Reminiscing the Past 16 Years of Piano

I’ve been okay for most of the month, I suppose.  I can feel my lower back hurt a bit recently, possibly due to returning to lifting weights and abdominal exercises.  I spent the past week organizing and writing notes on the projects I’ll be working on this year including recreations of my past compositions, creating new original work, and recording all the piano arrangements I’ve done in the past 16 years.  It’s scary to say and think “wow, it’s been 16 years!”  Well, it’s been sort of a crazy nostalgic trip looking at old notes I wrote back 16 years ago when I was just fooling around on the keyboard and playing the melody of songs I liked.  Looking through notes and old MIDI files, I was taken back to when I was 13 in my own new room.  Memories of playing Gameboy color and Gameboy Advance, going over to my grandmother’s house or friend’s house to play Nintendo 64 with them, hours spent creating StarCraft maps, skateboarding, learning songs on piano for hours on end and such all rushed back to me.  It was mainly learning and playing piano that really got me thinking back.  During High School and Jr. College, I would spend anywhere from 2-7 hours a day playing piano and trying to memorizes new songs I’ve come across from playing various videogames, animé I watched, or songs I just happened to stumble upon on the internet.  It made me really miss those days of when I felt so passionate about game development and music.  The thought sat with me throughout the weekend and I was pretty happy with where I went with it now.  I’ve created a few games, I’ve learned and arranged dozens of songs on piano, I’ve created numerous songs of my own, and I’m playing a larger variety of games than I’ve ever done before.  Like today, Overwatch officially launches and I’m going to start playing right after I post this.  The main point I want to make is that reflecting back on the past 16 years has really made me appreciate my life now than I already have and it has also refueled my passion for playing the piano.  I know I’ve been neglecting learning new songs on piano aside from maybe 1-3 a year.  So I’ll be focusing on practicing the piano again and recording everything I’ve arranged and learned in the past decade and a half.  I guess it’s actually been longer than that since some of my piano compositions were made before I actually took piano playing more seriously.  Anyways, I want to enjoy playing Overwatch for now and will get around to my new projects soon enough.

Recovering and relaxing

I think I'm finally as normal as I possibly can be right now.  My heart palpitations stopped last Tuesday and that was the last of the major problems I had.  Right now, only a minor lower back pain and some leg pains would occur occasionally, but they're easy to ignore compared to what I had to go through those past 8 weeks before last Tuesday.  For this month, I focused on uploading my 3 remixes that I've worked on so far and planning ahead for the next few months.



I would say a majority of this month was trying to get work done, playing games and not feel miserable.  There were a lot of days where my back hurt, my stomach felt queasy, I had a headache, or my heart palpitations were bothering me.  I've been okay ever since last Tuesday and I've been sort of at a loss at what to do next.  I bought Melty Blood: Actress Again Current Code the day after I uploaded the remix I did for it as it's the first time Melty Blood got an official English Translation and sold in the Western market.  I've been going through Arcade mode with all the characters and I'm not even half way done yet.  Because I've been playing the game a lot, I'm reminded of a lot of the music.  Just to note, I've been playing Melty Blood for about 10 years now.  I played the original 2, then Act Cadenza, and then I barely played Actress Again.  I never got that good because I didn't have anyone to play against, but I know a bit of the mechanics from playing it for so long.  Listening to the music again, I'm really tempted to remix a lot of the songs.  I have enough ideas for a full remix album, but I kind of want to mix and match various fighting game music to remix and not just focus on one game again.  But before then, I plan on working on some original music and some animation projects before I get back to remixing this year.  I want to add new material to my portfolio and send out some more resumes.

Besides Melty Blood, I've started playing Resident Evil 4 HD again and making an effort to try to finish it (started last summer, I think).  I've also continued to play a LOT of Senran Kagura Estival Versus and proceeded to buy $25 worth of DLCs.  I felt kind of bad at first, but I ended up playing a total of 68 hours as recorded in my save file last night before I called it quits.  SKEV was a great game and I loved it.  I don't think there will be a Senran Kagura game for a while as the company is working on several other projects.  As of right now, there is a Animé Weekend Sale going on for Steam so I might end up picking up a few new games (I mainly want to buy a lot of the OSTs for games I have).  I don't have a clear cut schedule, plan or goal at the moment as my ailments really set me back by another 2 months, but I kind of enjoy how relaxed I feel at the moment.  I hope May will be a productive month for me though, because June and July has always been the most difficult months to stay productive for me.