Agniratha, Mechonis Capital (Day) - Viola and Piano Cover ft.

AHHHHHHHHJFDHKJDHFJKHDFKJHFS IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!! Oh boy was this video a long time coming! This project all started in March when ‪@kmadsmusic‬ left such a sweet comment on my Auresco cover and brought up the idea of covering Agniratha together. We started working on this in late April after most of my schoolwork was wrapping up. I’m SUPER happy and excited that it’s finally released! KMADS did a fantastic job, so check out her channel if you want to see more from her! Forever grateful to her for all the music we get to make together! ❤️

Here is her version of the cover:    • Agniratha, Mechonis Capital (Day) - Piano ...  

I didn’t work on the piano part, so I can’t really speak about that (BESIDES IT BEING AMAZING), but there were a couple of thoughts I had while arranging the viola part (and processing the video is taking a much longer time). So... I hope you'll humor me and have me talk more details about the music 😂 !! One such issue that always arose was which octave to use. Perhaps it’s stubbornness or some hesitation, but I didn’t want to use a violin for this or edit the pitches to make it a lower octave. For this specific arrangement, I could get away with it a little more since the piano part can cover those lower and higher ranges.

In the original, the higher octave when the violin comes in the introduction is extremely haunting and beautiful. I wanted to at least be a higher octave for that part but the part wasn’t very idiomatic. I ended up settling for the range you hear in the cover which I believe makes it less suspended/floating, but more grounded and deep. Around 50 seconds in, I wanted my pizzicato to imitate the percussion that I heard in the original. At 1:14, there are so many moving parts but in the first draft of the arrangement I couldn’t really hear the primary voice. It makes sense with all the voices being so tightly knit together. I decided to double that voice despite the texture getting a bit thicker. It was a tactic that I used more than once haha. One of my regrets listening back to this cover was that I didn’t do a great transition into the next section around 1:36. It sort of fades out and then back in which could work too I guess.

At 1:43, I thought it would be SOOO cool if I played artificial harmonics to imitate the flute timbre in the original! KMADS would be playing the actual notes from the flute, but I think it turned out pretty interesting! I would also have parts that primarily function as “bass” or “inner voice” but I thought it would be interesting to have some of those come out at times! However, that was also a pain to deal with in other ways such as during the mixing process lol. At 2:22, I could have had strings play with KMADS there, but I kinda thought it would be cool to have a sudden texture change there and only have piano playing! That section is one of my favorite parts of the whole track! I also love the section at 2:45 where the theme comes back but there's this new groove to it. Overall, there were a lot of choices to think about. I think some of it came out successful and some of it fell short, but I think I learned a lot throughout this!

Since this cover took a while, I recorded the audio for this in April. It was wild trying to lip-sync to the audio of this and listen back to an old version of me! I really hope you all enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed working on it with KMADS!

Thank you so much for watching!
Will
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#xenoblade #xenobladechronicles #ゼノブレイド #XenobladeChroniclesDefinitiveEdition #viola #piano