Piano Cover: Partner for Life

So it's been one of those semesters. Maybe it's senioritis; maybe it's the feeling of impending doom associated with graduating from college and moving on with life; maybe it's the realization that my time remaining with my Duke friends is limited, but my experience so far this semester has been kind of difficult to describe. I've been doing a lot of reflecting on my college career as it steadily draws to a close, and of course, you can't reflect without thinking about where it all began: my freshman year.

If I could define my freshman year of college through music, a major part would definitely include a small collection of Korean songs that my roommate looped through his iTunes playlist, including such hits as BIGBANG's Lies, Epik High's Love Love Love, and a number of arrangements of Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, among other gems. One such song (which, gasp, is the one I'm posting about today) was a ballad by Korean group SG Wannabe, called Partner For Life (내사람, or "Nae Saram," in Korean). Although it didn't catch my attention immediately (the other pieces were somewhat catchier), I eventually heard an beautiful a capella rendition of the piece at the 2008 Lunar New Year festival. Immediately thereafter, I became enamored with the piece, looked forward to the times it appeared on my roommate's playlist (by then, I had the order essentially memorized), and eventually began to figure it out on piano. :)

내사람 (Partner For Life): Piano Cover



Artist: SG Wannabe
Date Completed: 2010-10-21
Number of Takes: 4
Software: Audacity
Instrumentation: Piano

This arrangement is a little more straightforward than my other ones; it's more of a transcription than much of an arrangement. Still, what makes SG Wannabe so appealing to me is their fantastic choice of harmony, rife with modulations and secondary chords; it's rather different than the three-to-four-chord pop songs that have nearly saturated the music world. Good stuff.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it! Perhaps one day in the distant (or not-so-distant) future, my former roomie will stumble across this blog post and relive some old memories. This one's for you, buddy.

Take care,

xds

VGMusic Submission: Epilogue

Just a quick update to showcase another piece I've recently uploaded to VGMusic.Com. Interestingly enough, this one was actually arranged for my music theory class. Our teaching assistant (who might in fact be one of the most awesome people I've ever met) gave us an assignment that I was more than happy to complete: arrange any piece of music of our choice. Naturally, I was all over that #$%@.

The source material for the MIDI this time around is a game for the Super Nintendo called Chrono Trigger (perhaps you've heard of it? :P). Like NiGHTS into Dreams, Chrono Trigger was another game that I have actually never played, but nevertheless fell in love with the soundtrack. I was first exposed to the soundtrack at Video Games Live Indy, where a Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross medley was performed as the final act of the show (see a recording I was able to take here). Soon thereafter, I tracked down the soundtrack and found that the remainder of the tracks were just as great as the excerpts from the performance. I chose to arrange the track "Epilogue: To Good Friends" for this music theory assignment because it was fairly straightforward to analyze, even if I did get carried away and arrange the whole piece instead of just the first few bars. :) In any case, here's the piece (and here's the original for comparison):

Epilogue: To Good Friends



Date Submitted: 2010-09-16
Time: ~4 hours
Software: Finale 2008
MIDI Tracks: Flute, French Horn, Orchestral Harp, Bright Acoustic Piano, Celesta, String Ensemble 1, SynthStrings 2

Not much more to say about this piece. It's not quite perfect; perhaps one or two incorrect chords scattered around, but I think it's pretty close. Hope you enjoyed it!

Best wishes,

xds

Piano Cover: I Am The One (Redux)

So about a month ago, I put up a post with an arrangement of Inon Zur's piece "I Am The One" from Dragon Age: Origins. I recently re-recorded the piece, but it turned out differently enough that I felt it merited its own post again. Thus, I (somewhat proudly...gahh for stupid mistakes) present take two of "I Am The One" (this time with video!).

I Am The One: Piano Cover



Composer: Inon Zur
Date Completed: 2010-09-04
Number of Takes: Way too many
Software: Audacity, Movie Maker
Instrumentation: Piano

I'll keep this one short and sweet. 'Til next time!

baibai,

xds

A Rare(RO) MMO Experience

In mid-June, two of my friends (for anonymity's sake, let's call them Lorrien and Willis) convinced me to try out an online game called Ragnarok Online. Today, roughly two and a half months since that day and standing at the foreseeable end of my time on Ragnarok, I thought I'd take some time to reflect a bit on my experiences.

As far as my video gaming is concerned, I'm fairly new at this whole massively-multiplayer online RPG thing. The only game I'd played in the past vaguely resembling an MMO was RuneScape, and that was hardly a good indicator of the MMORPG world. Then again, perhaps neither was my Ragnarok experience. My friends and I ended up playing on Rare Ragnarok Online, a high-rate server with experience rates somewhere around 10,000 times that of the "normal" server. This essentially eliminated any time investment needed for character creation and allowed me to experiment with many different characters, but was admittedly a bit daunting at first to see everyone operating at seemingly near-expert familiarity.


Rare Ragnarok Online loading screen, courtesy of my friend Lorrien.


A selection of a few of my Ragnarok characters.

That's not to say that there wasn't any "grinding" in Rare Ragnarok Online, per se; rather, the grinding was for items rather than for levels. Specific powerful items custom to the server required large numbers of specific items in order to craft, so much time was spent killing hapless cute monsters and collecting their remains in hopes of building these items. Additionally, a number of "boss" MVP monsters, which spawn only once every few hours, occasionally dropped very rare and powerful card items, so I spent a fair amount of time chasing after these monsters in hopes of obtaining the cards (with a rather low success rate). Nonetheless, the possible frustration of these endeavors were mitigated somewhat by adventuring alongside Lorrien and Willis; we took care to stick together and help each other out with our quests whenever possible.


Many hours were invested in collecting, say, 300 Raccoon Leaves.

The most interesting part of the game, in my opinion, were the custom server events. Occasional mini-games like "Cluck, Cluck, Boom," "Hangman" and "Find the Prize" were welcome distractions, along with the more difficult challenges such as "Invasion" and "Cursed Dimension." In particular, Cursed Dimension became somewhat of a nightly routine, where Lorrien, Willis and I would party up every evening around midnight and attempt to eliminate MVP monsters and collect their rare items. The server events were made more entertaining by a staff of friendly GMs as well as a generally friendly player base, allowing for wacky experiments such as forming "RARERO" out of players (an endeavor which, unfortunately, was met with only limited success).


Preparing to do some Cursed Dimension with Lorrien and Willis.


You probably can't tell, but this is supposed to be the letter "E".


One of the many spontaneous GM-initiated server events.

Overall, my experience with Rare Ragnarok Online was an enjoyable one, and I'm a bit sad to be leaving it behind now. Lorrien, Willis and I met today (yes, IN REAL LIFE OMG) for one last Rare Ragnarok session together, where we did some final server events, randomly summoned a great number of enemies, gave away some of our items, and said our goodbyes to the server. It was quite the poignant moment. :)

Below are a few more screenshots of my time with Rare Ragnarok Online, to relive some of those good ol' days:


An initial photoshoot of my party with Lorrien and Willis.


My pet munak Tali (center).


A cool (and spontaneous) screenshot of our party in town.


Randomly summoning a bunch of monsters on our last RO excursion.


One last party screenshot with Lorrien and Willis.

That's all for now. For any random RareRO-ers who might have happened across this blog post: take care, and it's been fun. :)

Farewell,

xds

Piano Cover: Insomnia

So I'm back at school now, which means the instances I'll actually have time to update this blog will be far and few between. However, due to popular demand (kinda), I've decided to put up another piano cover before I descend into the dark abyss. Well, I dunno...maybe I'll have some more in the future, or at least make slightly better recordings of my older work, but for now...

My relationship with the source material of this cover, Insomnia, has been an interesting one. I first encountered the Korean version of this piece at another Lunar New Year performance, when it was included in the repertoire of the amazing dance group Defining Movement. Although I didn't think much of it at first, one of my friends soon showed me the song again, and this time it stuck (partly because she took care to remind me at regular intervals). After listening to it on repeat for the better part of a week, it was clear that I'd been addicted.

Although I'm certainly no expert on the history of this piece, here's a bit about what I know. The single Insomnia was released in the UK by artist Craig David, where it was met with a fair amount of success in Europe. Later that year, Craig David contacted Korean artist Wheesung to record a Korean version of the song, which was released in 2009. The music for both versions is fundamentally the same, with mostly differences in the vocal part (although I haven't personally checked to see how well the Korean and English lyrics match). The English and Korean versions of the song, respectively, can be found here and here.

Unlike many pop songs I enjoy, which appeal to me either because of an interesting harmonic structure or some sort of emotional connection to the piece, Insomnia caught my attention simply because it was so damn catchy. The harmonic structure consists of roughly ONE chord progression and a bridge, and I never really learned the meaning of the Korean lyrics, but the ostinato and "FEELS LIKE INSOMNIAAAAA" portions of the song still find themselves stuck in my head regularly. Of course, what better way to get it un-stuck (or, perhaps, even more stuck) than by figuring it out on piano?

Insomnia: Piano Cover



Artist: Craig David/Wheesung
Date Completed: 2010-08-31
Number of Takes: 7
Software: Audacity
Instrumentation: Piano

Unlike my past two covers, this one is actually in its original key of F-sharp major (or maybe B lydian, one of those)! I know, aren't you proud of me? Because Insomnia is an extremely repetitive piece save for the lyrics, I struggled to find some way to differentiate the verses from one another. Hopefully I succeeded to some degree. xD My apologies for the nearly unbearable background noise in the recording (the noise filters would have distorted the recording to an unacceptable level), but at least I'm using an in-tune piano this time! :) Oh, and for those of you who for whatever reason would like a copy of the mp3, it can be found here.

That's all I've got for now. Until next time!

Happy start of school,

xds

Piano Cover: Coral Sea

I first encountered the piece "Coral Sea" in 2008 during a Lunar New Year performance by the a cappella group Temptasians. I proceeded to forget about the song until two years later, when I sought out the original piece out of curiosity and immediately fell in love. For most of spring 2010, the Jay Chou piece was constantly emanating from my iPod as part of a small collection of C-Pop and K-Pop pieces I'd become enamored with. Over the summer, I decided to explore Jay Chou's music in more depth, picking up a few of his albums, including Coral Sea's debut album November's Chopin. Although I enjoyed the music a great deal and developed some new favorites (I discovered I'm more partial to his slow works than the upbeat ones), none of them could quite compare to Coral Sea's unique place in my heart. [/melodramatic]

One of the funnier stories relating me and Coral Sea involves the lyrics. Due to my innate tendency to overlook lyrics in favor of the music, coupled with my not-amazing-literacy in Mandarin and the song's fairly complicated lyrics, I neglected to learn the lyrics for the first few months of listening to the piece. The file in my iPod did provide lyrics, but they were in Traditional, which I couldn't really read. Thus, I just went about listening to the song, assuming it was one of the typical sugary-sweet C-pop love songs. When I finally looked up the lyrics in Simplified (and eventually English for confirmation), I was actually quite taken aback my the despondency and bitterness of the words. lol, that'll teach me to assume things about music. xD

So, long story short, I decided to figure out Coral Sea on piano, as likely evident from the title. I've been playing around with it for a few months now (a random 3-month-ish period with no access to a piano notwithstanding), but I finally decided to put together a low-quality recording of it. Anyway, I'll skip right to the media. For those of you unfamiliar with the piece, here's the source material for reference.

珊瑚海 (Coral Sea): Piano Cover



Artist: Jay Chou
Date Completed: 2010-08-17
Number of Takes: 8-ish
Software: Audacity, Sound Recorder
Instrumentation: Piano

Again, I was rather loath to perform the piece in its normal key of A-flat, so I decided to take it down a half-step. Sorry again to the perfect-pitch kiddies out there. You'll also probably notice that this recording is certainly not error-free; turns out I get twitchy when the mic comes on and make dumb mistakes easily. >_< Regardless, I hope it gives at least a passable impression. (I also discovered, literally now, that I can record directly from Audacity...maybe that'll help with some of the quality issues?) Anyway, once I get back to school in a week or so I'll hopefully find the time to put up higher-quality recordings, perhaps even a video or two. :P [UPDATE 09/01/10: I've updated the recording from my last post to a higher-quality, straight-from-audio version. Hopefully that will make this cover suck a little less. xD]

I've got a few layering experiments planned for the near future, so stay tuned!

Until we meet again,

xds

Gen Con 2010

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I recently attended Gen Con, a huge annual four-day gaming convention in Indianapolis. I thought I'd share a little rundown of the events I attended there, for those who are curious. I'll just jump right into it without too much introduction:



Day 1

Thursday, 12:00: RPG1016482 Iron Team Challenge: Shipwrecked

My first scheduled event of the convention was a Pathfinder event, essentially equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat hesitant to join this event, since it specified that players should have some experience with Pathfinder, of which I had none. The first hour or so of the event was excruciating, since I had no clue how to make a character; I ended up scraping by with a half-completed ninja monk character. Fortunately, my character sheet really didn't matter much, since Keith, the GM, was aware that our group had some n00bs and focused much more on the role-playing elements than the combats. Major props to the GM for this one.

Thursday, 19:00: ENT1017082 Hamlet vs. MacBeth: the Shakespearean SmackDown!

While two of my friends decided to continue on with Pathfinder for the rest of the day, I opted to check out something new. That something turned out to be a skit put on by a group the Damsels of Dorkington, "Hamlet vs. Macbeth" (Shakespeare in the loosest sense). Unfortunately, my enjoyment of the show was hampered by the tall guy sitting in front of me, which obstructed most of my view of the stage, as well as my unfamiliarity with the Macbeth source material. Still, the Damsels put on an exciting show; their excitement was infectious, and their frequent on-the-spot interactions with the boisterous audience really made it something unique. Check out the Damsels here.

Day 2

Friday, 10:00: SEM1017813 Video Game Music Composing and Video Games Live! with Tommy Tallarico

My friends and I barely made it in time for this 10 AM event, but of all Gen Con events, I'm happiest that I attended this one. The event was essentially a presentation by esteemed composer Tommy Tallarico about the world of video game audio, but for some reason this event was left out of the Gen Con catalog. Consequently, I was one of about four attendees, which actually made it better, I think. Tommy was gracious enough to answer all of our questions, and after the event, I managed to ask him a few questions on my own. Upon learning I was a music student, Tommy referred me to a variety of resources on the video game audio world. If you're interested in learning about some of those resources, let me know. xD

Friday, 16:30: FLM1013517 The Dead Matter



Of the films in the Gen Con catalog, The Dead Matter both looked interesting and didn't conflict with any other planned events, so we decided to check it out. The movie (a fairly nondescript film about a necklace with necromantic powers) wasn't anything mind-blowing, in my opinion, but it was impressive enough for its low budget, and once I realized the movie didn't take itself very seriously, I began to appreciate the humor.

Friday, 19:00: TCG1010427 Two Headed Giant Limited - M11

For my sole Magic event of the convention, I teamed up with one of my friends for a Two-Headed Giant draft. I'd never done a 2HG draft before, and the format was definitely interesting, but I think my teammate and I put together some admirable decks. Our first victory was an unlikely turnaround that left our opponents stunned, dealing something on the order of 30 damage in one turn. We weren't able to complete our second game, due to our opponents having to leave, but nonetheless it was a fun little distraction.

Saturday, 01:00: ZED1010350 Are You a Werewolf?



There's actually no difference between Werewolf and the more well-known game Mafia apart from different naming conventions, so I was able to jump in without much of a problem. In Game 1, the entire group was fooled by a 10ish-year-old girl who successfully convinced her father that she wasn't the werewolf, and rode that trust card to victory. In Game 2, I happened to be a werewolf, and both of my fellows were killed off early in the game. I managed to stick around for a little while longer, but unfortunately couldn't pull off the victory. I hate being mafia. I mean, werewolf.

Day 3

Saturday, 14:00: RPG1017757 Tokyo Masks

Tokyo Masks was quite the unique tabletop RPG. Essentially, each player took control of a fairly stereotypical superhero; I, for instance, had the super-powerful but not-so-bright Brodin, the "Norse God of Surfing." The first half was fairly typical role-playing; took down some evil supervillains, etc., but for the second half the GMs decided to conduct a cross-over with a closely-related universe, featuring a school of mutant elementary-school children. With something like 10 players in the room and two different rulesets, things got a little hectic, but at the end of the day it was still immensely entertaining (and unique).

Saturday, 19:30: ENT1016339 Video Games Live!

I mentioned Video Games Live in great detail in my last post, so I won't go into detail again here. The best part of the event was getting to meet Tommy Tallarico, Emmanuel Frattiani, and Laura "Flute Link" at the meet 'n greet following the show. Mr. Frattiani, upon hearing I was a music student at Duke, gave me a reference to one of his colleagues, a graduate of Duke's Ph.D. music program; I thought that was really cool. Of course, getting to talk to Tommy again was awesome, too, especially since he still remembered me from the seminar that morning.



Sunday, 01:00: ENT1014142 Pajama Jammy Jam (a.k.a the Dance)

Having been at the back of the line for the VG Live meet 'n greet, we made it in time for the last two or three songs of the dance. I wasn't expecting much from a dance where the ratio of men to women was probably something like 10:1, but it was actually pretty fun. And no, there really weren't that many people in pajamas.

Day 4

There weren't any scheduled plans for Sunday, so my friends and I just wandered the main exhibition hall, where essentially every company present has a booth set up with cool stuff. I'll just attach some pictures here to show a little of the happenings of the ex-hall.









Yep, that's pretty much all I've got. 'Til next time!

xds