Mitsu no Yoake (Spice and Wolf 2nd season OP) - Arranged by Zacky the Pianist

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Song: Mitsu no Yoake
Artist: Akino Arai
Arranged for piano by ZackyAnimePiano
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Enjoy!
This was the third time I was attempting to learn this Mitsu no Yoake arrangement, and it ended with vague success! Had my eyes on it since I started learning piano actually, and it surely goes in my repertoire that I intend to maintain as long as keep practicing piano (hopefully forever!). It's a sweet arrangement made by Zacky (who sadly stopped uploading new videos on his channel), and it captures the essence of the original song extremely well.
So challenges! Where to even start?..
First, both hands are doing completely different things, and despite a fairly slow tempo it turned out to be quite hard to learn proper movements for each hand because with this song it turned out to be hard to find some sort of "common ground" on which you can build memorization.
Second, the usual issue of doing strong emphasis on melody is aggravated in this particular piece due to the majority of it being played on p, not mf as in almost all my previous works, so I had to play the left hand exceedingly lightly in order to not overpower melody in the right hand, and unfortunately, some notes were still omitted. Need more practice!
Then, there is phrasing, which should be of course very prominent due to the piece being an arrangement of an actual song. Took a while figuring that out, but hopefully, it turned out alright!
Next, it seems like Zacky made sheets only for TV size version of this song, while the extended version that he published is of course more exciting, but contains sections for which there is no sheet music. Solution? Make sheets myself, of course! Thankfully there is also a Synthesia tutorial that Zacky published, and I used it to create hobo sheets by hand (my teacher might just die if she sees them, broke every rule of musical notation there 😂). But it turned out to be a massive help, totally worth the effort!
And finally, it's a 3,5-minute song packed with notes! Very challenging and took significant time to learn. Actually, the reason why I wasn't able to learn it in previous attempts is because it's so hard to memorize! But it seems like over time I built some mental stamina that allowed me to assimilate this piece in full, and that hopefully means that I'm improving!
The downside of learning such amazing works is that of course, it's quite taxing, both in time and effort, so the next piece I'm going to upload is a much simpler, but nevertheless beautiful work of a famous classical musician. Stay tuned!
P.S. By the way sound quality should improve a bit over previous videos, slowly learning the ropes of sound production!
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Setup and settings:
Yamaha CLP-645 digital piano, default settings with the following changes:
- Binaural mode is turned off;
- Voice - Yamaha CFX;
- Reverb - Cathedral.
External sound card - Steinberg UR-44C.