How To Train Your Dragon Two Piano Transcription

John Powell is, along with Hans Zimmer, one of my favourite film composers of today. While Hans scores in a very simplistic, self-taught 'German' style (nothing wrong with that of course, just makes you wonder why you never thought of his melodies in the first place), John Powell's extreme flexibility leaves you wondering what type of soundtrack he will compose next (in other words, he can compose electronic music just as well as orchestral).

Therefore, as I have already done transcriptions of some of Zimmer's works, I decided to do something by John Powell. Immediately I went for his HTTYD score, which not only is WAAAY better than the score to 'The Social Network', but is easy to listen to and would be doable as a two-piano transcription.

I then decided which piece to do. I was thinking of doing either 'Test Drive' or 'See You Tomorrow', but as the spirit of tomekkobialka goes, I had to choose something that would be almost impossible to play on the piano. So I took the 10 minute battle music and decided to do that.

My main point in doing this transcription was to experiment with how different orchestral techniques can be recreated on the piano. Powell's orchestra contains more than 100 players:

·         2 Flutes

·         1 Piccolo

·         2 Oboes

·         1 Cor Anglais

·         3 Clarinet

·         2 Bassoons

·         1 Contrabassoon

·         12 French Horns (yes, 12!)

·         4 Trumpets

·         4 Trombones

·         2 Bass Trombones

·         1 Tuba

·         Timpani

·         Tubular bells

·         Piatti (cymbal)

·         Sustained cymbal

·         Anvils

·         Gong

·         Tam-Tam

·         Chinese Cymbal

·         Snare Drum

·         Bass Drum

·         Piano

·         2 Harps

·         Full SATB Choir

·         30 Violins

·         12 Violas

·         10 Celli

·         8 Double Basses

You can imagine what I felt like when I saw this. How can you convert all these voice parts into two pianos??? Well...you can't, so I had to leave stuff out. (I also thought to myself how does John Powell get his head around so many instruments? He obviously had a lot of orchestrators at his disposal, in fact, he had 10, probably because it took one orchestrator a week to orchestrate one track!).

N.B. - unlike many lucky musicians out there, I don't have perfect pitch, so I can only rely on the original orchestral score :(

For example, have a look at this page from the original conductor's score (this bit comes from between 5:40 - 5:48 in my transcription) (click on image to zoom) :

I mean, where do you start?! It takes a long time to decipher which instruments are being doubled and which ones to include in the transcription etc... in this case, I felt tempted to take the harp part, the horns and trumpets playing the melody and the...bass clef of the piano part (if the pianos already in there then why not use it again? :) ) So it all went well, but after two bars I could see that the flutes play these slides up. Now how do I add that into the transcription, it seems almost impossible!

This kind of problem solving was very common. Here's another example (between 6:25 - 6:34):

This time, the problem is the strings. Those lines tell the string players to slide their fingers from one note to another, while playing a continuous bow stroke. And on top of that you have the double basses 'slapping'. Now how do you recreate this sliding effect on the piano? To solve this I had to use lots of pedal and chromatic notes going up and down to create the general idea of chaos. You may also notice that in the second bar, the piano and bass woodwinds play a B-flat, but the main melody, played by the tuba/trombones and cello/DB, is a B natural. You can't hear this in the recording, as there is so much going on, but if I recreated this clash in the piano, it would be very evident. So again, I had to point these mistakes out (and there are actually quite a lot of these in the whole score, some of which I doubt were intentional...)

So there! I hope you enjoy my transcription, and I hope maybe someday some duo will be brave enough to play it.