[DELETED] [NDS] Pokémon Ranger - "Jungle Relic (Erupted)" by Trasdegi

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Submission Information:
Series: Pokémon
Game: Pokémon Ranger
Console: Nintendo DS
Title: Jungle Relic (Erupted)
Instrumentation Solo Piano
Arranger: Trasdegi

[Trasdegi]

[Khunjund]

Hey! Pretty good overall, but I do have a number of remarks.

I know there are several B naturals throughout the piece, but considering the position of the loop and the harmony in general, I'm pretty sure the key signature should be D minor.

In measures 7–8, keep the B7 spelling; the progression B7>Gmin isn't the result of a harmonic reinterpretation, it's an alteration of a deceptive cadence: B7 is the V of E minor, G is the III, and V>III is a standard deceptive cadence—only the composer used G minor instead of the more usual G major for a more surprising effect and to keep the chromatically descending bass line intact.

The D flats in measure 11 should be C sharps: the chord is A7, with the flat 9th (B flat) and flat 13th (F) serving as appoggiaturas to the chord tones (A and E respectively)—not Bbmin/A.

I've only looked over two of your pieces (this and "N's Castle"), but in both you basically drop the bass line, which is a decision I take issue with; if this is a recurring habit of yours, I suggest change it, for two reasons:

• Chord inversions matter. Currently, you start on a first inversion chord, and have a number of weak-sounding second inversion chords later on. This is especially flagrant when the bass is playing a note that isn't found anywhere else in the chord (like in measures 3–4, where it plays the D in the E/D chord), because in the case, dropping it means you're completely changing the harmony rather than just altering its quality.
• The bass line is usually second in importance, after the melody. The two most audible lines are the extremes: the melody is usually the highest, and the bass is the lowest. Composers will have this in mind when writing music, and you'll see that the bass line is, in fact, often a "second melody"—for example, a lot of Baroque and Classical music is basically two-part writing; a simple dialogue between melody and bass lines. Even when this isn't the case, the bass line will frequently be crafted a lot more attentively than the middle voices, to better convey a sense of direction to the music—which is the case here: the ever-descending (chromatic at first, then stepwise) conjuct line here is what connects all the chords in the piece and gives it a harmonic drive throughout, not the middle voices which jump around all over to fill out the harmony (though these do contribute more rythmic energy to the piece).

This isn't to say that you can never drop the bass line at any time in any piece, but I hope you get my point.

There are a number of ways to get around this, like incorporating the bass note into your rythmic accompaniment:

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Which might require you to invert your chord to keep the bass note on the bottom of the chord. You could also only play the bass note every other chord, or every two beats, etc., so long as it remains the lowest note.

The other solution is to alternate between bass note and accompaniment notes. Again, this could be done once per measure:

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Twice per measure:

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Etc., whatever sounds best to you. The benefit of this method is that you'll (almost) never need to invert or octaviate anything; both the bass line and the rest of the accompaniment can be played at their normal height.

It doesn't matter that the bass line isn't sustained: so long as it's the lowest note we hear in each measure (or whatever the harmonic unit is, if it's shorter or longer), it'll stand out (since, again, we hear the extremes better than the rest) and we'll be able to keep track of it and hear it as a separate line. Really, you don't even need to hear the bass note first thing in the measure: you could play a chord on beat one and the bass on beat two, and we'll still understand the harmony—but this is a bit harder to pull off, so I don't recommend it here.

Finally, you could consider using cross-staff notation or switching the right hand to bass clef in a bunch of places (i.e. measures 1–8, beats 3–4 of measure 16, measures 17–22, beats 3–4 of measure 32), depending on your preference. Up to you.

[Trasdegi]

Thanks for the feedback!

-Fixed the accidentals. EDIT: Just noticed all those fixes somehow got lost, so I'll have to do it again when I have time to...
-Well, I arranged both a loooong time ago, so I don't remember why I left the bassline out...
Anyway, I tried to experiment with it: 1 note per measure seemed not enough (plus that made a "hole" in the rythmic section), so I tried every 2 beats. It sounded like it was limping, so I tried to incorporate it in the rythm, but it sounded too much this time... So I ended up trying this:

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Do you think this would work?

[The Deku Trombonist]

Just a tip: You can resize an image in the img tags by specifying the width or height.

For example:

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[img width=500]https://i.imgur.com/0hC1vTT.png[/img]
Gives you this:

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[Maelstrom]

You going to update the files, Tras?

[Latios212]

I agree with D3ath that the bass is important here, but I would highly advise against putting triads so low on the piano - they sound quite muddy and aren't characteristic of the original.

[Latios212]

trasdegi?

[Trasdegi]

Um... yeah. I'll try resurrecting next week.

[Trasdegi]

...Sorry, I won't really have time to do this for the next couple of months... I'll take it back.