Piano Cover: M07 (Kara no Kyoukai)

Man, I've been on super-music-withdrawal recently. I've been adjusting pretty well to my graduate-student life in all aspects except that my exposure to music has dropped drastically. Part of that, of course, is that I'm no longer an undergraduate music major, but another factor is the lack of accessible musical instruments. Luckily, that all changed a few days ago: I finally managed to procure (however temporarily) an electric piano courtesy of some friends, and I feel like I've been rapidly making up for all of the piano-free days over the past two months.

Being the newly-minted anime fan that I am, I decided to tackle a couple pieces of anime music for my first piano covers since February. I decided that the first of these covers would be a piece of music from the anime movie series Kara no Kyoukai (空の境界), or Garden of Sinners. It's a beautiful set of movies (if a little confusing; I still need to re-watch them sometime), supported by an equally beautiful soundtrack courtesy of Yuki Kajiura. The soundtrack is wonderfully atmospheric, tender at moments, creepy or tense at others, but with an overall tinge of poignancy from Ms. Kajiura's hauntingly gorgeous melodies. Indeed, this poignancy is perhaps my favorite aspect of the Kara no Kyoukai soundtrack; Kajiura seamlessly weaves a few common melodies into a number of otherwise diverse musical numbers, generating a sense of unity that I find absolutely beautiful. :P My cover is of the track "M07" (gotta love Yuki Kajiura's naming scheme for these tracks) from the seventh Kara no Kyoukai movie, "A Study in Murder (Part 2)". In particular, it's from this scene if you care for some context.

Anyway, here's the cover!

M07 (Kara no Kyoukai): Piano Cover



Composer: Yuki Kajiura
Date Completed: 2011-10-17
Number of Takes: Uhh...like 20 >.<
Software: Audacity, Movie Maker
Instrumentation: Piano

Getting this piece together was more difficult than I'd envisioned. I'm not as great of a pianist as I'd like to be, and getting this piece mostly free of mistakes was a sometimes-frustrating challenge that involved many, many takes. There's a reason that most of my piano covers are arrangements rather than transcriptions; it's much easier to get away with the occasional mistake when the cover isn't supposed to be identical to some other piece of music. :P

Speaking of transcriptions, here's the sheet music for my transcription of this piece. Lovely harmonies, but not quite as challenging to transcribe as the previous two Usagi Drop pieces I'd done. Just goes to show that music certainly doesn't need to be complex to be beautiful. :)

That's all for now; look for more music coming at ya soon!

Best wishes,

xds