Here’s the first time I arrange an anime song! Proudly chosen by my own friends, a lot of those happen to watch JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures.
This song has two main things I want to capture - the raw power and also the “bizarre” moments either interjected in between or found stirring in the background. The opening is already one of the hardest places to interpret, because the “JoJo” chants were so distorted that presenting it on the piano is almost impossible. I tried to use 3rds before, but that was too consonant so I ended up with this motif that contains both the dissonance and the gesture.
The song gets to the most powerful during the choruses, that I went with this really heavy and leap-heavy approach to left hand to imitate the almost blindly repetitive drum pattern, with tremolo to represent the guitars. Another interesting part is the short effects before the chorus, in which the notes are very distorted and my solution is to utilise different arpeggios that deviate from the original key to maintain its chromatic nature.
Despite being a very heavy song, I also tried to make more contrast to less intense sections, so that the performer has a bit more of a breathing room in an otherwise very tiring piece to play. This is also a great excuse for me to make a variation by the last chorus, where it gets quieter, and the left hand transformed into motifs found in the verse.
Difficulty: 8/10 (Intense)
This piece is relentless. Apart from the various leaps, octaves, big chords; they appear in very quick succession, and can become very unwieldy to play. On the contrary, the left hand leaps in the chorus sections requires a lot of consistency. However, many passages are repeated with very few differences in between, so it becomes manageable after a long while.
Hope you all like this! Sorry for the inactivity that lasted for more than 3 months. Hopefully the sound quality issue could be addressed ASAP as I still don’t have a standalone microphone…