Author Archives: sara-garrard

December Updates

A quick blog entry to recap what I can remember that I forgotten to recap…
Various things that should be coming up soon-ish include:

  1. This year’s PIANOWRIMO album finalised for Bandcamp and streaming etc
  2. Ditto the sheet music (Related to that, I was very excited by all the new look niceness of Musescore 4 … only to realise my operating system is just too far behind to run it 😭)
  3. More FFVII Demakes redone with not strictly soundfont sounds for Spotify etc … and possibly some more new Crisis Core related ones, it being the season.
  4. I’ve done a “year in review” type video the past couple years, and it’d be nice to get one of those done before or around new year — time permitting!

Things that have been happening recently:

  1. This year’s Sing Clifton Christmas concert! Including a first performance of my Christmas piece O Night Restful and Deep
  2. I have been working on another game music & sound design job that I can’t share any of currently but will be keeping me nicely busy for a while now. I’ve also been doing more teaching, with more school age piano students at a school and a gratifying influx of adults realising their dream to play the oboe outside of that!
  3. This wonderful performance of Four Hildegard Texts by Peter Anthony Smith and the Sydney Sydney Conservatorium Clarinet Ensemble:

Sostenuto (after Chopin) [Free]

We’re nearly halfway through November and Pianowrimo this year. You can keep up with all the new pieces on my YouTube, and here’s a sneak preview of the sheet music before the album release next month. Today’s is inspired by a unnamed Chopin albumleaf, also in Eb and in 3.

UPDATE: Listen / download the full album on bandcamp here (also on Spotify etc), and get all 30 pieces of sheet music here.

Sostenuto (Pianowrimo 2022 Day 14)

Gacha game music ~

Excited to finally be able to share something I’d been working on over the summer and early autumn: music, and also sound design.

I believe you can actually play this game worldwide … but it is in Chinese so you might not get quite so much out of it if you don’t read Chinese!

I composed the two battle themes and the main/town background music, along with the sound design you’ll hear in the gacha roll part (see 9:41 in this gameplay video.)

And here you can hear a bit of the other battle theme which I think goes with player vs player battles and I haven’t seen in a gameplay video yet, but it’s fairly epic:

Trailer: Facebook has slightly completely destroyed the sound quality, but here is the trailer which contains a new musical theme and sound effects.

Wild Roses (piano)

little piano piece!

Sorry no roses in the video… more like a farewell to summer thing. Though the mood is rather more emotional even tragic in the middle there, you can put your own story to it 🙂

There is sheet music for this on the sheet music page. I wanted something pretty easy under the hands. It is kind of Einaudi lite, but just the two pages. I used an old Roland SC88 piano for this sound.

Songs and Carols for Christmas

I have just updated the sheet music page with a bunch of choral scores, in time for Christmas! ‘Twas in the Moon of the Wintertime / The Huron Carol we have sung several times in Sing Clifton; the rest are new, one getting its first performance this year.