anyway), so you might want to consider cutting it down to two iterations or so, then jumping straight to my tacked-on ending. Or something. I dunno.

 Trading Yesterday - For You only [ YOUTUBE / MIDI / PDF ]
Yeah, that band. I find this reduction pretty boring, myself, but you might disagree with me (although the song sure isn't). The outro is taken pretty much note-for-note from the song (barring the fact that I had to insert the string melodies somewhere), which I am happy with.

I'm not sure if CutePDF Writer embeds fonts into its output files; if it doesn't, the .PDFs will look like gibberish. If they do, comment and I'll upload the fonts, and the .TIF export if anyone doesn't have privileges to install them.

Also, the folder on Skydrive does have an RSS feed, but I'll post all my reductions here, so there shouldn't be any point in subscribing to it.

End transmission. Or something.

Of musical taste, causal inferences and bad handwriting

So I was woken (in typical B-style, at 1100 or so) by the sound of some very familiar lines on Saturday.

"Anakin is the father, isn't he? I'm so sorry."

Yeah, I don't know why I've managed to memorise those lines. Heck, I hadn't seen Revenge of the Sith since it was in cinemas! Soo, I dragged my butt out to the living room and settled on the sofa to watch the remainder of the film. (AKA the good bit. Yay fighting!) I have to say, III is definitely my favourite of the new trilogy. (YES, FLICK. NOT ONE. THREE.)

But in any case, in one of the final fights, and I won't say which, since one crazy person has yet to see III, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Duel of the Fates feature in the music as it grew increasingly epic. (Well, it phased out again, but you can't win 'em all. DotF is the main theme that plays in I when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon fight Darth Maul.) For some reason, the theme triggers an internal "SQUEE" for me. (No, I am not a lizard at heart. Most of you didn't get that. Head this-a-way.)

I didn't think much of it at the time, until I started checking to see if I could download some Star Wars soundtracks later that evening. (I was looking for the music in III that features DotF, but it's not in the soundtrack! Laaame.) Getting to the point, Duel of the Fates is the first musical theme ('track' or 'song', if you will) that I can think of that I've liked (that isn't a hymn. Because that's all the music I ever heard growing up. In retrospect, that's probably a good thing, as I outgrew the bubblegum music stage in about three months). Which made me wonder if it's the root of my love for symphonic metal. (Best. Genre. EVAR.)

Thankfully, the questionable causal inference only lasted a few minutes. (And who says Theory of Knowledge is useless?) It could be possible that I already had the taste, and DotF was one of the first pieces of music I heard which matched this palate. Which is also questionable, as this taste would have supposedly grown out of hymns. (Seriously, it is a HUGE jump from Give thanks to DotF.) Maybe it was indeed the former, helped along by how friggin' cool Darth Maul is (was?), and the fact that the fight was brilliant? (This would also explain why the original trilogy's music didn't have the same effect. Although admittedly, I grew up watching those practically like other people would've watched Disney.)

Well, here conclude the thoughts of your friendly local raving lunatic. A few links and other thoughts before concluding:

 Writing this up in Notepad++ was pretty awesome. Gotta love it highlighting your HTML for you.
 I've killed the obnoxiously long recommended listening list on the sidebar, and stuck a link to my last.fm account there instead (The comics list has exploded in its place. Woo!). Same difference. Sadly, I can't scrobble because of my non-standard use of tags, but a list of bands is still present. Also sadly, Evanescence registers the most plays in my library, because it was the first band of those I still listen to that I discovered. And my tagging things as by "Kamelot & Amanda Somerville" and the like has warped those numbers anyway. Ah, well.
 Noticed a new development in the devolution of my handwriting in my English exam this morning (Incidentally, this is the last unseen poetry commentary set by my teacher that I'll sit, and I loved every poem she chose. Heh). YES, I THOUGHT ABOUT BLOGGING IN THE MIDDLE OF AN EXAM. GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? *ahem* Anyway, it's summarised pretty well in the image below. And yeah, my capital 'Y's have turned basically into '7's. But I cross my '7's, so all's good. Over and out!

(Translation: because everybody loves marking essays in this sort of handwriting!!!1one)