[GBA] Golden Sun - "McCoy's Palace" (Replacement) by Onionleaf

[Zeta]

Submission Information:
Series: Golden Sun
Game: Golden Sun
Console: Game Boy Advance
Title: McCoy's Palace
Instrumentation Solo Piano
Arranger: Onionleaf


Replacement Information:
Links to Existing Sheet: MUS | MIDI | PDF
Replacement Type: Challenge (new arranger)

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Onionleaf]

[Libera]

Sorry for the really long wait on this one, I'm going through it now...  The notes look pretty good to me, it's just a slightly tricky piece to fit onto the piano because of the wide orchestration (which is what my feedback mostly concerns.)

-Compared with the rest of the arrangement, I'm not so sure about the textures of bars 24-27.  I think it'd be better if the left hand continued to the take the bass part there, rather than omitting it, and the right hand played the semiquaver part (as that bits sticks out the most to me) perhaps with adding in the other melodic line as harmonies?  For example bar 25 might look like this:

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Also this way you avoid having any collisions between the two hands which is an added bonus.  Similarly I think it'd be best to remove the passing of the melody from RH to LH in bar 24 (by keeping the semiquavers in the right hand and instead playing the bass in the left hand.)  Also perhaps for consistency then it would be best to bring the left hand of bars 28-29 down by an octave.
-I think I'd go ahead and restrike everything on beat 2.5 in bar 16, like you do later on.  Particularly as I think the bass does in fact restrike, and there's no harm in restriking the string parts since it helps them to sustain more like they do in the original.
-I'm thinking that maybe it'd all look neater with more systems and less bars per system than you have at the moment (maybe 4 per system is a good aim, with perhaps less for the semiquaver heavy sections?)  You certainly have quite of bit of spare white space on the second page that you can use to spread things out more, which I think will help out to make things look more uniform (and also fixes some of the slightly odd-looking ties.)
-In the first section (bars 1-12) perhaps it would be better to move the extra harmony to the right hand rather than the left.  That way it should end up being more balanced compared with the rest of the arrangement.  (It's fine in the final section (bars 30-39) since the left hand is a lot higher there so it doesn't sound quite as muddy.)

Hope that helps!

[Libera]

Bump for arranger.

[Latios212]

slight nudge ^^

[Onionleaf]

Sorry, yes this has been waiting around for me for too long. I had a read through the review points, and will make the changes sometime this week.

[Onionleaf]

[...] and will make the changes sometime this week.

Did I say this week? I meant next next next week...

...

Hope that helps!

This helped a lot, thanks! I made all the changes, which definitely improved the sheet. I still have some doubts about my interpretation of the right hand in m. 25-29 - let me know if you think there's a better alternative.

[Libera]

Did I say this week? I meant next next next week...

No worries haha, it happens to everyone.

I still have some doubts about my interpretation of the right hand in m. 25-29 - let me know if you think there's a better alternative.

Hmm, looking at it again I think it's a little trickier than I thought it would be!  I think I looked at the first bar (25) and came up with my picture and just assumed that the rest of it worked similarly nicely, but I'm not sure it does.  After that the other melody line gets in the way of the repeated top notes in the semiquavers or is in fifths with the lower notes or something else awkward.  I think bar 27 works well as you have it, but maybe it'd be best to cut out the counter melody completely in bar 26 and just have the semiquavers.  Although you might prefer to cut it out in 25 as well so that the two bars match each other, but I'll leave that up to you.

Other things I found:
-It might be a good idea to add the fifth into the left hand chords in the last two bars so that you really get the sus4 sound, even though they're already in the right hand.
-The tempo marking is a little close to the beams, so you should probably move it up a bit.
-I'm surprised that I didn't say anything about this last time, but in bars 17-23 you're missing the bass part out (clearly intentionally).  That's cool and all, but it means that some of the harmony is being lost and there might be a way to work the quaver accompaniment and the bass notes (at least some of them) to make something that has a bit more of the harmonic content.  Maybe something like this?

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and then similarly for the next page. (I did actually check that it worked this time though!)

Also similarly to Agitha's Castle, I think that this is probably far removed enough from Thomas Wilson's version that you could probably just credit yourself.

[Onionleaf]

Cool, all noted! (no pun intended...) I'm glad you spotted all of these things, m17-23 are now looking much better with the bass notes. I also updated the last quaver note of each bar here to match the bassline in the original - hope my interpretation of it makes sense.

And oh yes, thanks to your detailed input there's been a fair few changes made to this replacement!

As always, let me know if I missed anything.

[Libera]

I also updated the last quaver note of each bar here to match the bassline in the original - hope my interpretation of it makes sense.

Yes that looks fine to me!

Just one small visual thing before I approve, which is that currently the distances between the systems are all different and it'd look a lot neater if they were consistent on each page.  Furthermore, for some reason the distance between staves has been set to 0.9 inches rather than the default 1 inch which makes things a little cramped in places.  I'd suggest bring it back to 1 inch.  Putting both of those things together should give you something that looks like this:

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After that I'll approve.  Also, I just realised that this is by the guy who did the Dark Souls soundtrack, which I was pretty surprised by!

[Onionleaf]

Cool, should be tidied up now!

Also, I just realised that this is by the guy who did the Dark Souls soundtrack, which I was pretty surprised by!

I did not know this, nice find! This composer is one of my favourites, so I'll be sure to listen to this soundtrack. ^^

[Libera]

Great!  It's got my approval.

[Latios212]

Looks great, just the lower layer note in m. 6 was shifted and the header on page 2 was too high. I've fixed those couple of things for you so we're good to go!

[Zeta]

This submission has been accepted by Latios212.

~Zeta, your friendly NSM-Bot