[GEN] Sonic the Hedgehog - "Final Zone (Two Pianos)" by Crealis

[Zeta]

Submission Information:
Series: Sonic
Game: Sonic the Hedgehog
Console: Sega Genesis
Title: Final Zone
Instrumentation Two Pianos
Arranger: Crealis

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Crealis]

First submission, yay!

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nVwm4aQS_E

[AwesomeYears]

Nothing much I can say with the music since Youtube is slow for me. But for the sheet layout, I have a couple of notes (nothing too bad). First, the composer and the arrangement section looks way up and would be more suited downer. Lastly, you don't have to put the copyright on every page, just the first page! That'll save you a lot of time if you're doing an extremely long piece!

[Brassman388]

Alrighty, here we go.

First off, The entire layout is pretty funky. That could be just my version of Finale, but there are things out of place, 2 staves on the first page and 3 staves on the second. I see you know how to you the resize tool, but I would recommend bumping up the size of the entire page by a few percents. The only thing I can see go wrong is if it's too big, then you'll have a chunky notes and staves cluttering up the page. I get that. But what you can do is keep it at it's regular size as is, then push one staff into the first page and leave a little slack on the second. That's would be okay. Not optimal, but with a piece as short as this one, we don't have much of a choice.

Margins are a pretty big deal with me. Whenever I think of good sheets, I think of how well the spacing is between margins are from the music, to the text. Well, sadly, I can't say the same with yours. Like I said before, It could just be a fault of the program. But as far as I can see, there are titles and subtitles that are waaaay off. Tempo markings that are clashing with staffs and so on. I would suggest giving this another look and possibly an overhaul in this regard.
Play around with it a little.

As for the music, Tonally, it's correct. Given some litigation in the bassline, I'm willing to let that pass since you didn't modify it in anyway to make it sound unappealing tonally and visually. There are a few blips like the rest in the second layer in measure 7, but I imagine you just overlooked it and forgot when working out the kinks here and there.

Now, I don't know how often you see the ottava written in with the clef, but a novice will easily look over it. In addition to that, your melody line is written in octaves as well, leaving the bottom octave right within reasonable reading range. To me, that leaves the ottava redundant and useless.

In the first two measures in the second player's part, there's an interesting thing going on. Something I did when I was younger as well. When you have those octave E's jump up you throw them on the adjacent staff. Don't do that. Either write the whole thing on one line, or either separate the octave parts onto two lines. It may be difficult to do sometimes, but it just looks cleaner that way. It's almost for the same reason as is with the melody line in the first piano's part. My philosophy is either you separate em' or you combine em'.

As for the last two measures, I would honestly give the second piano a little love. Give him the melody and throw those weird, chromatic 16ths on the very top line. Separate the bass lines and put the one in each piano's bass part, allowing the second piano to not feel neglected. And last but not least, ditch the ottava's in the clefs. I cannot stress how much you don't need these.

That's pretty much it. You can verify with Deku if any of these changes would be necessary. But in the end, it's your sheet.

Keep up the good work, man.

[The Deku Trombonist]

Just to add to the ottava clefs thing, they're just not used in piano music. Maybe on choral music, but not for piano.

[Crealis]

Thanks for the feedback.  I was unaware about the ottava clefs issue... I'm gonna have words with my piano instructor xD.

The formatting is weird: it looks fine on my end.  Perhaps I'm using an old version of Finale?  The PDF printed fine with none of these issues.  I'll try updating and see if the issues go away.

I'm going to carefully go over everything else when I get a spare moment.  Thanks again for the feedback.

[Sebastian]

Alrighty, here we go.

First off, The entire layout is pretty funky. That could be just my version of Finale, but there are things out of place, 2 staves on the first page and 3 staves on the second. I see you know how to you the resize tool, but I would recommend bumping up the size of the entire page by a few percents. The only thing I can see go wrong is if it's too big, then you'll have a chunky notes and staves cluttering up the page. I get that. But what you can do is keep it at it's regular size as is, then push one staff into the first page and leave a little slack on the second. That's would be okay. Not optimal, but with a piece as short as this one, we don't have much of a choice.

Margins are a pretty big deal with me. Whenever I think of good sheets, I think of how well the spacing is between margins are from the music, to the text. Well, sadly, I can't say the same with yours. Like I said before, It could just be a fault of the program. But as far as I can see, there are titles and subtitles that are waaaay off. Tempo markings that are clashing with staffs and so on. I would suggest giving this another look and possibly an overhaul in this regard.
Play around with it a little.

As for the music, Tonally, it's correct. Given some litigation in the bassline, I'm willing to let that pass since you didn't modify it in anyway to make it sound unappealing tonally and visually. There are a few blips like the rest in the second layer in measure 7, but I imagine you just overlooked it and forgot when working out the kinks here and there.

Now, I don't know how often you see the ottava written in with the clef, but a novice will easily look over it. In addition to that, your melody line is written in octaves as well, leaving the bottom octave right within reasonable reading range. To me, that leaves the ottava redundant and useless.

In the first two measures in the second player's part, there's an interesting thing going on. Something I did when I was younger as well. When you have those octave E's jump up you throw them on the adjacent staff. Don't do that. Either write the whole thing on one line, or either separate the octave parts onto two lines. It may be difficult to do sometimes, but it just looks cleaner that way. It's almost for the same reason as is with the melody line in the first piano's part. My philosophy is either you separate em' or you combine em'.

As for the last two measures, I would honestly give the second piano a little love. Give him the melody and throw those weird, chromatic 16ths on the very top line. Separate the bass lines and put the one in each piano's bass part, allowing the second piano to not feel neglected. And last but not least, ditch the ottava's in the clefs. I cannot stress how much you don't need these.

That's pretty much it. You can verify with Deku if any of these changes would be necessary. But in the end, it's your sheet.

Keep up the good work, man.

Brassman isn't just back, but alive and kickin'!

[DonValentino]

https://db.tt/2xSCATMb

At least it's organized. Since it's a two piano arrangement, I made some tweaks to make a question-answer between them.

[Zeta]

This submission has been accepted by Bespinben.

~Zeta, your friendly NSM-Bot