[DC] Sonic Adventure - "At Dawn ...for Speed Highway" by tunafish45

[Zeta]

Submission Information:
Series: Sonic
Game: Sonic Adventure
Console: Dreamcast
Title: At Dawn ...for Speed Highway
Instrumentation Solo Piano
Arranger: tunafish45

[tunafish45]

[Kricketune54]

Hello tunafish45, welcome to NinSheetMusic!

The way the submissions process works here is two updaters will review your sheet for a variety of criteria (note accuracy, and formatting on your sheet), which you can then review and implement. Once two updaters approve of your sheet, it will be accepted and put on the site in the next update!

I don't have a whole lot of time at the moment, so I just a few comments from skimming to start.

• No need to include "From" in the game title at the top of the page
• In 4/4 time signature, it is a general rule to follow note groupings where the first two beats don't visually combine across the middle of the measure. m1's right hand (RH) part would look like this, with correct note groupings for example.

Spoiler

You cannot view this attachment.

[close]

Just going to also link the formatting guidelines as well, we do have some standardized fonts in place... less important to deal with at the moment but wanted to highlight some of the things we try to have every sheet include and be visually consistent with. Formatting in MuseScore & Exporting to Finale

Please let me know if you have any questions otherwise!

[tunafish45]

Kricketune54, thank you for reviewing my submission!

I have regrouped the notes and edited the titles in both of my submissions. I have also made numerous other format edits.
Please let me know if there is anything else I need to fix.

[Kricketune54]

Had a bit more time to do a review. I just want to give a heads up before we get pretty far along - but I think there is going to be a lot to correct here. I've jumped around a bit, but there's a lot I have to say and wanted to cover some of the bigger bits that jumped out for me first.

• One other thing is we look to have that bottom page copyright info on the first page only. lmk if you have trouble with that
• "con pedale" is sized a bit large. Usually that's a file conversion issue though because I see it says 12 pt font instead of 18 or something so can hold off for now


Note Feedback
• m1-10 would give m1-2 and m9-10 in particular a relisten. It sounds like the melody moves notes on beat 3, not on beat 2.5 (the latter 8th note half of beat 2 just for terminology clarification). Looks like currently the melody moves notes at those spots a half beat early.
• m7 RH beat 3 hearing An and Bn also under the Dn.
• m17 This applies for a few other places as well, but generally when writing out chord patterns, when there are inner notes like on beat 2, the notes are usually represented at the front end of the held notes. But in this particular measure I also disagree with the length as it sounds like the A's should be a quarter note length at most and not two beats.
• m17 LH pattern (this applies to measures that follow as well), I am hearing the rhythm's beats like this:

Spoiler

You cannot view this attachment.

[close]

• m70 to end this entire part is actually not at the end of the track - correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but this track repeats from m69 back to m9. We usually specify that arrangements should follow loops from the source song as it would be heard in game. One thing will add, reference this section compared to m1-16 before deleting as I think a lot of the RH's notes should look exactly the same for how they are in this end section.

[tunafish45]

Kricketune54, thank you for the feedback!

I have made the following changes.

• Edited m1-16 right hand to reflect synth chords in OST
• Edited m17 beat 1 and similar measures' right hand notes to quarter notes
• Edited m17-32 left hand to reflect bass in OST
• Removed m69 to end and added repeat sign back to m9
• Removed copyright from pages 2 and 3 in .mus file
• Reduced size of con pedale text

Unresolved:

• m20 and m28 unsure what to change about inner notes

Note:
When I made this I was more focused on musicality and feeling rather than note accuracy. In the song's intro, you hear many voices + percussion, each doing their own thing. I added syncopated melodies both the L&R hand to recreate that effect. Throughout the rest of the song, the left hand also doesn't follow any particular voice either, It's more of a compromise between rhythm, chords, and the other voices. I get that NinSheetMusic strives for accuracy to the source material. If you want a more true to source rendition of "At Dawn", take a look at the arrangement by "Eleventh Floor".

Spoiler

[close]

He uses a drone note in the left hand for the syncopated rhythm, and to make up for the slightly singular tone, he adds another voice to the right hand which may or may not be playable in the later sections. There's no sheet music referenced in his video unfortunately. If you like his version better, I can make changes to my sheet to reflect that and credit him.

Here's my original version for reference.

Spoiler

[close]

Again, thanks for taking the time to review my sheet. I'm looking forward to getting more feedback!

[Kricketune54]

I'll have a bit more to say in a follow up post eventually, but I did notice it looked like the rhythm for m17-32 LH was still the same. On beat 3 specifically it should be a 16th, 8th, then 16th as opposed to 16th 16th 8th.

[Kricketune54]

• I don't know if you have the flexibility to make this update- but the measure per system is a bit cramped for parts of page 1. You could try 5 measures per system for the entire arrangement, or 4 if there parts that look cramped with 5

• I spent a lot of time looking at the first 16 bars of this and listening. Here's what I think would work best (I need to still do a review of the LH a bit more at m7-8) for the RH and some of the LH. Lmk your thoughts on these potential changes, more or less I did my best to parse out the melody and incorporate other parts going on. Feel free to add accents and such, I didn't take that much time to look at that more just to correct notes

Edit Ideas for m1-m16 (Dropbox Link)

• m8-m16 I think the LH at this point should switch to the bassline. I like the idea of your part that you made for m1-8 incorporating a few different parts, but again have to look at it a bit more.

m20 and m28 unsure what to change about inner notes

On the inner notes - I meant that it's typically easier to play multiple notes at the start of a phrase than on beat 2 for example (looking at current m19). But also, having a chord at the start of a measure when it is heard in the original source at the start just makes sense from a setting the chord tone and accuracy standpoint. So at m17 for example beat 1 in the RH would be spelled out as An-En-Cn-An

I would usually advise against using other arrangements as reference - this one in particular sounds like it is more a transcription than an arrangement. While we strive for accuracy here, we also strive to make sure arrangements are playable (not that yours isn't, but there are some things that this arrangement you linked would not be playable unless you had three hands, to confirm your suspicions).

However one thing I do think I picked up on from this linked arrangement which differs from how you arranged is that the melody on your sheet is placed up an octave from m17 and on. Usually we try to make sure the melody stays in its original octaves and move down harmonies unless there's some part that's more important at some point in a song.

So with that said I think you could make some changes to your current RH part from m17 and on and move the notes to their original octave where applicable - may need to make modifications to the LH as a result (looking at page 2), but as I said in my first post, there is a lot to go through so I'm trying to keep things manageable. As a starting point for adjusting the LH, could follow what I did for m9-16 LH, which is just the bassline basically.

[tunafish45]

Kricketune54, thanks for the feedback!

I have made the following changes:

• Increased spacing of m1-8
• Changed m9-16 LH to bass as prescribed
• Changed m9-16 RH to include melodies as prescribed
• Extended m17-32 LH bass structure to the rest of the song
• Nuked RH m17-end

Here is the previous version for reference.
You cannot view this attachment.

[tunafish45]

Update:
I rewrote the entire right hand.
Now that both the right and left hand have been replaced, I don't think there are many notes that survived in the original submission! You weren't kidding when you said there was a lot to correct!

After nuking the right hand to the bare melody, I re-harmonized the notes.
This time I tried to draw more directly from the OST. It should be more accurate now.

Let me know what you think when you have the time to review.

[Kricketune54]

Admittedly, I had a very difficult time following some of the changes that were made since I last looked at this. I would ask if this submission is going to continue through our submissions process that you keep things a little less drastic between edits unless we discuss making such changes - this is a complicated track and I think it might be better for future arrangement submissions that you make to be of less complexity so we avoid having to repeat a ton of sections.

I know this sounds like I'm asking to hold your hand, but I want to make sure that I'm not spending a lot of time having to re-review sections of this submission without much context as to what or why something changed, out of fairness for other arrangers who haven't had their sheets looked at yet. I do also want to be helpful to you though, and perhaps give you more of a sense what we look to have arrangements be like that are on NinSheetMusic, in terms of capturing the melody and feel of VGM songs, and also having a representative harmony optimized for piano.


• Of changes I noticed that were a bit different than I expected, I focused in most on the intro. m1-6 I don't quite hear this second RH voice (which is an acoustic guitar in the original I think?) as is, and honestly I don't think it's one that necessarily needed to be included because it is quite subtle compared to what I had laid out for m1-16 previously. But this is how I hear those notes:

Spoiler

You cannot view this attachment.

[close]

Now this honestly doesn't work super great. A lot of notes in that third voice (green) end up restruck by the LH, so you'd probably need to maybe make the notes fifths or thirds where appropriate.

Other stuff I had time to look at:
• m4 LH there's a grace note Bn on the Cn on beat 3.5
• m6 LH the Gn on beat 1 should be up an octave. The Gn on 3.5 is actually quarter note length, and 4.5 is where the Bn is played.
• m7 RH I don't hear beat 1-2 like this, more like how m17 is.
• m8 LH I think this works a bit better top to bottom - C#-An-En (C# being the one a half step up from the Bn of the previous measure)
• some of the rests seem to have come out of alignment - examples like m17 RH beat 2 or m18 beat 2. The quarter rest is lower for some reason than it should.
• m20 RH second voice this is an example of a part that maybe should be changed a bit from its original octave. Reason being that G# is the melody note here, and it kind of gets drowned out by striking those other notes on 1.5. I would suggest moving the En and Bn down an octave here.

• I haven't had a chance to do much looking at it, but there are some spots later in the sheet where I can see ties between quarter notes - the usual/more correct notation alternative is to make these two separate voices, where the one that was previously tied is a half note in one voice, and the moving quarter notes are in a another voice.

[tunafish45]

Kricketune54, thank you for your response!

I have implemented all of your suggestions.

• Rewrote m1-6 right hand
• Added grace note to m4 LH
• Fixed m6 LH
• rewrote m7
• Fixed misaligned rests
• M20 and m28 moved top voice down one octave
• Changed tied quarter notes into half notes

For m7, I added an arpeggio in the LH to keep the rhythm of the acoustic guitar. Also, with just chords playing in unison, it sounds a bit bare. I would reserve that clean sound for the resolution in the next measure.

Let me know what you think of m1-6. The middle voice is just for syncopation. It loosely follows the echo of the acoustic guitar, which I think is an important sound in the intro.

Looking forward to the next round of feedback!