"Waltz for Ophelia" tormented me for over three months.

I painted this myself for the album cover of "Waltz for Ophelia" (digitally painted).

Background of the Composition

As of today, "Waltz for Ophelia" has been released worldwide.

It’s a minor piece starting in G minor, and perhaps the most passionate and note-heavy piece I've released to date.

When I compose, I always prioritize the listener’s emotional response.

Of course, the fundamental motivation behind creating is to express my own feelings and satisfy my creative urge,

but I haven’t yet found meaning in laboriously creating music that only I like and nobody listens to.

Since I’m trying to make a living through composition,

and because I still need to build a more stable and abundant income stream,

for very realistic reasons,

I focus my musical ideas on what will emotionally move listeners. (Of course, I sometimes write pieces purely for myself. "Kamyu's Spell" is such a case.)

Notes written on MIDI program

"Waltz for Ophelia" was also written strictly with this direction in mind.

In fact, I had completed another piece back in March, even finishing the recording. But once completed, I felt it lacked structure and musical coherence so severely that I fell into deep self-doubt and ended up scrapping the entire thing.

Later, I borrowed the melody from that scrapped piece and developed it into a new one—what became "Waltz for Ophelia."

At the time, I was immersed in Chopin’s scherzos, especially the intense coda of Scherzo No. 3, and I wanted to create something that could offer a similar thrill.

Through the painful failure just prior, I learned a little about how to develop music in a more compelling way. And since the new ideas came from developing existing melodies, the actual act of "writing" the piece wasn’t unbearably difficult.

The real problem came after the composition and recording.

60-Day War Against Noise

After recording, the piece must go through monitoring, mixing, and mastering to reach a minimum quality level for release—and that’s where I hit a wall.

I was deeply inspired by Horowitz’s performances at the time, and I wanted to replicate that rough, slightly aggressive tone.

Click this image to listen to what inspired me

So I used a more raw and acoustic-sounding virtual instrument (Addictive Keys), which ended up being the root of all problems.

I loved the gritty, unpolished texture of the sound, but as a tradeoff, countless natural noises were embedded in it.

All the wild resonances and percussive elements from the virtual piano created a chaotic mix of sounds—most of which I couldn’t even detect during the recording.

Having once suffered from noise issues in previous releases, I became obsessed with eliminating them. I monitored the audio in 0.X-second intervals trying to spot and remove all noise.

Lists of the instruments (all same model but I EQed each slightly differently) I used

Some were direct issues with key attack noises. Others involved strange overlapping harmonics from specific notes in both hands.

These latter cases involved thousands of potential combinations depending on velocity, sustain, and timing.

To fix these, I tried adjusting the velocity ever so slightly, shifting timing forward and back, turning off reverb for specific notes, shortening the sustain drastically, applying unique EQ settings to certain keys, replacing or blending with other piano sounds, and even muting problematic notes entirely.

I tried altering even the surrounding, unaffected notes. Turned pedal noise off—then maxed it out. I changed miking just for specific keys. I tested hundreds of scenarios in a bloody war against noise.

And even after all this chaos, some noises absolutely would not disappear. For those, I added new inner voice notes with boosted velocity to "cover" the old ones. (You can hear this between 01:12–01:15. The left-hand inner melody overtakes the right-hand melody. I tried to make it sound like a reappearance of the main theme with a new voicing, but it was purely a cover for unwanted noise.)

Over 126 hours spent on this 3 minute single track.

Now, this obsessive effort—testing so many cases and trying to achieve the best quality—was commendable.

The problem was that I did it for two whole months.

Recording finished in April. From May, the serious noise reduction work began.

After spending all day fixing noise, I’d sleep, wake up—and hear dozens of new noises I hadn’t noticed the day before.

I thought this would take maybe a few days, a week at most.

But no matter how much I removed, new noises emerged each day. I spent two full months in this loop.

All creative composition halted. For two months, I did nothing but wear headphones and hunt for new noise, draining myself each day trying to fix them.

After a month, I was burnt out. Listening to the same 3-minute track thousands of times felt like I was going insane.

It felt like scouring a house for hidden cockroaches or crawling under store shelves to find hidden rats—something I actually did while working at a convenience store in my early 20s.

Audio noise is just like that. Filthy and stressful—and somehow, always elusive.

I think I removed or masked thousands of noise points over two months.

Maybe I’ll hear a new one tomorrow. But this is the end. I’ve done enough.

If I keep going, I’ll lose the entire year.

Why “Waltz for Ophelia”?

When I title my music, it’s rarely due to some deep meaning. I try to find a name that suits the mood and makes the piece feel special.

In modern times, titles are like packaging for music. I don’t assign too much meaning.

Since it’s a sorrowful piece, I wanted to dedicate it to a tragic figure—Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, came to mind.

To briefly introduce her: she is a pure but tragic woman who ultimately goes mad and drowns.

The Album Art I Painted

For the first time, I created the album art for my own release. I used ArtSet4 on iPad.

I aimed to paint a dark and chaotic oil painting.

The figure in the artwork is, of course, Ophelia.

I tried to depict her drowned corpse, expressing the tragedy of her fate to help enhance the listener’s experience.

Photos