There’s still Farewell Song to go, and maybe all the unused tracks. Furthermore, I’m looking to overhaul Tori No Uta, Tsukiwarawa, Sousei, and Kannagi in particular. That makes roughly 10. But there’ll also be some more edits here and there, so I guess there’s still a month’s worth of work left at least. At worst, it could stretch to next March.
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Felt like sharing my sad attempt at transcribing Yuriha. Yes, the Rewrite OST Yuriha. I’ve been wanting to transcribe Key OSTs since discovering that there’s so much transcriptions found in a lot of Japanese websites and finding out that there haven’t been much transcriptions for the more recent Key OSTs. I also wanted to train my ears, and also to appreciate OSTs much more deeply.
I’ll be selecting some tracks from Rewrite, Harmonia, and maybe LB! to do transcriptions out of, and here’s Yuriha. It’s not quite accurate, but I uploaded a MIDI (linked in the video description) for those who want to improve on it. (BTW, I also did a transcription of Kurohoshibyou before, but it hasn’t accounted for the SFXs yet.)
I already expressed my frustrations in the video description itself, but to be fair, I did learn a lot from the experience. 
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I transcribed “evening breeze” from the Angel Beats! piano arrange album Holy. The song was originally played on guitar, but I prefer the slower piano arrangement, so I wrote it down since I didn’t find sheets anywhere. The arrangement turned out to be fairly easy to play, which was a welcome surprise.
Here is a link to the sheet on Noteflight, which you can use to print or listen to it:
If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
I plan to transcribe “girl’s hop” from the same album at some time in the future, but I’m currently distracted by making a Lucid9 medley, so I don’t expect it to be done soon.
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Great to see all the work being done to transcribe Keys music!
Hey all,
Farewell Song (the full version - the shorter ones are quite different, so I guess I’ll finish them next time) is done.
So before I go on to the more pertinent stuff, here’s some backstory.
Farewell Song is actually the first track I began transcribing, but that was many years ago, and it seemed like too much to put down for solo piano back then, so I had to give up and improve my technique (play more piano). Then my hard drive crashed, wiping all my efforts - and it was then that I started practicing intensely, hoping one day to avenge myself and finish this transcription.
And thus,
There will be notes on this piece in particular, but they will mostly be interpretive in nature.
Farewell song is easily one of the densest, if not the densest, tracks that Key has thus far produced. It’s chock full of little bells, chimes, bass rings, and other nuances, that are all quite deliberate and add up to form a colossal soundscape. This transcription tried to capture as much as it could - no mercy, as usual for this set of transcriptions.
Perhaps one of the most unique things about Farewell song is that there is no resolution in the song (I can argue that even the ending stanzas of the lyrics are ambiguous). While Tori No Uta achieves this as well, by navigating through multiple keys and bouncing melodies around, Farewell song is overwhelmingly dominated by a chorus line that repeats itself umpteen times, only swelling in intensity each time. It both starts and ends on a G note for the melody, and a G chord at both points as well. But despite ‘hitting’ home so many times, the chord progression never allows a cadential resolution, and the melody keeps on springing back to the dominant - effectively, diminishing any sense of resolution from approaching the home key. In essence, the home key does not feel like a home key - a clever move befitting of the title of the song.
In the original song, to accompany this sort of never-ending motif recurrent throughout Air, the song fades out, like Tori No Uta. But where Tori No Uta fades out on “new” material, that is simply rehashed from earlier portions, and effectively defuses tension by way of a long coda passage - ending the song on an uneasy sobering tone, Farewell song does the exact opposite. It begins fading out in the middle of a ‘farewell’ section that’s been repeated for a good minute or two, but it ends right before yet another flying melodic motif kicks in, and ultimately nothing gets resolved. But if every phrase practically ends in a grounded G, is there a need for a resolution?
But I digress. If you don’t really get the song, perhaps the best way is to sing it out, including that wailing bit at the end. Back to the transcription, I’d like to highlight the importance of proper preparation and avoiding injury.
To prepare for it, it’s advisable to tackle the other Air transcriptions, especially the ones marked Advanced along with Mizutamari and Tori No Uta, since Farewell song utilizes techniques covered by the others in the set. Don’t play through the pain; you’re not working out. Also, for Farewell song, it is especially important to train your arms and back, lest you wear out in the middle of the piece.
Next up is cleaning up the set. I might consider simplifying some of the widest leaps in Farewell song, but that remains to be seen. Tori No Uta gets a revamp. Kannagi will be completely overhauled. Tentoumushi will be slightly simplified. The final section of Niji will be slightly changed. The beginning of Esoragato will be changed too. Tsukiwarawa might be changed. All others will be edited a bit, and cleaned up. Not to mention, the 6 unused tracks. Additionally, I’ll try to post videos of the transcriptions, just to give a better clue of how they can be played.
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Ahh, this is looking awesome. I’m gonna promote the hell out of the complete collection when it’s done.
Thank you for this! Is it OK if I use this and adapt it for a full orchestra?
Hello everyone,
It’s a bit of a heresy to post a not-so-high-quality transcription in what I now consider @eptakyrios topic, but here’s what I made, my very first arrangement: Song for Friends which I subtitled “The Story of Kurugaya”.
So basically what I intended was to transcribe Song for Friends fulfilling the following criteria:
- Toning down the difficulty.
- Conveying the feelings of Kurugaya’s route.
- Following the vocal melody but disrupting it at times with the piano accompaniment.
As for toning down the difficulty, mainly what I did was to completely eliminate all chords in the right-hand accompaniment during the first and second verse. While it takes out a lot from the original vibe of the song, I feel like it was necessary to make it playable by not so proficient people like me. Secondly, while the vocal melody and the piano accompaniment could have been combined without omitting much, it would have turned out to be a complete mess of chords and probably a constant 3 voices to be played throughout the whole song.
This leads us to the third point I listed: my approach was to take the vocal melody and the low-pitched accompaniment and, if I could fill in the blanks with the higher-pitched accompaniment, then I would, but I wouldn’t write too many chords which would have upped the difficulty too much. So I ended up taking away the vocal melody when I felt that the piano accompaniment could give a more varied feeling to the melody. This happened mainly at the bridge to the chorus and the final part of the chorus.
Finally, the second point and what I considered to be the most important: making it convey the feelings of Kurugaya’s route. Because of this, I’ll spoiler tag the whole explanation due to obvious Kurugaya route spoilers.
Kurugaya was aside from everyone at the start, and she didn’t really understand what emotions are, so to portray this, I started off sticking to the piano accompaniment during 16 bars, without any of the vocal melody being shown. This would show the dull gray life that Kurugaya was living at that point. To further show this sentiment, I added the note “Senza espressione” which translates to “without expression”, so that these first 16 bars should be played without articulating as much as possible. This means, reducing the accent on the “strong beats” of each bar and avoiding making it sound too much as a legato.
then we jump to the bridge and first chorus, which represent the time where Kurugaya discovers the Little Busters! and starts understanding what Joy is. This is why the note “Festoso”, which roughly translates into “with joy”, is used to indicate a more cheery way of playing, accentuating the higher pitches of the vocal melody over the lower pitches of the accompaniment. The fact that the vocal melody doesn’t have chords helps making it a more plain melody which also helps transmitting that feeling of joy. To further enhance this feeling, the loud, syncopated accompaniment takes the place of the vocal melody at the latter part of the chorus, allowing three more rising notes before returning to a slightly modified vocal melody with extremely loud left-hand octaves.
The following part of Song for Friends is the second verse, with the same melody as in the beginning. In this arrangement, this time the vocal melody is played to depict how Kurugaya had been changed by the Little Busters and had snapped out of her lonely, gray life. To add a bit more of colour to this part, a simple embellishment is made at bars 28 and 29.
Following is the chorus again. The mood is still the same: Festoso, it’s meant to be played just as the first one.
Now we move on to the verse/bridge to the last chorus. At this point, Kurugaya has accustomed herself to the life with the Little Busters! This is conveyed with a “Comodo” (comfortable) way of playing, slowing tempo a bit and using “legato” or a lot of pedal. On a side note, I chose the high pitched part of the accompaniment for this part since it is barely audible but made me feel like it could represent quite well the three girls messing with the Little Busters. During this part, the bullying was barely important. However, then, on the bar previous to the chorus, an octave spam getting progressively louder depicts how the bullying got worse and Kurugaya snapped.
Now we’re approaching the end, with once again, the happy feeling to the chorus due to her spending her days with Riki, however, she is well aware that that it can’t go on forever, so a “Pesante” (heavy, slow and sad) way of playing is advised, slowing the tempo and and avoiding the accentuation of the vocal melody too much. The accompaniment is also changed slightly to combine rising and descending groups of notes instead of just using ascending ones. This helps giving a very subtle sad connotation to the accompaniment, although this effect isn’t too big (this a big failure due to my inexperience composing).
Finally, we have the main motif again except that the left hand is playing some minor chords which accomplish two things. First, minor chords have a gloomy sound that help with the purpose of making the ending slightly sad. Secondly, using those minor chords forced me to use some notes that were off scale, so there’s a small feeling of them not belonging there. This was made to represent the chaotic world in which Kurugaya and Riki were living during the end of the route. Since I know that these chords will be to the liking of anyone, I added and Ossia with the regular accompaniment from the beginning in case you prefer it. And, to finish the piece, the left hand stops playing and the right hand starts rising in a D arpeggio while getting more and more silent until disappearing, just as the world ended at the end of Kurugaya’s route
Well, if you’ve read through that massive text wall, you have my thanks. I’m well aware that the cover is far from perfect, it’s my first one after all, but I still ended up pretty satisfied with the way it ended up being.
If you want to download it, be it the MP3, the MIDI or the PDF file with the sheet music, all of those links are in the description of the youtube video I linked.
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A version I might actually be able to play with a bit of practice, very nice 
Though it does get a bit advanced for me in some parts 
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Hey, same for me. I’m still practicing it cause I can’t get the chorus 100% right 
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Yami no kanata e’s piano version. It sounds so good ( both the original and this ). The midi file used to be there but I am not able to access it. If anybody knows where I can get the midi for this song I would really like it.
Our dormitory lost Internet connection so I tend to do a lot of things I usually have no time to even bother with. So yeah this happened. Yay, another MIDI transcription :'D
Wedge is from the Rewrite Anime OST and being an arrangement of Instincts, it’s almost automatically great. Actually, it’s great and I highly recommend giving it a listen because it was never used in the anime lol.
For this one, this was so much easier to transcribe than Yuriha. This didn’t take me as long as I expected. Also, the video is based on Synthesia but Synthesia’s soundfont is terribad so I used two MuseScore-compatible soundfonts instead.
Feel free to use this transcription as a basis for music covers or whatever.
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Great piece and great transcription. The piano part looked easy at the beginning but got a bit more difficult in the middle and last parts with interesting left-hand melodies and pedal work. Still, the key signatures are quite easy.
Keep them coming, I really appreciate this kind of work.
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It’s a shame the website pico-score.com went offline a few years ago - I found it to be a great place for Key piano transcriptions. The arrangement for ‘Onaji Takami e’ got me into playing piano seriously.
I did purchase the physical books from the website, so need to try find them as I think the books came with a CD-ROM containing all the PDF and MP3 files for pretty much every track on a range of Key OST’s (including stuff that wasn’t avaliable on the website for download).
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Wonder no more (for now).
There’s a lot of edits I made, carved out from small pockets of time. I haven’t uploaded them yet though, since I’m taking the time to view things from a new lens. Lots has happened and for a start, I no longer have free access to a (good) grand, so I’ve slowed down quite a bit. Meanwhile, balancing my hobbies with my other hobbies has proven to become quite a challenge lately. Currently doing some sweeping of the scores; quite a few edits I made on paper during practice have to be transferred.
To name a few major works in progress,
Tori no Uta: though there’s a few bits I’m fond of, I can’t help but feel the whole’s rather bland and second-rate. Attempting a redo. Current version receives some minor tweaks, such as changing out the absurd right-hand for bars 113-114 (personally, I’ve never played that part at full speed without missing every other note). Contemplating overhauling some sections in the third quarter of the current ver.
Kannagi: with time, I’ve come to accept it as a passable effort. Save for the fact that I’d rather punch a brick wall than play it. Changing the ending, simplifying the beginning.
Farewell Song: ungodly. Having spent a good part of the year practicing it, there are many times when I’d feel like my arms would give way thanks to the bigly leaps. But I’ve never felt so exhilarated playing a piece, so rather than scrap it, simplifying current version. Doing a new transcription of Farewell Song that doesn’t restrict as much to the original.
Sousei: the whole piece is tremolo. Finishing up a non-tremolo ver.
Air Main Menu Theme: the real reason behind the delay. Just kidding. But to say that it didn’t put a wrench in my plans would be a lie. Proving extremely difficult to transcribe.
Almost everything else also gets edits. Some of the tougher ones get slightly simplified, mostly the silent but nasty parts like the hidden 4 octave left-hand leap combo in Tentoumushi. Most of the overt challenges, of course, are not touched. For some, whole sections may be changed out, e.g. Natsukage final section, Niji’s final section, Koko’s tremolo, Esoragoto’s intro Some tricky issues will probably take much longer to resolve though if I even find a satisfying solution, such as Niji (pedaling is a real challenge here; the texture in the second half of it gets easily muddy), since I’ll need a grand to test things out. Meanwhile, I’m still wondering if Natsukage sounds too majestic.
Save for the new pieces, the rest will be done and shared altogether somewhere around the year-end to the New Year or so, unless anyone is dying to object or something or other. I guess that’s about it. I’m hoping to get to the Rewrite OST, but it seems like the day is still far off.
@supercoobie
Apologies for the impossibly late reply, but if it’s still relevant, I’m fine with anything. To all, just use these transcriptions however you want. I’m glad if they serve to be useful in the least.
Thank god they’re getting simplified. You shouldn’t put away the old versions though, they were still very good. Specially Natsukage. Even if it sounds too majestic, it’s a hell of a piece.
Actually, what surprises me the most is that you can actually play your own arranges. Most of the people that I’ve seen do different arranges of that level aren’t able to play them themselves.
So I’d like to share a transcription of Hikari ni Yosete (the really beautiful Mio Theme) from Little Busters!, for solo piano. In this folder, there should be a PDF, a MIDI file, and a MuseScore to be found.
Please don’t give me much credit in this transcription – all I did was import to MuseScore the MIDI transcription by mo7779 and tweaked some stuff so it can be played for solo piano. If anything, the biggest change is in the second part - chords supposed to be played by both hands are somewhat simplified so they can be played by only the left hand, while the right hand plays the melody originally played by a string synth. I also sneaked in a brief counterpoint somewhere, and added the final cadence. That’s just it.
As for this particular transcription, there have been arrangements made for this piece before, but this one is a little harder than the ones I know of. I’d say the most difficult part here is in measures 9-16: the left hand constantly jumps between playing the bass and the chords, but it needs to be played lightly… 
The rest of the piece is, I think, not nearly as challenging (most of it is played in arpeggio), but watch out for the counterpoint in measure 24. >:D
Have fun!
(I can no longer upload to MuseScore for free 
so I’ll just put the sheet music here.)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cyR3EoVlcEFTbZfHIZXjrcjvb7N5J9f3?usp=sharing
(edit: crap, I forgot to remove that stacatto dot in measure 30. please play that in legato ;u; EDIT2: okay I’ll be uploading a revision soon :'D)
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I returned to Kaza after some time focusing more on RL issues, and to catch up with Kaza I decided to tackle Summer Pockets. So I installed it and spent a day or two setting up VNReader to get through the Kanji walls. Then I notice that I don’t need any of that because the menu music is already enough to start working on something.
And here it is, a transcription of the menu music (which is curiously named “Summer Pockets”). The beginning and the end of the song were hard to transcribe and there might be one or two mistakes (specially on the note lengths) here and there, but most of the stuff should be just as in the original, just the way a transcription should be. You can check it out in youtube and you’ll find the PDF sheets for the piece in the video description in case you’re eager to learn it (which I’d love to see any of you do).
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Just figured I’d leave the link to the sheet music for my planetarian Arrangement Album: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1F10xtcFGrfLmBCSaEvPxZf5v6JX2_j6F?usp=sharing
If anyone wants more specific details of my transcriptions and how I think they turned out, check out my post on Key Music Fan Covers.
Also, if anyone wants a specific type of file besides a PDF so they can make additions or corrections of their own more easily, just ask and I’ll see what I can do. 
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