Attack on Titan Season 4 Trailer - Collaboration by Anime PianoDemic

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Well, this was a project that was a whole lot of fun.

It almost started on a whim when on Rama’s server when people just casually mentioned doing a server collab. But somehow, within a day the song selection was made, a reference score was chosen, and parts were being written.

And of course I had to take part. I mean, these guys are absolute ballers who are so incredibly supportive and talented at their respective instruments as well.

The arrangement itself is quite simple for each instrument (well, for piano at least), but since I didn’t have a part in putting that together, I expect Rama will have better thoughts on that than I do, so be sure to check out her release of this cover when it comes out!

But the part that I was most involved in was mixing the song and editing the video, and since I haven’t seen AoT yet (don’t worry it’s on my watch list) I don’t have thoughts from the anime, so I’ll spend most of my time talking about that. Well, mixing at least since that’s where most of my creative energy went.

The first challenge was dealing with varying qualities of recorded audio. Unsurprisingly, a piano recorded on a phone or tablet sounds a whole lot different from a sampled and polished VST. Rather than try to homogenize all the instruments and get them sounding “good”, I instead opted to use the better sounding recordings to fill up most of the frequency spectrum and used the poorer recordings for more specific applications, which in turn allowed me to cut out most of the frequencies that sounded bad without much loss to the overall sound.

The biggest headache by far was the editing process. Some of the melodic instruments had to be tuned, and most of the tracks had to be manually synced at several parts. Sure, I could have automated the process with a transience detector, but I wanted to maintain the organic feel of the overall song and not make it sound robotic. So manual alignment it was.

I edited without regarding how the alignment with the videos would be in my DAW because I’m far more comfortable in a DAW than in Resolve (not to mention the DAW is less taxing on my PC and runs much smoother). That’s why in a lot of spots the videos are slightly desynced with the audio.

The vocals were probably the most interesting part to work on. At first, I only had YellowTulip’s vocal to work with, which sounded a bit awkward in isolation. Like it didn’t sound good as a melody panned left or right, and it wasn’t thick enough on its own to create a satisfying reverb-y choir sound either. I tried creating a duplicate track, panning LR and setting them slightly out of phase, chorus plugins, and some other stuff, but it just didn’t sound great.

So insert me recording 20+ tracks of myself duplicating the vocal line in 3 octaves. That’s right, I sang 3 octaves of the melody, and it only sounds good because I layered myself so many times. But it got the choir feel I was going for, and it increased the stereo width of the song when it comes in, which boosts the energy in the build, which is really great.

Of course, there’s a whole lot of reverb on each track. I actually ended up using 3 different reverb spaces to create the feel I wanted along with a plate reverb to give some parts an extra shimmer. Most of the pianos went primarily into the second largest reverb, the percussive elements went into the smallest reverb when applicable, and the vocals without exception went into the largest. I didn’t just add them in isolation for each track and blended the spaces to get the sounds I wanted.

Huge shoutouts to everyone who was involved in this project and made it possible. Yall are ballers and pogchamps that deserve a lot more recognition and subs. I love listening to your stuff and I can’t wait to see how each of you continues to develop as musicians, but more importantly, as human beings. And weebs I guess.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this project!

Until next time,

- WattKeys

Project manager/Arr/Pno3/Flute2 - AnimePianorama


Pno2/Vox2/Mix/Master/Video Editor - WattKeys

Pno1 - fruit


Pno 4 - Tiffany Gan


Pno5 - Hayden Piano Covers


Pno6 - Azeriru


Flute1 - LifeCynefin

Vox1 - YellowTulip

Percussion - Winter


My recording setup:


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