I feel like I've played this song before. When it was called "Honto No Jibun." It's in the same freakin' key (F) and uses the same functional chord progression (I-V-vi-IV) a bunch of times. Geez, Buono, you could at least try to perform a different song for your third single.
Maybe that's why I got lazy about recording this one ... it feels like a cheap bootleg copy of Honto No Jibun. The melodic writing is sloppier, it jumps awkwardly from section to section, and I wouldn't be learning anything new by figuring out the music. The thematic fragments in the verse are especially flawed; they don't flow like the verses of HnJ or have a strong impact like the ones in Renai Rider, so how the hell am I supposed to play them? Doing cover versions is great when the song is so good the arrangement writes itself, but interpreting bad songwriting is a chore. All I knew was to hit really hard and use octaves when I got to KAKKOII JAN~~ (the A-Bb-C in the bass is pretty much the only inspired moment). The chorus is better, though, and I like how it floats the high C's in the melody above the changing harmonies. The ascending bass towards the end is a nice touch too.
One particular quirk is that the last note of the chorus overlaps the first note of the intro theme, so I got around that with a grace-note that brings out both melodies. Oh, and the instrumental bridge was also kinda fun, although I never quite got the speed and power that I wanted out of it. Eh, I'll pick a better song next time. And hopefully be more creative about it.
or, "How To Rock in A-flat" (and who wants to bet this was written in G and capo'd up 1 fret because the girls can't sing that low)
Ask me as a music theorist which of Buono's first two singles is better, and I'll tell you it's "Honto no Jibun" any day. The melody flows better, the chord progressions are more convincing, and the structure of the song is just beautifully coherent from start to finish. But ask me which one gets stuck in my head more ... and it's always "Renai Rider."
On my first listen (while watching the ending of Shugo Chara ep 14, which is freaking cute btw), I definitely felt it was less polished than HnJ -- why the hell is the verse just descending quarter notes? Why are they yelling? Is it just me or does the chorus only use 4 notes?
But ultimately it's that unpolished in-your-faceness that makes it such a striking, memorable song. Like the amazing upward motion of SUKI DA YO OMAE!!!!1111 and the use of the VI7 as a secondary seventh on "tsuyoku" to drive the chords toward the ascending bass of the chorus' last line. And let's not forget the bVI-V in the chorus either, which uses the flatted sixth in a very striking way (I thought it was an iv chord at first, but that's just because I love that smooshy sappy effect too much; it turns out that bVI to V is a more potent application of that harmonic quality).
As for arranging it ... that's just another case of "Play it the way it sounds because it's already awesome." This is definitely a left-hand fingerkiller because the only way to get that rock beat is to pound away with octaves in the bass. Jerry Lee Lewis would approve.
I'm sure he would also approve of Buono ... if you know what I mean XD
P.S. And just for the random crapness of it, as I was mysteriously possessed by the spirit of Ray Charles:
AMAZING FACT: The chorus of "Baby cruising Love" works in canon. By which I mean, listen to the last chorus on the original recording and notice how it echoes perfectly at one measure apart. Now, most people today associate canons with Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Taco Bell, but at its most basic level, the musical definition of a canon is a melody that harmonizes with itself when repeated at a certain time interval while the original is still playing. "Baby cruising Love" cleverly makes this possible by balancing out the long notes and the short notes so that they never clash when you try to play them on top of each other. Therefore, we can conclude that Yasutaka Nakata is some kind of smartass.
Meanwhile, removing all the electronics from an unabashedly electro-pop song reveals that it plays just fine acoustically, with proper chords and whatnot, and has a "pretty normal" song structure. There is something odd about having no Verse 2 (it's replaced by a repeating "baby cruising looooove" interlude), but the real challenge was in arranging a song with an extremely steady, repetitive nature. It's fine when you've got the drum machine and the synths going ... But I'll be damned if I just play the hook 45 times over or whatever.
The final solution was to change the timbre and texture throughout the song so that it travels through a variety of moods. Like when the key-change section goes an octave up the second time it appears. Or how the interlude thins out after the heavy chords in the main chorus. Or how the left hand ends up doing double duty by the finale, handling the bass notes AND some of the inner voices. And to recreate the sense of beat that makes the song so freakin' catchy? Endless arpeggios just under the melody, in the style of a Perpetual Motion piece.
I never thought I'd end up quoting Debussy's 1st Arabesque for anything, but it fits perfectly as a lead-in -- same key, same arpeggio figures, same surreal dreamlike quality that comes out of Perfume's singles. I mean, Debussy just has that unique sound. And so do these girls.
That's why "Honto no Jibun" turned out the way it did. It already has a strong melody and chord progression (Y HALO THAR PACHELBEL) so there isn't a lot of tinkering to be done. I almost contemplated doing a film-score/Final Fantasy sounding kind of deal, but that idea died pretty fast (although you can still hear traces of it in the 2nd verse with the "galloping" rhythmic figure for the accompaniment). Basically, as long as you play the song the way it sounds, it works.
I guess the only real messing I did was with that guitar interlude, because it kinda does the same riff for about 16 bars, which I personally think is twice as long as necessary (and generates a lot of embarrassing air-guitar hand-waving in the PV). So I thought it would be funny to insert a little nod to the Shugo Chara opening theme in there. :p
But otherwise, all that needs to be done is to lay down a steady bass line, put on some nice thick cords, follow the tune properly, and it's an instant power-pop hit.
Special Generation went through a lot of variations in my head before I settled on a style. It's a fantastic song, but again, one of those recordings where a direct transcription to piano doesn't make much sense and quite frankly sounds like ass. I think for a while I was trying this "tango" thing where I chopped up the melody and syncopated it all to hell, and it was really cool, but I felt that people wouldn't "get" it. And the novelty wears off about halfway through the 2nd verse.
This ballad-style thing is the result of weeks and months of painstaking musical research, or maybe me just being lazy. :P Honestly, I can do arpeggiated bass figures until the cows come home, so this came very natural to me. (Chopin's nocturnes much?) In a way it's an inversion of the original song because the mood is now very laid back, even melancholy. But it's still the same song ... just that now it expresses itself in quite a different way.
There's a dramatic arc in how the melody line starts with just single notes on the first verse and eventually builds up to full chords on the finale ... and at the same time, the song is constantly changing in volume. Just because it's slow, doesn't mean it's always soft ... DYNAMICS! That's something you don't get a lot of in pop. :P So I put it in here to help educate people.
Key of G minor, common time.
The main directive given to me was "Make it sound like the opposite of H!P," and my first instinct was to give it the ballad-like movie-soundtrack-end-credits touch. This was all nice and good until I realized I was hitting huge, sappy 5-finger chords by the final chorus. That was not happy times. So I kind of abandoned the song for a few days because I didn't like what my arrangement was doing to it.
Sometimes you just have to do that in the creative process—let the work marinate over time until something magical comes to you. And sometimes that means doing counterintuitive things. When I was first figuring out the notes and chords for Meguru, I was listening to the song A LOT. This is obvious. In the car, at work, while making dinner, because I wanted to internalize the structure until I could play it better than Tsunku could (and it's in G-FLAT/F-SHARP AGAIN, YOU DICKWAD). But to actually write the arrangement, as in, the pianistic interpretation, I stopped listening to the song. Cold turkey. The last thing I needed was to have those rock drums and gee-tars seeping back into my mind's ear and forcing me into a corner. Instead, all I was thinking of was the notes on paper ... the music condensed into its purest form.
A couple of days passed and at this point I'd been listening to the local jazz station (proper jazz, not the easy-listening crap) frequently in the car. Now, I'm no Count Basie, but I know enough how to swing, and the elements of the arrangement became self-evident:
- steady "walking bass" figure (do you have any idea how fecking hard this is to figure out in F#? bloody hell)
- 30's/40's big band sound - RH little finger plays melody a la saxes, rest of the RH plays chords for punctuation a la brass
- 6th and 7th chords okay, but avoid higher extensions which weren't used until the Bebop era
- a quick little in-between riff that goes I-VIm7-IIm7-V7, very traditional jazz
- instrumental solo FOR GREAT JUSTICE!!!!
It wasn't until later that I remembered °C-ute's cover for their 2008 calendar (which had been announced around the same time):
Coincidence? I wonder.
Inspired by the events of this video.
The piano room on a typical day.
Sometimes, I do like me a challenge.
Sakura wa Rakusa is that challenge. It's saying ... "We have, like, 3 drum machines and 5 synths going at the same time! Can you play THAT, fancypants?"
And I'm like ... "Of course I can. My skill level is OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!!!111"
The trick with multi-layered, electronics-heavy dance tracks is that you never play them the way they sound. (I'm not too fond of my Onna Ni Sachi Are arrangement; it's obviously an act of pianistic button-mashing.) What's more fun to do -- and what I did here -- is to reinterpret the song in such a way that it still captures the mood but is better suited to an acoustic instrument.
One of the song's key characteristics is its strong, steady beat -- and that's the first thing to go. I have no interest in having my left hand go BONK BONK BONK BONK over and over for four straight minutes. Instead, I chopped up that strong beat into a bluesy, funky groove that is, quite honestly, more fun to play (while still very booty-shakin'). And then after a random playthrough I was inspired to move the "Sakura wa raku..." riff into the bass clef for great justice.
The right hand, meanwhile, still has the unenviable task of trying to carry all the other instrumental lines in the song. Now, I can barely handle a Bach fugue, so I wasn't about to try simulating the multiple inner voices that form the accompaniment. A close-voicing jazz chord approach was the better answer, and really, who can say no to pumping up the harmonies with 7ths, 9ths and a touch of chromaticism (already implicit in the original recording). It makes it thicker and meatier, a tune you can really dig into.
The quote in the middle ... is from some famous dude. Named Tsunku. XD
This just in: HELLO! PROJECT BUDGET UNABLE TO AFFORD NEW CHORD PROGRESSIONS :P
How else to explain that Kokuhaku no Funsui Hiroba and Onna Ni Sachi Are have virtually the same chorus? (i-iv-VII-III, if you must know)
No matter. When I first heard Kokuhaku, I thought "Crap, another boring Berryz ballad," but then an amazing thing happened. I kept humming parts of the song at work. Over and over. And it had this graceful melancholy that followed me around wherever I went. Eventually I caved and realized that it was a pretty darn good song after all, and that Tsunku had fooled me once again by hiding beauty within its banal simplicity.
Graceful melancholy is, of course, the domain of a number of composers, and the more I thought about the song the more I wanted to channel Schubert. He certainly lives up to the ideal: winding melodies of remarkable prettiness, colored by harmonies that shift in and out of major and minor, and always filled with a gentle longing. (Risako hanging out alone at the fountain is so filled with longing it's not even funny.) But Schubert was still tied to the rules of the Classical period, and honestly, the progressions of the song didn't quite fit Classical structures.
So I ended up with more Chopin than Schubert, because he's all about graceful melancholy as well, and a little freer with melodic variation. The left-hand part is definitely straight out of the Nocturnes and other slow pieces, and the ad-libbing in the second verse is loaded with turns and passagework that I learned from ol' Frederic. By varying the textures and voicings I could eventually complete this musical tale, telling a story of love confession infused with that distant longing.
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Raid-kun said:
[いいですね]Saw a post at Intlwota regarding your blog and I must say I am mightily impressed! I can never ever... read more
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Gray said:
[いいですね]I bet he wrote it in e minor and transposed it down so that during the last chorus it could... read more
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Hotaru said:
Oh my! It Kokuhaku no Funsui Hiroba and Onna ni Sachi Are's chorus are extremely similar! At least the first... read more
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