MapleStory Sheet Music Site!

Wow.

That's certainty...something all right. You're trying to transcribe orchestrated music for a single piano, and it isn't working very well for quite a few songs. I mean, look at Omega Sector here. You're basically just picking out the melody with the right hand and blocking out a base line with octaves in the left. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, it's just super basic and would sound, well, super basic.

And then there's this hot fresh mess of notes. What am I even looking at? How many different instruments are there? The only thing I can come up with is that each full page is a full list of instruments, but that doesn't mean anything because nothing's marked at all. Is that top line supposed to be a voice, or a flute? Or a violin? I mean I don't think it even matters because most of them aren't even playing half the time anyway.

Henesys is one of the "better" ones I've seen so far, but it has a problem that I saw in quite a few other pieces: That you guys like going way up into the stratosphere with the right hand constantly. Just because you can go up there doesn't mean that you should. If you don't want to change the original key of the song, you can always just do something simple like drop the whole thing by an octave or something, or just write the music so it doesn't go so high.

But the most, uh, outstanding thing to me was Happyville, and more specifically it and it's simplified version. First off, the simplified version changes stuff starting from the third line.

("difficult" version)


("simplified" version)

Do you see the problem here? There is nothing "simplified" about this, all that was done is changing the left hand to block out some chords. Everything in the right hand is difficult enough that if someone was capable of doing it, they are certainty more than capable of playing an eighth tied to a quarter.

I don't mean to sound overly harsh here, and I hope you guys continue to work on this and get better and better at it. There are just quite a few bad decisions (and some nonsensical ones) that you're making now that can form some pretty bad habits later on.

Am I the only one not seeing the difficulty in that? That looks perfectly reasonable to play from my perspective...

As for why that second one is simplified, the blocked off chords give you less to worry about, allowing you to focus your attention on that "difficult" right hand. Simply put, if your left hand is simply droning on playing a D chord over and over, it gives you one less thing to worry about, diverting your attention to the right hand. Its the same concept behind hands separate practicing, slow metronome practicing, and melody first practicing.

Music has patterns, and once you can recognize them, it isn't hard. For example, once you recognize that there's a voice exchange between the outer voices in the treble, then reading it becomes not so hard after all.

PS: You can't just drop the whole freaking piece an octave. It changes the mood of the piece completely. Try it some time. Play your Henesys theme two octaves down, and tell me if it keeps the playful, careless mood it has.

Agreed on the orchestral score but not much beyond that unfortunately...