ReMix: Secret of Mana 'Dark Star Scherzo'

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Newcomer to OCR and piano arranger extraordinaire Jormungand writes:

"This was an attempt to blend the style of Masashi Hamauzu's rich piano voice with Hiroki Kikuta's imaginative composition. As both are among my favorite composers, I tried to retain the spirit of both."

The judges were unanimous on the arrangement being creative and the technique/performance being emotive and technically proficient; the only real hangup was the production. The mix is recorded at a fairly low level, requiring a volume bump to get it up to where other songs on your playlist will be sitting, and is essentially mono, not wrapping the higher notes right and lower left (aka player perspective) or vice versa detectably. That being said, the piano timbre itself is quite lovely, and the dynamics employed take full advantage of multisampled velocity layers to dance between forte and piano. Actually, due to somewhat limited recording, one panelist thought it was a live recording, until reading the ReMixer's note. zircon writes:

"WOW!!! Talk about piano technique. We've got some great pianists in this community, but this ReMixer shows a lot of proficiency, and a pretty unique playing style too. Bravo. The arrangement is most excellent as well, with lots of dynamics and emotion. I have no complaints in this category. I will be completely honest. I thought this was a live recording. You had me fooled. I had a whole paragraph written up about how recording live piano is difficult and that it's not a big deal, until I saw that you said you used samples for it! That being the case, there's more you could do to make this sound closer, cleaner, and more full (in terms of stereo width). However, by no means does this hold back the GREAT arrangement and performance."

This actually reminds me of pieces from Michael Nyman's score to The Piano which have a similarly quick tempo and general feel to them of stark but flowing beauty. Great to see yet another talented ReMixer working in the solo piano genre submit a strong arrangement that showcases both skill and musicality.

― djpretzel