Hey all,
Alright. Before I get carried away with a bunch of info about what I'm doing, I'd like to take the time to say that 1) this is my first Google Project and 2) I'M SUPER PSYCHED ABOUT IT. Even though this is the first time I've ever arranged music. Could be interesting. For this project, I am going to arrange the top-selling song from a very famous power metal band for... well... for my school's pep band to play at football/basketball games. Amaranth by Nightwish. Composed by Tuomas Holopainen (I worship this guy... and he deserves it. He's a genius. And he's Finnish. What's not to like?) Of course, nobody besides we metalheads out there have ever heard of this song. I will tell you this, though. This song is EXTREMELY CATCHY. It will get in teams' heads. It will bore its way into their minds and turn them to grey goo. It will win us the game.
As for a more musical description of the song, it's more of a hard rock beat than anything, even though it's classified as metal because of the nature of the band that wrote it, with a very syncopated melody and bassline, at least for the part I'm arranging (refrain and outro). The vocalist in the original track recording (Anette Olzon) brings her talents to light in this song with a soaring melody which involves a lot of interval jumps and changes pitch while on the same syllable in the lyrics. For those of you who are curious (and you'd better be... OR ELSE!), here's a link to the music video. I hope you can put up with fallen angels, a heavy bassline, and epic guitar riffs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdZn7k5rZLQ
The first day of this was... well... interesting. For one, I was originally going to do this with a friend in another band, but she backed out on me to write music with another person without telling me until I'd already created this blog. Also, after I created it, I realized I couldn't really do anything about getting started on this project other than listen to the song over and over and over again. At least I finally figured out the gist of the rhythm for the bassline, and this was no small task because of the overlap of syncopation with the melody. I ran into another problem when I got home and discovered that the software I need to write this out (Finale NotePad) only runs on Windows operating system. I have a Mac. Just a bit of an issue, don't you think? I guess worse comes to worst, I'll just use the program at the school to finalize the parts I've arranged. Hopefully it won't come to that, though.
Well, I guess that's all I have for today. There's more to come! Please do come again! Thanks!
-Rachel (the dragon)
