SquareSound - Distant Worlds Concert Wrap-Up / Arrangement Catch-Up

Distant Worlds Concert Wrap-Up / Arrangement Catch-Up

These last few weeks have been exciting, but insanely busy. I attended the Distant Worlds concert in Chicago on March 1st, and had the privelege of interviewing Nobuo Uematsu and concert conductor Arnie Roth before the show. I also had the privelege of hanging out with Michael "Piano Squall" Gluck (who conducted the interview with me) for Friday evening and all day (and most of the night) Saturday. We were thrown a bit of a curve when our promised translator wasn't present, but luckily, Michael is well-versed in Japanese so we were able to successfully complete the interview.

Afterwards, Michael and I met up with Andrew Aversa (who won our Tribute to Nobuo Uematsu Arrangement Competition), and our featured arranger Josh Barron. We went to dinner and then went to the concert. What an amazing day it was! I have a lot of video footage to add to the site over the next few weeks including the full interview with Uematsu and Roth, a brief interview with Andrew Aversa and his girlfriend and fellow OC ReMixer Jillian Goldin, post-concert reactions from all of us, and some exclusive footage of Michael and Josh performing on a piano we found at a nearby hotel. Michael played his rendition of "The Athlete's Rag" (my personal favorite) from his GAME album, his newest arrangement "Terra's Theme" from Final Fantasy VI, and snippets of a few other pieces. Meanwhile, Josh performed a couple of his own arrangements from the Kingdom Hearts Piano Collection project. I'm just getting into video editing myself, so it will take me a while to get it all up here. I plan to write up a full concert/interview journal to accompany the video footage, and will be posting a lot of pictures as well. Stay tuned for that.

In other news, I've finally got the arrangement archive caught up with all the arrangements I've received over the past few weeks. Be sure to check them all out, including some very nice arrangements from our soon-to-be newest featured arranger Alex Lamonte!