Rainbow Road 64 — Take 1

So I’ve been struggling with Rainbow Road 64 by Kenta Nagata for about a month. Last post, I took a bit of a mulligan with the Final Fantasy Fanfare, but progress on Rainbow Road has still been slow. It’s time to post it and think about what’s going wrong.

The song follows a basic pattern where a melody plays, and then a harmony enters. For whatever reason, it’s very difficult for me to hear the individual notes that make up those harmonies.

I’ve tried lock-stepping the harmony, but that always ends up sounding odd. This leads me to believe I need the musical structure — which I can’t seem to lock down.

For a seemingly simple song, there’s a lot going on. We have basic tones panned left and right, a bass line, a melody, a harmony, and some other ornamentation (left out on the take 1 transcription).

I think my main issue is not being able to determine where the structure begins and ends. What is an accidental and what’s a chord change?

My goal is to identify all the chords, then use that structure to guide reconstructing the harmonies. The issue is I just don’t seem to have my feet under me when it comes to chords.

So, we’ll come back to Rainbow Road 64. Not next time, but maybe in a month or two. In the meantime, I have a clear goal.

Pick some simple songs that are heavily chorded. This is what I need experience in transcribing. Chords are what I need most to develop a working understanding of.

Thank you for reading~

Notes: These are disorganized and inaccurate, but will be shown here to document my process for anyone interested~