Hecksa

Hi there. You may remember me as the guy who did a cover of Billie Jean on the choir bells a while back. Well, I enjoyed myself so much making that, I couldn't stop myself doing another. This time, I got a bit more adventurous:



This is a cover of "Still Alive" from portal, using only the instruments available in GW2 (Yes, the organ too!). However, this time I allowed myself a fully chromatic scale, which I made by editing the pitch of some of the available notes. This lets me play absolutely anything on the bells and organ, which is great.

For those interested, I got through somewhere around 40 bells in the creation of this video, mostly due to recording at tonnes of locations before picking the clips I liked best. Doing these is beginning to get expensive! Recording all the parts probably took about 3-4 hours in total, spread over a period of several days. Sound + Video editing to pull everything together took...a long time. A long, long time. Way longer than Billie Jean.

Once again, thanks to Arenanet for making this possible, and also to Jonathan Coulton and Valve for creating Still Alive, a great song to work on.

So, I couldn't stop myself seeing what was possible with the notes we were given for bell choir. Turns out, since we got a dorian scale, things get a little trickier. Billie Jean is about the only well known song around that is written in the dorian mode. So, I pulled out a piano arrangement, adapted it to fit for handbells, stripped out all the notes that the Bell Choir can't play, and then started work.

Thanks to Arenanet for the awesome minigame that made this possible. Next time, maybe we can get a few more notes? Just throwing it out there...