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[Start Demo 2]

Start Demo 2 adjusted.

• RH m6 and elsewhere (also in Demo 4 and 5 ) beat 4.0 (8th note) should not beam to 3.0 in this case. 4.0-4.75 should be beamed together alone (when you have 16th notes at end of a beat, you do not beam to the previous beat in 4/4 time).

Start Demo 3
Good to know, though the manual adjusting of the beaming in Musescore is wonky. In some cases the beaming actually crossed to the previous measure and I can't fix it without undoing the desired beaming completely. but it fixed itself in Notepad, so yeah that's a formatting thing as much as I try to fix it.

Everything else is in place.

Start Demo 4
I'm not a fan of the octaves, but I included them. Do you think playing the LH top G gets muddy with the cluster of notes in the RH in m14 in particular?

Start Demo 5
Octaves adjusted. manual beaming doesn't work that well in Musescore. It beams where I don't want it to beam. but can't get it to do what I want otherwise.

Demo 6
notes adjusted.

• For the ending notes, I think the C# makes more sense as a Db in the RH. For the LH, that grouping of low notes sounds quite muddy- general guidance is to avoid grouping more than 2 pitches together below half staff or so - usually you won't multiple notes other than octaves written low. However, this works as an alternative:

That is a 9th. Octaves I rather not when unnecessary, but no 9ths for me. How about a different inversion?

Titles are fixed.

All suggestions implemented.

Files are updated.
formatting is as good as I know how to do in musescore.

though I personally think the order should go "short" to "long" and not long to short. Any thoughts on that?

I swapped it as you suggested my guess is because you wanted the short ones to fill the first page?
I would appreciate if you would give a reason instead of what is essentially "because you feel like it"

I added the box as I know how to do in Musescore but the format didn't work at all upon converting to Finale so... yeah. That's what I can do.

I think the difference between the stage introduction and demo is that during the demo tune the characters are talking, introductions have no talking.
The stage openings are not on vgmdb.net,

So I'm open to renaming these as NSM sees fit. Youtube namings are inconsistent.
Start Demo 2

Start Demo 2 I picked the melody and the bass notes over the flute since I thought that would be preferred by NSM. If NSM prefers the flute or both bass and flute I can do that. just tell me how you want that setup since you can only play one or the other at a time. I think choosing the flute would make it different than the other tracks.

Start Demo 3

Start Demo 4

Start Demo 5

Start Demo 6

This seems atypical to our standards, to take exact heard phrase from one measure and to then take over to another whole measure as a matter of preference. Personally, I've never seen it and don't really like the idea of it -

On paper as written above the idea does make one scratch their heads.

In context though the song effectively repeats the first 8 measures beginning at m17, so using a part of the song that was originally written to accompany the melody isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Though my creative side digresses...
Anyway, I switched it back to the strings part which I liked from the beginning.

Regarding the dotted eigth & sixteenth, I would rather keep it as written as I too interpret it as "play it short" instead of divide by 2.

Not quite, I was saying that m4 should be consistent with however you decide m2, etc. are. m4 beat 1 is same beat length.

Fixed

Still going to disagree here, I pitched up the song an octave in Audacity and it sounds like a consistent held pitch. Would relisten and also try what I've suggested, or slowing the track down. To me I could hear how it sounds like two pitches (but isn't) just on how the percussion and LH notes strike on beat 3. To me it also would make sense to sound like this given how m11 2.5 and 3.0 are tied as well, sort of mirroring rhythms.

Regarding m13, I wouldn't compare it to m11 because technically both voices currently arranged overlap in the OST, so it would be separate articulations.
Not sure how to go about resolving this. I uploaded the file to Bandlab and recorded what I heard as separate articulations in the original, ptiched up, and slowed down pitched up.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VUtDaaRPLdwv9n4NVF-JryUjPz8XrKWv?usp=sharing

Musically it makes more sense to have a rearticulated note to keep the song going than a held note that keeps it less interesting.

Or we agree to disagree.

I would again recommend pitching up the original audio in Audacity to get a clearer audio picture

Ok I hear what you are pointing out on m19. I'm not trying to blend the horn and the low notes you pointed out. I don't like the low notes themselves because they are boring half notes, and the horn is mostly present in the RH, and if I include the horn in the LH it will force me to add the triplets in the LH, which makes it lots more complicated to play against those 16th notes.

Instead I want to take descending tuba heard in m3. It fits well.

If this is not acceptable I can switch back the strings which would require me switching measures 20 to be like measure 4.

so now that the forte was gone, I wanted to suggest perhaps adding an mp at the end of m24, and then you could cres. up to an mf leading up to the repeat symbol. Thoughts?

No, since it is a grand march I'm thinking it can't go less than mf. Only moving between mf and f. and move deliberately in m28 than a gradual increase over many measures.  I'm good with no dynamic markings.

• m3 RH, you could make layer 2 last three beats, I hear on beat 2 an F# quarter note, and then a Gn quarter on beat 3 before the current one on beat 4.

Added

You may do whatever formatting to the staccato you'd like. the staccatos don't seemed well placed in finale and if I have to drag around that dot, I'll pass.

• Pickup measure I don't think there's a real rule on this but typically the dynamic aligns with the first notes, not necessarily the first beats (rests in this case)

now that I think about this, would it have been better that I made the pickup measure only a 1/8 instead of a 1/4. I can't make the change now in finale. That would have also avoided that placement of the mf.

• m2 and m18 RH beat 1.0 might've said this before but staccato dotted 8th notes are not typically used, as they are a bit ambiguous as far as length goes. Usually, these are written as staccato 8th, followed by a 16th rest or an 8th note without a staccato and a 16th rest

I don't have a musical reason to disagree with this, however I like the fact that it makes the music cleaner by having less stuff on the page. a dotted 8th and 16th are very recognizable compared to having a space in between.
When I tried changing this in notepad in finale, that music value/space where the rest would go disappear or I would lose space for the beat itself by using the eraser... I would effectively have to restart the measure from scratch and keep all the beats intact. is this how finale works or is there something else I should be doing? This is nothing like Musescore.
Any way you could fix this with all the formatting?

• m4 and m20 RH beat 1.0 hearing this as same length as m2's beat 1, so whatever you want to do there you could for this measure too

I think this is the same as the above comment the dotted eight?

• m8 LH 2.75 hearing Dn not En

No, I hear the En

• m13 RH 2.5 hearing this En tied to the En on 3.0

No, I hear it rearticulated as it is written

• m19 LH 1.0 sounds like a Bn, and 3.0 is Gn. Technically the low notes are only on 1.0 and 3.0 are half notes, but I think based off the line you're blending in, 4.0 should be an En as a result. I think you could also remove the staccatos here as well

The LH Tuba line should be the same as the start of the song, but it is much clearer sounding at the start. I hear it as it is written and it sounds Staccato'd. This gives it a march-y feel. The notes being only detached doesn't have the same feel.

• m24 LH 1.0 think the Dn could also go here like on 2.5.

Added

• m27 RH in spots where two instruments play the same notes in the original, I sometimes like to reflect this by adding a lower octave. You could do this for beat 4, as well as at m31 beat 4 and m32 on beat 1 (dotted half note)

I hear you, but in this case it brings the tone of the song down more than my liking.

• m28 the cresc. could come down a little, and also doesn't have to extend all the way to the bar line. Maybe you could replaces the cresc. symbol with the cresc. text marking? it's kind of ambiguous as far as how long it's supposed to last. Is the forte in m32 intended to make the 2nd time through the arrangement after the repeat forte instead of mf?

I removed the forte since that was an old thought. I wanted the crescendo since it is natural to increase in dynamics climbing those notes and to the end of the song for a grand finish.
However, given the feedback from my Versus select arrangement that the crescendo has to go to the next level, in this case forte, then I'll pass. Not that I'm entirely opposed to it, but I rather remove the markings and leave it up to interpretation for NSM purposes. And the original I think is fairly even in dynamics in those measures.

Then, for the ending tail of the ottava, you could align that a bit closer to the last note it applies to as opposed to right up to where the ottava technically ends. Just a general formatting guidance, but please see the reference image for a visualization

I'm not sure if I can edit the 8va in notepad (if so let me know how), and this is interesting to know for the rest of my arranging. However since this is formatting could you handle this and the other stuff you pointed out please.

one question is intended at the end of the crescendos? Each of them should have a dynamic at the beginning of the next measure to indicate if it ends up on a louder dynamic level or resets to mf.

my original thought was to make it more interesting to play/listen for it to gradually increase in dynamics. By the end of the song it would be forte at most. Starting at mf seemed like a better choice than mp.

If I read your comment correctly since I have 2 crescendos that would mean it would go to forte and fortissimo. which is higher than I would expect. and I wanted the 2nd part to be slightly louder than the 1st and etc. If there is no clear way to notate a slightly increase in dynamic, then it might be easier to omit the crescendos all together. Relistening to the song I don't hear a change in dynamics.

I'm not attached to the dynamics at all so you can make whatever change you prefer and adjust the formatting please.

Woops! sorry about that. the correct file is uploaded now.

FYI though, since I'm using the latest Musescore 4.2.x the XML cleaner is now giving me an error.
"XML error in file [file name] at line 66 Attribute "type" with value "grace-cue" must have a value from the list "cue grace large"
Everything still imports well, but the file name didn't carry over prompting me to make this file name mistake since I have to do it manually. I'll pay more attention though.

All Fixed

-In the R.H. in m9-10, the A#'s should be Bb's, and in m11-13, the Db's and Gb's should be C#'s and F#'s. These are all sus2-chord voicings, but currently look like normal triads. The L.H. Db's in m11 should be C#'s too

Fixed

-While I know you mentioned you didn't want the notes to go too high above the bar, you don't necessarily need the 8va in m1-8 at least, because the highest note is still just 2 ledger lines above the bar (Eb in m5), which isn't much higher than the lowest note that you currently have (the low C in m2). You could keep m9-10 in F clef too if you're okay with the F and F# one step above the second ledger line, but you could also put these 4 measures in the G clef

My thinking was the notes don't go high enough off the F staff to warrant switching to a G clef, I'm not sure about having so many notes near/above the staff for a prolonged period of time (even though once you figure out the first notes you know the rest of them), and I thought simplifying note position movement by keeping it all 8va would make the song easier to read at first glance. Though maybe getting rid of the 8va is the better decision? That's what I uploaded anyway. What are your thoughts/how would you recommend this be arranged?

-For repeating from m12 back to m1, it's probably easier for the L.H. to take the lower D in the R.H., similarly to how you did in m13-14, but I don't know if there's a straightforward way to notate that :p You could also just leave that up to the player to decide for themself.

I thought about making the F clef have a second voice for the bottom note of the top staff chord, but not sure if that is common practice, that would for sure require me getting rid of the 8va (otherwise it looks weird) and I could either pick up the 8va in the next measure or later on as you suggested.

Otherwise as you said the player would have to figure it out once they get there how they are going to play it.

Yes, I updated the sheet per your suggestion shortly after your January reply.

Since you said the magic word "approve"

I'm alright with approving!

I assumed it was moving to the next stage anyway so I didn't feel it necessary to post another reply that I made the change. Now I know to keep responding till I sill the blue approve.


I'll make sure it is fixed in the next update.

This one should be straightforward.

I chose the title "Versus Select" instead of "V.S. Select" as noted on VGMD https://vgmdb.net/album/133 as I prefer to write out the word Versus.


Finale formatting can wait until the end.

I chose the 8va on the top staff since I didn't want the notes going over the staff for better readability.