Hello everybody! It’s been quite a long time since I last posted as I’ve been very busy and have had little time for music outside of teaching.
I recently became aware that I now have more than 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel, so I made a video to say thank you and to share previews of a few of my upcoming projects! I’ll be glad to hear what you think of them!
Hello, everybody!
It’s been a while since I posted anything here. The last couple of months have kept me relatively busy – with kids going back to school after the summer, I’ve had an influx of new pupils, both beginners and more experienced players. Evening lesson spaces are filling up – I’ve still got a few slots left, so if you’re interested in starting lessons, I’m sure we’ll be able to arrange something. I still have spaces available on Saturdays, too.
In addition to more teaching, I’ve also been composing. It’s been a while since I last released any music – my most recent was my EP about six weeks ago. After the relative simplicity of that EP, I wanted to go in the other direction and work on something much more musically complex. It took longer to write due to the complexity, but now I’m happy to present the results of that work in my latest video!
This piece, Inexorable Force, is my attempt to capture chaos in musical form without going completely abstract. For the average listener, there are still plenty of hooks, as I’ve gone by the adage of making anything that supposed to be clever also be catchy. For the theory loving musicians, I think there’s a lot of interest.
The main riff in this piece came about by a small challenge I set myself – to write a rhythm in 5/4 time that doesn’t split up the quavers into 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 groupings. I ended up going for 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 and started to think of the time signature as being 10/8. Then I was curious about adding one more beat into the next bar to add to the feeling of chaos. I built on this and ended up using frequent time signature changes, irregular numbers of bars for some phrases, plenty of chromaticism, and some quartal harmony for further strangeness. I’m really happy with the final result!
I’ll be releasing the track on Bandcamp as soon as I get the notation finished.
Hello, everybody!
Apologies for the lack of updates recently. Life has been chaotic recently, though should be settling down soon. I’m delighted to announce the release of my latest EP, Moments of Safety! It’s currently available to purchase on Bandcamp, and will be up on YouTube and Spotify in the coming days. Here’s the link to buy: https://nicholasowen-petch.bandcamp.com/album/moments-of-safety
This EP is something I’d thought about writing for a while. I love the ‘safe room’ themes from classic Resident Evil games and decided that I wanted to do my own take on them.
Additionally, the idea of safety took on new meaning to me earlier this year – I was living in Kyiv in February when the Russian military started its renewed invasion of Ukraine and I know the terror of waking up at 5am to explosions. Sheltering in an underground car park never felt entirely safe, but it was with trepidation that we ventured outside when the air raid warnings had finished. While two of these tracks were written in Kyiv before the invasion, they developed nuances of emotion that they didn’t have before in the time since.
An interesting aspect of these themes from the old Resident Evil games (and some other survival horror) is that they’re usually quite simple – just a few chords with memorable melodies (and orchestrated beautifully). At the same time, they capture both feelings of comfort and unease – for me, it’s quite incredible how effectively they do this. In my writing, I tend to go quite complex and often have to pull myself back from that. Here was a challenge for me – how could I simplify my writing for each track without making it boring, and how could I write multiple tracks without falling back on the same ideas and chord progressions?
I’m satisfied with the results – each track is quite different from anything I’ve previously written but still sounds like me. In the end, whether this music is effectively written or not is up to each and every person who listens.
In addition to the new release, today is the anniversary of my first solo album, Let the Journey Begin! The last year has been a very long one and I barely remember frantically trying to release that before moving to Kyiv. I’ve learnt a lot about composition since then and plan to learn even more in the coming year. Thanks for all of the support thus far – I hope you’ll continue to find my music engaging and interesting!
Hello, everybody!
This week’s video is a performance of my own composition, Clockwork Sanctuary. It’s far from a perfect performance, but I decided to post it anyway, as I’m tired of the requirement for perfection that is so prevalent when it comes to performances. I much prefer being a studio musician and teaching, and I don’t enjoy performing – these videos I make are a challenge to myself to at least develop the skill of performing a bit, as I feel that my pupils can benefit from this.
In recent times I’ve barely played anything that involves leaping around the keyboard, so had to break down my technique in great detail while working on this piece. Amongst pianists it’s common knowledge that people with smaller hands really have to learn how to use their arms and torso to support the work of their hands. That was my focus in my practice for this piece, along with making sure that my fingers were really active and not getting lazy.
I plan on working through some more pieces that involve leaping around to consolidate this skill a bit more, as I definitely haven’t mastered it. I’m generally against the idea of focusing on one thing until it’s ‘mastered’ – I much prefer to get a great improvement, then work on other skills before coming back and refining the first one.
Hello, everybody.
This week’s video was made by request – someone commented on one of my other videos, a piano transcription of a piece from the game, Tormented Souls. They asked if I could do the same for their favourite piece from the game and present it in a way that it can be learnt. I’m happy to take requests for making piano arrangements – I can’t promise that I’ll do every single one that I’m asked to do, but will take all of them into consideration.
The original piece has some tremolando strings that I found difficult to work into this arrangement – in the end I included them as single notes, though I’m sure someone with more experience of making piano reductions of orchestral works could find a more inventive solution than I did.
Hello, everybody!
I haven’t stuck to my usual upload schedule recently as I’ve got a lot of projects in progress but nothing finished. This week I still don’t quite have anything finished, but I made a teaser for some of my upcoming videos! There are bits of three covers that I’m working on (from Tombi, Dark Souls II, and Final Fantasy IX) and also snippets of three original pieces of mine. The video description has timestamps. I hope you enjoy!
Hello, everybody!
This week’s video is a piano arrangement of Balamb Garden from Final Fantasy VIII.
In this composition, Nobuo Uematsu managed to capture a number of different moods – studiousness, positivity, peacefulness and safety. He did this by modulating between keys that are often not related F lydian, D major, and B major, before heading back to F lydian (a tritone away!). This variety is important because it’s a track that players will hear a lot during their time in the game.
I didn’t really have to do much to arrange it for the piano – the different instruments are already so well orchestrated that it practically arranged itself.
Hello, everybody!
Today’s video is a good demonstration of why choice of instruments matters. It’s my latest composition, a Safe Room theme called ‘Time to Rest’. I’d been working on this for a few days with piano as the main instrument but wasn’t satisfied with that version. I decided today to rework the whole thing after finding a synth preset that grabbed my attention. I then performed both parts and put them together in this video.
It’s interesting for me how finding that particular synth sound changed my perception of the piece – I hadn’t intended it to sound sci-fi originally, but it sounds so right like this. I’ll definitely explore more sounds with future compositions before settling on a final version.
I hope you enjoy it as something to relax to!
Hello, everybody!
This week’s video is a solo piano arrangement of ‘ZERO’, a piece of music that plays in the opening cutscene of Resident Evil Zero. The original is piano and some kind of bowed string (possibly violin, though it is raspier than most violins are played, so might be a bowed string that originates outside of Europe).
There are a couple of chord movements in this piece that I really like. Both are similar ideas – moving minor chords a third up or down. The first one is Gm to Bm, a movement of a major third. This is a very strong movement as there are two semitone movements involved (B-flat up to B and G down to F-sharp).
The second movement is from Em to Gm – a minor third in this case, so only one semitone movement, but it still has a strong effect.
I’d be interested to hear whether anyone think that having the string part on piano lessens the creepiness.
Hello, everybody!
This week’s video is a piano arrangement of Hello by Evanescence. I transcribed just the piano part of this years ago, but decided recently to include the vocal and cello parts on the piano.
It was an interesting one to work on – it’s a highly personal song for the writer, Amy Lee, as it’s about her sister dying. The original track only has one vocal part to reflect that – no harmonies or backing vocals. I retained this in my arrangement, rather than varying the different verses and choruses by harmonising the melody or reinforcing it with octaves.
The piano part of the original track is already quite interesting – nothing hugely complex to draw your attention away from the singing, but with enough variety not to be boring. The song effectively arranged itself for solo piano – I didn’t have to do much to it, just occasionally remove notes from the accompaniment so as not to clash with the melody. Let me know what you think of it!
Music and Movement Lessons with Nick Owen-Petch 