Here's a mega throwback Thursday.
I've been in Malaysia the past month and sifting through all my old stuff, and stumbled upon this. Almost exactly half my lifetime ago, when I was 16, Final Fantasy VIII had just come out. FF8 Piano Collections, which released after the game, came as a surprise to us, since the usual Piano Collections arrangement album had skipped 7, after Piano Collection albums were published with sheet music for FF4-6.
However, FF8's Piano Collections was CD-only, without any sheet music. I was such a huge Uematsu fan, that I took it upon my optimistic, clinically insane 16 year old self to rectify that by transcribing the entire CD, piece by piece, bar by bar, and note by note. Back then, I had no idea what I was doing, (Shuffle and Boogie not notated in swing 8ths hahahah) and essentially created the pages one by one by screenshotting my transcriptions system by system in a software called Noteworthy Composer, then positioning everything manually in a giant GIF file. The process would be something akin to coding websites and making custom Quake/Quake 2 models in Notepad (both of which I also did in my teenage years). The visual results weren't exactly REALLY NICE to look at, but they were functional. (And hey, there's only so much you can do with a huge GIF!)
Despite all my overflowing optimism, this was still a gargantaun effort - one that took me the better part of 10 months to accomplish. It was a very intense ear training exercise, because I wanted to be 100% true to both Uematsu-san's amazing music and Hamaguchi-san's elegant arrangements/embellishments. At the end of it all, I realized that after all that aural and mental exercise, I was basically able to pick out chord qualities, structures, progressions, tension and resolution, intentional dissonances, even if I wasn't aware of the generally accepted ways of notating it in chord chart form, and it helped me in my musical journey from then till now. At the end of it all, I could also play practically the whole album simply from muscle memory, since I wasn't much of a sight-reader. (In fact, the sheets were more for the Gamingforce Forums community than myself)
It was only some time later, when a reprint of FF8 Piano Collections released that DID include the sheet music that I realized how close I'd come to being 100% accurate, aside from things like meter markings, enharmonics, performance markings, etc. Tone-wise, there was less than one wrong tone in every ~500. That actually took me by surprise.
I think those 10 months marked a few milestones for me - it was when I abused my ears and brain and got really, REALLY good at transcription/dictation. It was when I began to appreciate many of the cliches inherent to game music, or more specifically JRPG and Uematsu-san's music. It was the first really absurdly large undertaking I saw through to the end, a trait that years later instills confidence in me to tackle impossibly large projects, one step at a time.
It was also when I knew that I wanted to combine my two loves - video games and music - and make a career out of it.
