Thread: Making piano reduction... how??

In need of advice...

I'm doing a piano reduction of several online game BGM songs. Mostly are orchestration of pop music, or perhaps techno or ambient music. It usually consist of main melody, with very very very little and weak counter-melody, bass (yeah, one or two notes at the most per bar, don't expect to hear walking bass here), and percussion playing repetitive rythm.

Well, the worst problem i faced was the blank area for the left hand, because mostly i put the melody for the right hand, and the only thing left for the left hand was the bass, which is only 1 note per bar. Of course it would be boring if i put broken chord for the left hand all the way till the last note. Also, how do i subtitute the percussion rythm? So, how should i manage those thing? Should I just add my own counter-melody for the left hand or is there any example of other pattern? Please tell me if you have any suggestion, so that i could get rid of those boring arpeggio from the bass clef

Game backgrounds are notoriously boring as piano music but if that's what ya gotta do then... here are a couple of things you can do.
1. Rumble octaves.
Find a subtle left hand figure (usually repeated octave leaps hence the name) and keep this kind of ostinato going through any chord changes.
2. Tremolando chords.
You can place a trem. chord in the left hand starting on the second beat (after the bass function) which sustains the tension in these 'blank' spaces.
3. Write your own countermelodies.
I know this is going outside of the contractual piano reduction idea but you might want to add a countermelody played with the thumb and first finger in the right hand in places where neither of the previous solutions work.

I do a lot of this kind of stuff professionally and I know what you are going through. Just remember that in the end you are writing a piano piece so it must sound good on the piano no matter how far that takes you from the original.

I hope this is helpful, tell me how you get on!
F

Really thanks

I will post the MIDI here once i have finished.