I am typing as fast as my little fingers will allow so I can get an update in before we roll into August- yes, I’ve moved on from Namine’s theme (for now) and am now chipping away at “Lazy Afternoons”!! I played KH: MoM at a friend’s house earlier this month and we got to this piece in the game and then it just unlocked a lot of nostalgia within me… so I ended up opening up my book to this piece later that week and have been trying to learn it slowly. By the time I recorded this, I’d gotten too far with progress to really do a full “cold” take, so this is the first chunk of the piece.

Detailed Analysis

This piece is deceivingly simple! This is another one of those arrangements that I always marked as “easy”, and it still isn’t that difficult, but it’s a slower piece with lots of doublestops and arpeggios which can really sound terrible if not executed cleanly… so been trying to put in good practice and avoid bad habits from forming.

We start out with sixths in the RH already from the very beginning, and there are some big broken chords- I can’t reach these comfortably so I’m still practicing getting them butter-smooth. The opening phrase has a lot of dynamics that I’m not showing enough of here… work in progress.

The melody starts at 0:17, with the RH taking it easy as the LH continues a steady eighth note pattern. The sixth in the LH at 0:19 is tricky and I try to use 1 4 instead of 1 5 but for some reason in this recording I ended up with 1 5 because I was nervous lol. There are also some sevenths in the LH that have slurred notes and it’s kinda tricky to maneuver, but not impossible. I definitely can’t reach the ninth in the LH at 0:32, so I’ve opted for treating the bass note as an ornament, which I think works okay in this context. Brain farted at 0:36 in the LH for some reason.

Next section starts from 0:48, where the dynamic SHOULD be a little stronger but I don’t think I was at a point where I was expressing my dynamics enough in this recording, whoops. The little phrase at 0:52 is one of the trickier ones so far; the LH broken chords are too big for my hand so I’m trying to roll them with crossovers, while also managing triplets over eighth notes BOTH IN THE RH my goodness… not that I haven’t done this before (see Noct’s theme), but for some reason, having a much shorter chunk of this syncopation is actually harder for me than the extended phrase in Noct’s theme? Not sure why I am the way I am. Anyway. Not happy with how the syncopation came out here because the triplets in the melody sounded uneven, but been working on it. Personally really like the chord progression in the phrase at 1:05 and the buildup to 1:11! And then there’s supposed to be a sudden quietness at 1:15, though the contrast isn’t drastic enough yet. And the ornament in the RH is pretty tough at piano.

We build up again from 1:19 and have our first octaves appear in the RH at 1:21; for once I do not have to fear for my life lol. The rest of the phrase is pretty methodical, and then we have the LH accenting the melody at 1:34 which is pretty neat. The phrase at 1:38 is very similar to the opening phrase, though in a different octave. The broken chord in the LH at 1:44 is the biggest one yet, but luckily the shape of the LH is actually pretty ergonomic so it’s not so bad for fluidity as long as I get enough practice in.

And then from 1:50 is new territory; it’s got those infamous arpeggios transferring between hands while juggling the melody on top, just like “The Other Promise”. Looking forward to learning it because I personally enjoy the challenges of passages like this!

Current Thoughts

So far so good?? Kind of?? Learning notes isn’t so hard, but again, it’s going to be cleaning up the technical aspects that’s going to make or break this for me. I do personally really enjoy this piece (easily top 3 from KH2), so I’m having a good time learning it despite it not being super exciting or having any particular spots that make me emo (I mean, this piece reminds me of Roxas, which automatically makes me emo, so I guess the whole piece just makes me emo?). It does have pretty big intervals, but the piece is slow enough where I can work around it (so far).

As a side note, I did drop Namine’s theme for now precisely because I was not really enjoying practice for that piece. There was no fun factor (or it wasn’t enough to keep my interest), but maybe someday I’ll return to it! The piece is beautiful, the arrangement just wasn’t fun enough for me to pursue… (the issue is me)