Hi and a warm welcome! I’m Alex and this is where you’ll find the collection of my musical, artistic and literary endeavours. At the moment I’m making piano transcriptions of the whole soundtrack from How to Train Your Dragon. Be sure to check them out.
Thanks for the visit and have a fantastic day!
Cheers,
Alex Sheen
With two new scores ready to for upload, I returned to working on “Test Drive” for four hands. After two full days of work (i.e. wake up, breakfast, Sibelius, lunch, Sibelius, dinner, Sibelius, bed : ||), I’m glad to say for the first time in months that the notes are in place. Here’re a couple screenshots of the unpolished score:
Intro
The most famous eight bars John Powell ever composed
What I personally call “The Weird Bit”. The strings port. and absence of rhythm makes it really difficult to arrange for keyboard. The solo score resolves the problem with a five-bar long chromatic scale, but here trills and tremoli are used.
As you can see, much more time will have to be spent on adding markings and formatting to produce the final score. I had a nasty time wrestling with Sibelius over the four-hand layout while working on “Forbidden Friendship” the other day. In all likelihood I need to take a break for a few days before continuing.
As amazing a track it is, “Test Drive” is equally exhausting to arrange. Last April, I started off with a marching band arrangement, which put my ears under full orchestral blast for days. Basing the piano solo on a seventeen-line score took even longer, not to mention the numerous revisions made over the following months. The duos have been dragged along since. After so many hours spent on one track alone, it’s hard to open any “Test Drive” file these days without a slight cringe. It just burns up my musical fuel faster than anything else.
Still, all hard work has its rewards, and nothing is more gratifying than uploading a new score, writing a new post, then telling myself “I did it!” As “Test Drive” represents the amazing music and challenges of the project at their greatest, every step closer to completion of another arrangement brings me more joy than working on any other track.
Cheers,
Alex
“The Kill Ring” has been posted. Click on the image above to access the score. This one probably holds the record for being the highest number of accidentals, tempo change and time change. To be honest, I don’t expect myself to be able to play it anytime soon. Here’re a couple snapshots of the crazy stuffs I had to deal with:
After the last entry, I set the project completely aside so to focus on schoolwork and finals. There were also a few other personal problems I was struggling with. In the end, third year wrapped up quite nicely, with a ten-day field school up near Sudbury (mapping bedrocks in the bushes, in short). The one unpleasant incident was this message someone sent me on YouTube in mid-April:
It took me quite a number of contacts with various friends to conclude that it was just an elaborate scam. The legal publisher for HtTYD scores is Hal Leonard (though they haven’t published any piano ones as far as I know), not DreamWorks. I asked the guy for the name of his company and never got a reply. Go figure. Still it was a really frustrating experience.
Anyway, as I’m home for the summer, I’ll aim to finish the last seven tracks within the next couple of months. Previewing “Ready the Ships” and “Battling the Green Deaths” the other day, I found that they’re just potpourris of segments of previous tracks. There isn’t really any new melody to work with and that should speed things up. As of other arrangements, “Test Drive” duo is being put on hold, but eventually a duo and a four-hand score will be made for each of the following tracks:
1. This is Berk
8. Forbidden Friendship (duo completed)
10. See You Tomorrow
11. Test Drive
15. Romantic Flight
When I work, I usually stick notes on a rough score of two grand staves (four staves total) before extracting them for actual arrangements. Most of these only need some trimming and testing before they can be published. ”Test Drive” and “Romantic Flight” will take longer than the rest because I began with an orchestral score and based the solo upon that. Non-piano arrangements will be kept to a minimum, as I’m very poorly acquainted with proper notations for other instruments. Nonetheless, a string quartet score of “Forbidden Friendship” is close to completion and will be posted soon.
Cheers,
Alex
A revised, more cleaned-up version of “Forbidden Friendship” solo has been posted. Click on the image below to access the file.
So what exactly is improved when I revise a score? Here are a few things:
- Stem organization
- Spacing of bars
- Page-turn (when applicable)
- Arrangement of certain sections (usually less difficult)
- Musical and dynamic expressions
- Playing directions
To give you an idea, here’s a passage from the previous version:
The same passage in the new version:
The first piano duet arrangement is up! Click on the image below to access the score.
It was around this time last year when I was working on the solo score for “Forbidden Friendship” and realized the potential to include piano duets and piano four-hands as part of the project. There’s a limit to how many notes ten fingers can simultaneously manage across 88 keys…Anyway, formatting took up the main bulk of time for this duet score, with double staff-systems. In addition, I made some revisions to the original solo score at the same time. It will be posted next week.
If you’re wondering where the piano four-hand arrangement is, I’m still working on it right now. It’s a bit more difficult to coordinate notes so that hands don’t end up crashing together.
A new version of “Test Drive” has been posted. Click on the image below to access the file.
The new score is more cleaned-up in terms of notations and dynamics, with fingering added. The technical level is also raised by a slight knotch to better express the way everything sounds in the orchestral version. I made major revisions to parts which I wasn’t happy with in the previous version. Certain passages just didn’t sound right no matter how much I worked on it last summer and it drove me nuts, so I left it aside to continue on with the project. Over reading week, I finally picked it up again and solved all the problems in one clean sweep. An example is shown below.
Old Version:
New Version:
As you can see, the best balance of sound with playability isn’t always easy to find and I often have to think outside the box. Anyhow, now that “Test Drive” is settled, I can finally have a decent score to practise with. Meanwhile, I’m set to clean-up a few other big ones in the coming weeks, like “See You Tomorrow”, “Romantic Flight” and so on.
Work on new tracks is put on hold now. I know I’ve been stuck on “The Kill Ring” for months, but as most of the popular scores have already been posted, I’ll spend the next little while going through them the same way I did with “Test Drive”, so to make sure people have clean scores to play from. Also, due to popular demand, I’ve started working on piano duet and four-hand arrangements. Because it is twice as many bars to sort through, don’t expect them to be posted that frequently, though I’m confident that “Forbidden Friendship” will be up within a month.
Till then,
Alex
Today marks the one year anniversary of the project. I’m sad to say that I don’t have a new score prepared for the occasion. The last few months have been a hassle with other tasks on my priority list and the project was neither here nor there. Nevertheless, here’s something I managed to dig up from the archives.
This is a screenshot of my very first attempt at creating piano score for the How to Train Your Dragon soundtrack, dating from May 2010. It was only a primitive effort, before I really learned the ins and outs of Sibelius. I soon abandoned the idea, partly because it seemed too daunting at the time, and partly because I held Powell’s soundtrack in such high regard that I thought any solo arrangement would “flatten” the music. It wasn’t until almost a year later that I gathered enough ambition to take on the challenge. At the time, I was playing several piano arrangements of orchestral music (Scheherazade, Dvorak’s 9th, etc.) and it helped me change my mind about the instrument’s capabilities.
It’s been a long, long way since then, and I’m glad that this project has taken me to where I am now. At times, I was worried that I’d be listening to the soundtrack so often that I’d get sick of it, but that never happened. Rather, knowing every track to the tiniest details just makes me appreciate Powell’s genius even more. Plus, the joy I get whenever I try out a new score or read a new comment from another music lover helps me go on with the project. With eight tracks left, I know not yet when exactly I’ll reach the end, but I’m sure it’ll be just as phenomenal an experience as it has always been.
Anyway, thanks for bearing with me through these rather unproductive months. I’ll be back full force on the project once I’ve got my ends sorted out.
Till then,
Alex
This marks the last of the recordings I made this summer, a total of six out of the first eight tracks (“Dragon Training” and “Focus, Hiccup!” needs more practice and possibly revision). It may be a couple months before new videos are posted. Originally, I planned to maintain a weekly upload schedule, but schoolwork and band committments kept me occupied through the better part of the term.
I’ll be spending Christmas break (ridiculously short this year – a mere week and a half!) to prepare for the next filming session, as bigger pieces like “See You Tomorrow” and “Test Drive” require some extra effort. Meanwhile, newly transcribed scores will still be posted. Thanks for the patience and understanding!
Cheers,
Alex
Piano solo for “The Cove” has been posted. Click on the image below to access the file, or find it on the HtTYD page.
This is the shortest piece transcribed by far. It doesn’t even fill the page…
“Forbidden Friendship” will be uploaded in two weeks!
Piano solo for “Dragon’s Den” has been posted. Click on the image below to access the file, or find it on the HtTYD page.
With this and the next track done, I’m slowly moving towards the battle segment of the soundtrack. Looking forward to tons of accidentals and erratic chords!
