Kira Kira / キラキラ - Kuzu no Honkai OST - Live Piano Cover [Patreon Commission] + Sheets Soon!
🍰 Consider becoming my Patreon! / hayashipiano 🍰
☕ Consider donating to me on Kofi! https://ko-fi.com/hayashipiano ☕
🌲 Join my community and I on Discord! / discord 🌲
📜 Link to all of my sheets! https://drive.google.com/drive/folder... 📜
DO NOT REUPLOAD MY CONTENT WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT PERMISSION! ❌
I've returned to piano performance land.
First off, I would love to say a massive thank you to Jennifer - my lovely Patreon supporter who requested both this and the previous Kuzu no Honkai OST ("Hajime wa nantonaku") that I did - for two reasons. One is that she was patient enough to wait the couple of months for me to slowly go insane in university until I could sit down one spring day and arrange/record this. I'm sorry it took this long; I hate school, grr! And secondly, by commissioning these tastily intricate OST selections, she basically forced me to improve on physical piano technique and musical storytelling maturity so I could even have the chance of making a decent cover of this beautiful OST. And I think it paid off: I love what I've made, albeit at the cost of never wanting to play Db, Eb, and Ab in a chain ever again (you'll see what I mean by this in the vid).
Secondly, I'd like to say a domo arigathanks to @Animenzzz for lending me advice on how to arrange the middle section, and for telling me the hard truth: some music is just too dense for one person to cover all the instruments with two hands. I was stubborn enough to spend about an hour trying to do some crazy three/four-hand techniques in an attempt to include everything I heard in the original track (including the string rise that I had to ultimately leave out in the middle section), but I soon realized that rather than have weak and tinny semblances of all parts at the same time, I'd rather just stick to the main parts and double down on making them sound as nice and musical as possible.
Which brings us to the thing that differentiates this cover from the previous Kuzu no Honkai commission that I did: I didn't try to recreate the original 1-for-1 this time. If you listen to the original, you'll find that the first section is repeated after the middle section in the form of the penultimate section. While beautiful, I thought it would be rather bland to play almost the exact same thing again, so at 1:20, I decided to change the entire feeling of the piece to a more active style by introducing massive romantic sweeps along the keyboard with spidery left hand arpeggios, bold right hand chords singing the melody (with extensions and suspensions for extra color), and ornaments at 1:27 and 1:30.
1:52 to 2:11 is a completely new section (2:11 onwards picks back up on the original again and ends the performance) that I thought was a needed "contrast" section to the big and bold passages that preceded it. The reason for this passage's existence is to gently ease the listener back into the original's more gentle vibe. One of my favorite things I did was the tender transition from Ebm11 to F-sharp minor chord at 1:59 with a simple movement of two notes as the constantly active right hand motif (Db-Eb-Ab) provides the sparkle, much like the rain of the ending scene of Episode 11 when this plays.
Some other things I wanted to point out:
There are many moments where my right hand is taking care of two melodies by itself (one being the Db-Eb-Ab pattern and the other is usually octaves outlining the melody). As sheets will be made for this, I tried to make the playing as intuitive as possible, so it shouldn't be that difficult to first train the right hand to "memorize" the Db-Eb-Ab pattern, then learn to leap around to hit other things while always returning to those three notes. Metronome was my best friend.
Building the climax from 0:48, followed by those endless strings of tremolos/broken octaves, was very fun. Not sure why people find tremolos difficult; it was probably the easiest part of the whole song for me at least.
The VST used is Noire.
Yes, my nails are painted in the video kek
Honestly, this anime's entire soundtrack is a masterpiece; all hail Masaru-san. It was a joy to have worked on this, and I hope that my performance could be emotionally inspiring to someone out there interested in music and anime.
As always, 楽しんでくださいね。
Louis
#kuzunohonkai
#kirakira
#クズの本懐
#キラキラ
#ost
#piano
#scumswish