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[Hogwarts007]

Hey, I made an arrangement for the New Donk City theme, I'm gonna put my pdf and midi files here for anyone to look at and give me suggestions. Other than obvious formatting things, what more should I do to improve this piece? Thanks for any suggestions, they're much appreciated.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yolqikzs6jlbfls/New%20Donk%20City%20Daytime.mid?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j9z6k08q3n0qdzw/New%20Donk%20City%20Daytime.pdf?dl=0

The arrangement came partly from two sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdH5WTwApb4
http://forum.ninsheetmusic.org/index.php?topic=9941.0

Of course, I redid a lot of it, so these only really helped me get some of the notes/chords so I didn't have to figure out every single one of them.
Also a note: all the grace notes I have written in the song are meant to be played like a sixteenth note before the note written. The midi kind of just jams them together and makes the second note late, but whatever.

[The Deku Trombonist]

Here's some food for thought on the first 4 bars. But don't just look at the first 4 bars, try and look at the rest of the sheet and apply these things as a place to start.

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Transcription: Don't rely on what anyone else has written before you, listen to the song and learn to develop and trust your ear. Part of arranging isn't just making sheets, it's also developing your ear skills. Anyway, there were a couple of wrong notes and some missing harmonies which I corrected.

Dynamics: It starts off quite bold and punchy and then it grows into the 4th bar. So write it!

Articulations: Articulation is everything is jazz. I'm not sure if you've had much experience playing jazz, in particular playing big band charts, but having the knowledge of what various articulations mean really helps you to be able to communicate your intentions more clearly. Take a look at what I've done and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Note lengths: This ties in with articulations somewhat, but you need to pay more attention to the actual length of the notes being played. If it's a short quaver, don't tie it over to the next beat etc etc. Again, having knowledge of the style and how these things are written will help you here.



And just a little thought for bars 5-12: Be careful which parts you choose to combine and how so that you don't end up with note soup. By that I mean having a whole lot of notes that then lose their meaning. An important part of arranging for piano is listening to what the most important elements are (ie what makes this tune sound like this tune) and then using or combing those in such a way that evokes the same "feel" as the original tune. In other words not necessarily using as many notes as possible from the original tune.

[AmpharosAndy]

You could use my old two piano arr for some of the notes n stuff, but it's very untidy!

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[Hogwarts007]

Thanks for the help, guys! I made a few dynamic and articulation adjustments for the first half of the song. Try downloading it again and let me know if I'm going in the right direction. Of course, I'll be continuing to improve the song (articulation, note lengths, grace notes, chords), so let me know if there's anything you don't like or don't agree with. I don't think there's much else to do with the "note soup"- I changed that part of the song that Deku was referring to to make it much more simple to play and sound more like the real song instead of stressing about the barely audible notes.