The Most BEAUTIFUL Song Of Fullmetal Alchemist

there is one song from Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood that is perhaps the most beautiful of the entire series it is one that you might considered to be painfully beautiful let's talk about why that is oh man I mean okay so this piece was written by the incredible composer Akira senju and you can already hear the complexities of the string writing I mean it's not even the harmony that makes this so beautiful it's all the inner workings of how it's orchestrated listen to this like like those inner voice movements in these sort of middle strings they're just astoundingly beautiful so we have that's our main Melody and as soon as we finish that we have that's the call and then we have the response to that and you can see how the response leads right into the next Melody note it's perfect beautiful and we haven't even started the melody now what we're going to see in Trisha's lullabi is a classic sad minor chord progression that utilizes five chords pretty frequently to get from one section to the next and we'll see how they're used as we move through this and there are a few things about how this is constructed that I think make it uniquely painfully beautiful and we'll talk about those in a [Music] second wow okay so there's sort of our first a section you might consider it right so we have this is this is kind of an interesting chord progression because it is so sad yet the first thing we hear after we establish our root F minor chord is we get a five chord leading into a major resolution and that goes like this those are chords two and three of this song Right which is inherently minor inherently sad inherently dark but yet we're setting up another five chord that you would expect leads us back to the home base of F minor but instead we get that beautiful d flat major chord right and so we have F minor E flat 7 a flat major and then a little sus on the C7 before letting it become C7 dominant and then brings us to d flat o what a beautiful chord that sequence right there is uniquely beautiful because we're starting on this d flat major 7th sound right and we have that right there that B flat minor and it's kind of the same exact notes I mean when we look at the notes that are in D flat d flat major 7 it's almost exactly the same as B flat minor 7 in fact we can literally play the same notes and just change our root and it's the same exact sound so we have here's that B flat minor 6 chord or our G half diminish chord from the beginning before bringing it to that five chord so we play that g half diminished before letting it go to our C7 chord now what does that g half diminished do in that context it's really simple we're in F minor and that g is literally just a two right so it it when we talk about a 251 it doesn't actually matter what the quality of the chords are they could be minor 7th they could be half diminished like in this context or they could be dominant what matters is the root of the chord that we're playing and in the context of F minor which is we're in F minor in this song primarily we're using a two and it happens to be half diminished and then our five it's just a two five everything is just two fives now of course if you're familiar with the Full Metal Alchemist story you'll know that this is incredibly sad because it's the story of Trisha who is the mother to the main characters the ELC Brothers in this song Trisha's lullabi is a reflection of her death so what you have here is a song that's basically two sons mourning the loss of their mother when you put it into that context I mean this is just it's it's a horribly sad song and you don't even need to understand words to get that because the harmony does a great job at portraying [Music] [Applause] [Music] it okay so this is like sort of the second section it's very similar the melody is almost identical to the first time through however we actually change our Harmony whereas in the first time around we went F minor and then we set up with E flat major a resolution to a flat major before immediately taking us out of that and giving us a c dominant d flat major 7 B flat minor G half diminished so that was our first time around and now we're almost going to keep the melody exactly the same but our chords change watch this now it's instead of going to E flat ooh now we have C except it's not C with a c in the base it's C with an e in the base and we'll talk about why that is in a second now it's an E flat in the base but it's an A flat major chord this we'll talk about in a second but it's D in the base check that out all right we need to we need to talk about this because this is super super cool this is a great example of how we can have a directional moving Baseline and yet we can make our chords go all over the place by using different notes of the chord as the root we can create a consistent motion here's what I mean if we have an F minor chord and then we have a C major chord well that's not a consistent motion we're jumping from F to C in order to play that but what are the notes of C we have a c an E and A G so any one of those could be the root note just depends on the context right so if we choose to make e the root note well that's only a half step away from F which means we can move slightly down from here to there so this you could call a first inversion C major chord from there we get this now we know it's just a flat major so all we've done we is we've used the fifth of a flat major as our route and we've played a second inversion a flat major chord just like that and then we can keep on going this next chord I got to listen again but it could be this or it could be that let's find [Music] out I think it's I think it's this which is a d half diminish chord ex but it could be it could be could also be B flat dominant it's one of those things where it almost doesn't really matter what we call it because they're kind of the same thing right if we look at the notes of B flat dominant and then we look at the notes of D half diminished it's like the same chord we're just adding we're just adding the B flat in there so who cares really what we call it we just know that that D is allowing us to continue our downward motion and of course that's going to bring us to d flat which we just use that same d flat major chord again there it is back down to C huh now right there that's really interesting because because we've established this whole thing in F minor but here we're going to change it because we need to jump off of this F chord to get to our next section now it's major now we can make it dominant which makes it a five chord leading to B flat minor listen to how that's [Music] done [Music] so we've established F minor but in order to get somewhere else we're going to make it make it a dominant chord so we can get to a new place B flat minor is sort of our new uh it's not our home base necessarily but it's leading us to that B flat [Music] minor and now we kind of go right around the circle the Key Circle and then we simply turn this dominant again to get us back once [Music] more only this time instead of going around like we did before oh yeah this is just such a great exercise in beautiful harmonic writing that just leads right into each section so seamlessly right back into our original Melody again this is the first version of the melody now we have our descending Baseline yeah there it is again now we have our instrumental interlude right around the same the same chord changes so that's the majority of the song actually I mean we're only less than halfway through it but the rest of the song follows pretty much the exact same Harmony so really what we have are three main sections where the first two are almost the exact same Melody just different chord changes and that's a really great example of how to use Harmony to create a new feeling even if the melody stays the same so each one of those first two sections develops the idea a little further and ultimately sets up this big expansion into the second main section and you have this combination of harmonies that I think really illustrate the sadness of it while not fully just being dark and and minor right because there's a lot of major chords and in fact there's a lot of major sounding Melodies in here as well and I think that's a really important aspect that makes this painfully beautiful and not just dark and [Music] sad like listen to [Music] this it's dark it's sad but then we have this emergence into the bridge and this is beautiful I mean it's not it is dark but it's also not cuz yes we're going to land on a minor chord like this is our home base everything kind of works its way around back to this point right but it gets there via some Melodies and harmonies that feel weirdly hopeful that's just gorgeous it's it's it's not sad necessarily without the context now the context of course makes it very sad but I think it being a lullabi and being the mourning of the El brother's mother that's what really drives this home and allows the harmony to feel so much more impactful it doesn't have to be explicitly just sad it can be beautiful because it's a representation of their mother who's this character who is beautiful and very loving and gentle and kind so we're reminded of her in that context but then we're also reminded that she's gone H it's just such brilliant writing both Melody and Harmony from Akira senu here then we get a little this is a little different yeah that all we did is we went F minor to d flat major 7 B flat minor 7 and then our G half diminished to our C dominant [Music] chord ending on F minor o what a perfect representation of the feeling that we're supposed to be feeling of about this plot point this song everything about it it's just perfectly composed to give us this painfully beautiful sad feeling it's not overly complex it's just the right amount of complex because there's some incredible orchestration in here some incredible Counterpoint writing counter Melodies beautiful string writing beautiful harmonies beautiful Melodies I mean this is just absolutely hit the nail on the head and of course this is just one part of the Full Metal Alchemist soundtrack so we will have to revisit that and look through some other parts but before we do that I want to let you know that Black Friday might be over but we still have an insane sale going on through the end of the year it's our holiday sale and it's over 70% off if you want to get started playing the piano if you've always dreamed of being able to play the piano maybe you want to play things like this my entire course library is where you want to get started and you can get it all in one massive bundle for over 70% off we also have smaller bundles depending on if you just want some of the more beginner stuff or if you want some of the more intermediate stuff you can spend a little bit less and get the things that you mainly want to focus on but we always love to do something 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Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 291,502

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy, fullmetal alchemist, trishas lullaby, trisha's lullaby, full metal, full metal alchemist, elric brothers, trisha's speech

Id: oY0eEhYnfFA

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023