Blowin'

A simple composition made for this time. This is not actually a song but this melody came up as one of the original soundtracks of "Taiyou no Uta" TV series that was aired on Japanese Television on 2006. The soundtrack was originally composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, the musician that had done several works on Japanese dorama and anime.

"Taiyou no Uta" TV dorama was adapted from an a movie with the same title. The dorama was starred by Takayuki Yamada and Erika Sawajiri. The story was about a girl who suffer a disease that restricted her to be exposed by the sun. Ultraviolet radiation had become lethal for the girl, so she just had midnight time for enjoying outdoor activites. Most of her night time was spent by playing a guitar on her favorite spot near. At one moment, she met the surfer guy whom she often stared from her window. As the relationship developed, Kaoru (Erika Sawajiri) and Koji (Takayuki Yamada) spent their quality time on Koji's scooter, went around the seaside neighborhood, and sitting by the sea. The setting was on seaside housing. So most activites shown on the series are seaside people activites like surfers, playing beach volleyball, fishermen, and beach party. But Kaoru and Koji were focused on musical band where they eventually created a pop music group (the main purpose is for realizing Kaoru's dream for being a stage performer).

As if creating a seaside ambience, i felt that this "Blowin'" song was illustrating a soundtrack when people spent their time on the coastline - walking by the beach, sit around. The magical moments when you were on the coastline are the sunset or the sunrise and i felt this song was also illustrated the moments (maybe because it was the period of time when Kaoru Amane can make herself outdoor). The "Blowin'" title might mean the wind that we feel blowing our faces on the coast.

Somehow this song had a past memory to me, more like a sad memory. One day, my shuffle playlist turned to this song. It was rewinding the memory but instead of awakening the sadness, i suddenly got an idea and got triggered to compose another version of this song.

On the original version, the melody was lead by an acoustic guitar, from beginning to the end. The main melody was accompanied by a small number of instruments like piano, strings,  another acoustic guitar, electric bass, and synthetizer sounds. Even the music tempo is not so ballad, somehow it had melancholy ambience.

Without changing the melody, i add and eliminate some instruments. I add woodwind section on the song with oboe and clarinet for leading the melody. So, instead of hearing guitar plucking, you will hear the woodwinds blowing on the whole song. With my composing tools, i can barely modifiy the synthetizer sounds, so i just add simple percussions to accompany the melody. There were no major changes to piano or strings sounds.

By these modifications, i found that the song was a little bit more classical and had the mood changed. And i also found it more simpler than the original one.

Because the song and the series had seashore theme, i also put the same theme on these post, video, and also the new song arrangement. Some pictures displayed on the video were taken by my friend, Haga Tara S, the soon-to-be great photographer.