This is a piano arrangement I composed back in 2020 when Switzerland was in lockdown. It's a combination of the music played in Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Hobbits. This is what I got.
Star Wars Meet Pirates and Hobbits by Riccardo Orion Feingold
So how did I get started with such a project?
At first, I began to collect some ideas about what type of music I wanted to create. Shall it be more classical or more pop? Shall it be completely new or an arrangement? For which instrument, or rather instruments, do I want to compose?
Since this was the first time I ever put my hands on creating a music piece, I thought it would be reasonable to start with an instrument I know pretty well. The piano!
At that point, I learned to play the Pirates of the Caribbean Medley by Jarrod Radnich - an incredible piece for advanced pianists, and my main inspiration for creating my medley.
For my medley, I wanted to combine the melody of Pirates of the Caribbean with two of my favorite movie melodies, namely The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars.
Next, I asked myself what kind of emotions I wanted to create with my piece. Depending on that, I can then define what type of structure the piano piece should have. For more sad or calm feelings, this would mean a slow tempo and a greater focus on minor chords. Since I prefer to create music that evokes positive moods, I put my focus on inspirational and positive-sounding harmonies.
With this prerequisite in mind, I directly jumped into MuseScore and started to arrange. Today I would arrange my music with Logic Pro X because it allows you to play your composition on your MIDI instantly. It’s also great since you don’t have to know much about music theory. A reading and writing score like in MuseScore isn’t necessary. You play your harmonies, and Logic Pro creates the music scores automatically. Tools like Quantisation and Piano Roll let you correct rhythm mistakes and change each tone separately. Here’s an image that illustrates what I mean:
Let’s get back to the process of making an arrangement. To get started, I copied some parts of other arrangements and put them into a new MuseScore project. This gave me the first fundament. Then I recombined, changed, and put these parts together. Here the harmonies of the different film music melodies must go with each other.
This was the most challenging part since you had to know some decent music theory knowledge. But it was also the most fun part since this stage is making your arrangement to an arrangement that includes your signature, and your personality. This is where you can show how you understand the music.
To conclude my experience, I’ve learned from this project that music composition becomes much easier if you know the melodies, especially in making an arrangement. You want to write the music so that people who may hear it also understand it as an arrangement. Otherwise, it would be a completely new music piece.
On my next project, I'm going to use Logic Pro X instead of MuseScore. As I said before, this software lets you focus more on creating the music than on the theory itself. In addition, you can turn a melody you’ve recorded with your voice into scores, which is pretty awesome 😎.
Below you can download the piano score of my arrangement.
