Quick Plug: The Joys of Anime music

Although I have spent the best part of today at home on my computer, the lack of my own computer (which still languishes in Leamington) has resulted in laziness and a short post. However, being home is not all bad, mainly because of the free food, but also because of the existance of the piano.

Now, just for the record, I am not a good pianist. At the age of 4 I was forced to start playing the piano by parents with big expectations (much the same as most people out there, I think), but I hated practicing. My fingers felt inflexible and mistakes took forever (or so it seemed) to iron out. and so at an early age after taking Grade 3 piano, I gave it up. I then went through a variety of other instruments and my poor piano sat gathering dust in the family home.

So you must be wondering – "If he gave up the piano, then why is he harping on about it now?"

Well, it's mostly because after leaving to go to university, I discovered that the piano was my favourite instrument out of all the ones I had tried. The reason being that it sounded so good on its own without any accompaniment and playing a song on it was so much more impressive than my clarinet, for example. However, I still lacked incentive to actually practice, since there were very few songs that I liked enough to devote enough of my time to retraining my fingers and practising for hours.

But then I found anime…and shortly afterwards, Josh's anime music sheet collection.

First, let me say that Josh is an absolute genius. For those of you not familiar with his work; basically, he takes anime themes, background music and songs, translates them to keyboard, records midis and sheet music and posts it on his website, at a rate of a few a week or so. Now this in itself is not unique, since there are more than a couple of sites out there that do similar things. However, Josh's transcribings are far more accurate and loyal to the source music than any other that I have sampled on the internet.

Currently, my piece of choice is Koi no Mikuru Densetsu from Asahina Mikuru no Bouken (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu). To give you an idea of how good his transcriptions are – I have practised for at least 2 hours today on just the first page and a half of this piece, simply because it sounds damn cool and I really want to learn it.

My hat goes off to Josh for single handedly bringing me back to practicing the piano, and I actively urge anyone that reads this who has even the slightest bit of musical talent to visit his page, which I linked to above. The link is also in the sidebar.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go practise some more ^_^

Ix

PS Apologies for irrelevant picture, but I don't have any music related images on the computer and Danbooru is still down -_-.